I ordered all these recently. What are some more awesome folios...

foliosociety.com/

without top right (cant ID), iliad, name of the rose, and waiting for godot, that grand total is 555 USD.

i always figured these were gift books and actually collecting them for your own personal library was a waste of money since many are available for 1/2 to 1/5 of the price from other publishers.

you might as well get thatcher to wrap them for you too, so you can spend more time looking and talking about them instead of actually reading them. youtube.com/watch?v=uh5EYJCZeEI

>incorrect pagination
>"good"

go back to r/books

tacky as shit

Most of them suck and look really tacky, like YA overly colorful books -- especially distasteful because of how great some of these are. Especial highlights: Dracula (that looks like the cover for some BDSM erotica e-book about vampires you might find on Amazon, like what the fuck?) , Thus Spoke Zarathustra (the fuck is that cover art?), and WB Yeats's poems and paintings (is there a name for that type of tacky typography with that same tumblr-y font and aesthetic I've seen in so many shitty online attempts at artsiness?). The best looking one is The Sound and the Fury, precisely for the minimalist aesthetic and not trying to clutter up the stuff with garish designs. In Cold Blood also doesn't look so bad, in my opinion.

So pretty much why would you do this? It's a huge waste of money. In my opinion, the best looking books are very plain or at least try to keep it minimally artsy on the outside. Moreover, it doesn't even matter how pretty it looks on the outside, what matters is what's on the fucking inside, yes that's corny, because that's what you're actually going to READ.

I disagree. I think the thus spoke zarathustra and dracula ones are some of the best looking of the bunch. I happen to like the style, I guess it's just a matter of taste. I really enjoy the books.

I don't get why people act like if you have a nice edition of a book that you somehow won't be reading them. Why not have an aesthetically pleasing book, and read it too? It's not like one excludes the other. I happen to really like gazing at my book shelf, taking the book off the shelf, feeling the material it's made of; it is all very pleasing to me.

There are companies that have a more uniform, conservative style. Those companies would be Easton Press and Franklin Library. I like those a lot too, and I have my own separate collection of Easton Press and this one stray Franklin Library book. I happen to like all 3 publishers though.

huh didn't realise they did in cold blood. must look out for that one

nobody pays full price for folio society books tho. i see a lot of them in my local oxfam bookshop for about £5-8. my local antiquarian bookshop always has 1 or 2 on their bargain shelf for £3. i have a bookcase full of them that i got that way.

tacky as hell + how do you find the book you're looking for WHEN YOU WANT TO READ IT

well ya know they have the titles written on the sides?

Lmao these are so tacky...like worse than the Barnes and noble leather editions. Why would you spend your money on these??

look at the video

no way, they're nowhere as bad as the B&N ones

I don't know why you linked a video to Juniper books. The books in the OP are Folio Society. I don't even own any Juniper books and no one mentioned them until that person linked that video.

They really don't look good sitting on a shelf and generally the translations for these designer books are subpar because they use older public domain stuff when they can. If you're just looking for a pretty bookshelf why not go with something like Harvard Classics? Not only are they good looking and readable but they're cheap.

yeah I meant the Juniper books. OP's books are alright, at least A portrait, The sound and the one to the right without any text on it. Illiad and The Odyssey look gorgeous

That's something I took into account when buying these books. The Homer epics are Robert Fagles (I have a copy of the Rodney Merrill Translations, but I wanted to read the Robert Fagles translation). The Thus Spoke Zarathustra translation seems to be reputable, from the reviews I've seen on the internet I researched before hand. The rest of them are all in English. I wouldn't buy the Crime and Punishment edition of Folio Society though, because they actually do use a very old translation for that one. I use Everymans Library for Dostoevsky translations, because they have P&V.

The Joyce book they gave me for free btw.

>generally the translations for these designer books are subpar because they use older public domain stuff when they can

not actually true in folio's case
plus they always name the translator on their site

>I wouldn't buy the Crime and Punishment edition of Folio Society though, because they actually do use a very old translation for that one.
My bad, it's actually not an old translation.

I keep seeing this said, and it concerns me because I own the Folio FW and have no idea what you're talking about. What's incorrect about the pagination?

A nice cheap folio society is The Greek Myths by Robert Graves, for everyone starting with the Greeks

almost every fw edition has 628 pages and all commentary, critical guides, annotations, discussion (citation, etc.) and discourse around FW uses that pagination and line number scheme.

the folio has 500 odd pages so if i tell you to locate the thunderword on 23.5-7 you won't be able to find it

the reason it is always cheap is that nobody who owns it has ever read it, and eventually they realise they will never read it and give it away.
including me. never even opened my copy.

What are the reasonings for buying Folios instead of Everyman's library?

better paper and better binding

whether that's worth it or important to you is up to you to decide/dependent on just how much money you have

not all books are of the same quality even if they're all "hardcover." objectively, folios are some of the sturdiest and most carefully constructed books you can get on the mass market. it's just something that's not that useful/important to most people.

Yeah I got the Folio Finnegans Wake as a graduation gift, and it's beautiful, but I still keep an old paper back one around for when I want to use secondary materials.

I picked up Meditations, and Analects, because I have had my eye on them for a few months now and couldn't pass up 50pc off. Wonderful they threw in Portrait for free, because my Joyce loving cousin told me to pick it up recently anyway, so he'll be happy.

Anyone know if the New Years sale is a lot better?

How is the meditations translation?

Not overly Latinate in style, but still clear and formal. It's the Maxwell Staniforth translation. It's my preferred translation frankly.

Personally, I think that these look hideous.

The only ones that I would consider buying, based solely on aesthetics, are their limited editions of Shakespeare's oeuvre.

How much did you pay for all of this?

>he doesnt have a folio copy of wind in the willows
how uncouth

The value of a book is not the paper it's printed on. The material aspect of it is just a necessary intermediary, the vessel that delivers the novel to you. Fuckin waste of money is what folio is.

Because it's not just the covers. Like you said, what matters is on the inside, and Folio books have sturdy binding and use archival or near-archival quality paper with readable typefaces and ink that contrasts nicely to the quality paper. The covers designs are only the wrapping.