Does anyone else refuse to read anything other than collectible editions of books unless there's nothing else available...

Does anyone else refuse to read anything other than collectible editions of books unless there's nothing else available but paperback? When I started out getting into books, I would just buy whatever was cheapest so I would have it available on my shelf for when I wanted to read it. Now that I have pretty much every book I want on my book shelf, some of them there's not going to be a really nice edition that I can buy, so I just read the paperback, but if there's an easton press or folio society edition available of it that's 100 dollars or less (or in some cases around 150 if it's super special), then I'll just read that instead. Honestly, if I'm going to read a book I might as well read it on a really nice edition and enjoy myself more. I think it makes the experience more of an event really. A really nice copy feels classy in my hands while I read and I actually find that I focus better when I'm in love with the feel and look of the book I'm holding.

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>autism speaks

No? What the fuck is wrong with you OP

Didn't know there was something wrong with me. If you have any clue let me know.

I don't like reading expensive editions. While they're beautiful and nice to own, I'm reluctant to actually use them. Give me a cheap paperback, preferably used, where creating creases and pencil marks doesn't cause anxiety.

Why? It's not like you're gonna resell them. The best feeling is getting a new edition and having all the wear on it be yours, as carefully as you take care of your books.

Take a pic of your bookshelf

No thanks. I have a lot of books on it and it would take many minutes to photograph and upload, with the minute wait time in between too.

>clue
I have a complete diagnosis

I'm literally the exact opposite of you. Books are meant to be abused, written in, taken outside with, taken to the bathroom with, etc... This has to be bait

You can Folio Society or similar nice editions for way cheaper if you keep an eye on Abe or EBay (use alerts). And use Bookfinder too.

The next step, bibliophile Anons, is to pal up with a skilled bookbinder and start getting that shit made to order. Not cheap, but of course, totally worth it.

id rather purchase first editions.

Some folio society editions are okay; I have never seen a franklin press or easton press that wasn't ugly as fuck. They look horrible on their own and tacky when shelved en masse. For books old enough to have been printed already with leather bindings, just buy those; there is no reason to buy a leather edition of a mid 20th century novel whose first release was clothbound.

Also this. Even the nicer hardcovers (loeb, everyman, vintage leather bindings) that I buy are annotated and underlined and dog-eared.

my goal is to have one bookcase filled with professionally bound versions of my favorite patrician-tier books. everything else can hide in a box in the attic or under my bed

start out by getting some good editions with tatty covers rebound plainly enough. see how the work is like (and the price). develop a relationship with the binder and see what happens next.

or get some stuff you put together from PDF printed out and bound too. that way you get the kind of typography you like too.

Damn, custom bound. I'd be worried about getting it bound from an ebook file though. Those things are notoriously riddled with errors.

>When I started out getting into books, I would just buy whatever was cheapest so I would have it available on my shelf for when I wanted to read it.
You used to have the right approach. Valuing a book cover over the actual contents is literally missing the point.

People always focus on the looks of leather-bound books, but the biggest quality for me is how they feel. They feel better to hold than any paperback or hardback book. If i'm going to be reading a book for a long time, I want it to be as comfy as possible.

Except I really like it when I have nice versions? lol
I like it when it doesn't have a dust jacket, but I know that the value of a book is sharply decreased without it's dust jacket. Not like I have a bunch of first edition copies of books that I like on hardcover, most of the hardcovers I have are everymans library. It just feels so wrong to toss the dust jacket. That's another reason I like folio society and easton press.

But yeah I agree, the feel is amazing. I love high quality paper, and the feeling of the thick leather and binding in my hands. I happen to be one of those people who really loves the look of easton press books too. I've never had a franklin library book.

Sometimes a certain edition will look better on a different publisher though. There was this edition of the master and margarita which I just ordered which was on folio society. It's not available on easton press or franklin library, but I wouldn't get it from them anyways because folio society edition looks stunning, I also got it for less than 100 dollars.

you can get scans from Archive.org, fpr facsimiles etc. depends on where you're getting the file from.
even faux-leather (like for binding theses) feels quite nice too. I got a bunch of stuff bound A5 in that manner, and twas quite decent if I say so myself. for stuff a bit better, go for buckram and throw in marble endpapers too. both Penguin and Barnes and Noble did fairly ok reprints of classics sans DJ, you can check those out.

what a pleb.
:D

>Not cheap, but of course, totally worth it.

How expensive are we talking?

could be literally anything. getting an ebook printed off and a cloth or buckram cover thrown on might cost the same as the normal hardback edition. more fancy and the skies the limit.

I've printed off and bound stuff that hadn't been released in print, as well as OOP stuff I wanted in hardback format. maybe 20-30 dollars tops.

fancier stuff (essentially having 19thC/early 20thC books rebound) maybe 40-70$ depending on material and lettering.

as I say, you need to develop a relationship with a binder. it really is that simple. start with the cheap stuff, then move up if you like what you see.

Damn. It sounds like it's cheaper than the absurd prices they make you pay for out of print editions.

with bookfinder and a bit of shopping around online, there's no reason to pay the ridiculous prices you see/ unfortunately the drawback of the net is algorithmic pricing...

>algorithmic pricing

i think there might be ways to game this, for example there are sellers on amazon that will algorithmically undercut the lowest price, so if you list a non-existent copy of the booker for cheaper, eventually when their algo updates their prices they will try to undercut you, then you buy it, and cancel your fake listing. the only problem with this is that someone might try to buy your shit, but amazon, unlike ebay, makes it easy to cancel sales

it's dodgy but maybe worth a shot if you're desperate for that last overpriced copy.
amazon are pretty strict about cancellations, and you'll get booted off pretty quickly,

Bookfinder still has the price of an easton press copy of Do Androids Dream Of Electric Sheep at 300+ dollars. What websites would do a really nice, comparable custom binding for under 100 dollars?

sorry mate, can't answer for you: only ever used 2 places, both in Europe, one of which was my local bookstore, and another which was a recommendation from an elderly bibliophile friend.

100$ maybe gets you something not as nice, but not too shabby either I would say, maybe 1/4 or 1/2 leather with fairly plain gilt. full leather, raised bands and elaborate tooling and you're looking north of 200$. throw in at least 50$ more if they need to cast a stamp.

ps: bookfinder is just a price comparator. use that before buying off amazon, abe or whoever, and double-check Ebay or other rare book websites (worth googling the title plus publisher plus year just to cover all angles).

Post'em lad

support your local bindery. as I say, the most important thing will be to develop some kind of rapport as if they're any good, you'll be going back, and you'll get to see the place, samples, get some ideas etc. Plus you'll end up getting preferential rates pretty quickly, in my experience. when they're not doing college theses, business is a bit slack these days. shop around, start with a few simple projects, and be prepared to wait for quality.

also, be aware some high-level old-school binders are a bit prima-donnaish: you don't get to decide how it gets bound. my elderly friend knew one such artiste of the book (way beyond craftsman level). he'd read the book first, and if he didn't like the book, he didn't bind it, simple as that. and if he did, he did his own thing. those books are worth like 2-3 minimum. That was in Paris, so maybe goes with the territory.

Actually, I was asking for pics of your bound books to see what they were like. But good advice user. I would have never thought of custom bounding books

only got a couple of boring black cloth jobs to hand as I'm abroad at the moment and don't bring a stack of rare books with me.

I got a few older books rebound just like this: s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/5b/42/69/5b42695bbaa64c85686d55461a4880f5.jpg

not too fancy, and not too expensive. (30-40$ tops). hang on, I've found some pics.

2x rather small booklets, no spines, marbled papers with faux leather label stamped in gold. covers are now hardback. one was an offprint so no cover, the other was stapled on so easy to remove staples and card cover, then resew and rebind as hardback.

don't recall the price but it was pretty cheap b/c no spine. (not enough pages really to justify one). plus the books are quite rare as it happens.

another shot, sorry about the crap light.

No I'm not an especially materialistic person

3x old french books with tatty covers. not especially rare so no spine or anything fancy, just something that looks nice and is a bit better at preserving the books integrity. faux leather label on the front cover, book on right was trimmed, the others weren't. kept the original covers I think.

here we go.

plain but functional buckram cover with label on boring spine.

the pictures of the boring cloth or faux leather stuff (just ebooks and texts I wanted to print out for college) didn't come very good. but you get the picture. (no pun intended)

just have those pics to hand, as a mate wanted to get a few things rebound too, so nothing majorly fancy. I only have a few 1/4 leather jobs, but they're nice - a 3 book set I managed to collect separately, all signed 1st eds by an obscure writer. got them all done up and boxed in a slipcase. Nice. cost me 200$+ as I recall.

They look briddy good user. Thanks for the pics.
Are they really as affordable as you say? I would assume that hardcovers from the publishers would be cheaper, since they are usually mass produced and all.

yeah, these were all pretty cheap (but YMMV) as I say, just to beautify some old books with tatty covers. Bear in mind that French publishers didn't start printing hardbacks until recently since everyone who bought decent books got them bound themselves. hence a lot of shitty paper covers and stuff from early to mid 20th c.

none of these required major work (sewing etc) bar the first pic, and that's quite easy to do. The spine is the real bugger.

I got a bunch of booklets done up like those in the first picture, just for the sake of it - the binders were doing a stack of them one day I walked in and I thought why the hell not?

depends on the book, depends on the publisher.
bear in mind they sometimes do different ltd eds. so there's often a more affordable edition to be had, rather than an ultra-ltd ed on the most expensive materials. like maybe 50-100$ instead of $300. that kind of difference.
again it depends on what it is you're after.
Personally, I've gone after a couple of Folio editions when I've liked a classic book and wanted a better edition for keeps. I'm a reader more than a collector. But I want my old books to look good and live longer too.
and I like messing about with typography occasionally so it's nice to be able to get a hardcopy of your own work too.

>my elderly friend knew one such artiste of the book (way beyond craftsman level). he'd read the book first, and if he didn't like the book, he didn't bind it, simple as that.
LOL that's sick

no because collectible editions are not immune from poor construction and garbage translations.

there's usually a bit more care put into them, let's just say

Thanks for the info user. Maybe when I have some money I can get a fancy book bound or get a book bound that isn't easily found where I live.
You've given me the idea of doing some /diy/ shit too, like making a copy of a book for fun. Will probably never do it though because I'm a lazy cunt
>tfw no wise elderly friend that has great connections
fucking frogs

yeah, pretty fucking funny.
but not as funny as his kids/apprentices: after training them up, one went on to become some sort of master shipbuilder (like giant wooden yachts and shit), another went to be an aircraft designer, and I forget what the third did. Nothing to do with books in any case. he retired and went to live on a vineyard, as you do in France!

I take books i'm reading everywhere i go,so i'm not gonna buy some fancy edition if they're going to get fucked up anyway.

99.999 times out of 100 these clumsy deluxe hardcover meme editions look like absolute dogshit. This is because they try to emulate the style of bookbinding in the late 19th and early 20th century, while lacking the proper materials, craftsmanship and most importantly quality of design. If you need a heavy, overpriced, aesthetically deficient piece of shit in order to emulate taste and sophistication in the most superficial manner possible, by all means go ahead. But don't turn your nose up at people who don't waste their money on this trash.

I like how you compare barns and nobles classics to deluxe editions of books.

the Penguin ones are slightly more tasteful. pity about the paper though.

Why would I want to spend 100 buckeroos on something I can spend 5 bucks on and get almost the same result?

Aesthetically they are the same.

When will the minimalism meme end.

folio is a scam.

Thanks, online places seemed to be crazy expensive compared to that

...

good bait. please kill yourself op

Sounds like autism.