r/BookCollecting

I’ve been wanting to pick up an old copy of this for years and finally settled on this one, a 1975 UK Picador.

55/2000, fantagraphics books 1994

It is cloth-bound, printed letterpress, with a silver gilded top edge and a slipcase.

I recently bought an abandoned house (we do that for my work) and one of the unexpected things that came with it was ... thousands of books.

And I really mean thousands.

The books in these pictures are probably only about 20–30% of what’s here. There are many more boxes, shelves, and piles that I haven’t even properly gone through yet.

At this point, I honestly don't know exactly what I have. My plan is to slowly go through everything, see what’s interesting, figure out if there are any rare or unusual editions, and decide what I want to keep and what do I wanna do with the rest.

Since I collect books, this is both incredibly interesting and slightly overwhelming.

The problem is, I don't even know where to start.

If people are interested, I can also post updates as I work my way through the collection and show some of the more interesting things I find.

One of my favourite recent finds: a 1533 Venetian edition of the Roman agricultural writers Cato, Varro, Columella and Palladius, printed by the heirs of Aldus Manutius.

Aldus himself had died in 1515, but his press continued under his family and the Torresani. By this point the Aldine name was already synonymous with high-quality editions of the classics.

What really sold me on this copy, though, is the binding. More than two centuries later it was rebound in London by Christian Samuel Kalthoeber, one of the leading binders of the Georgian period, and it still retains his binder’s ticket.

It also carries the bookplate of the Earl of Kimberley.

So in one volume you get Roman agricultural texts, Renaissance Venetian printing, Georgian London bookbinding and later aristocratic provenance.

That layering of history is probably what I enjoy most about old books, the secrets peeled back slowly over time.