Best Buy of 2019

Folio or not, old or new.

My own best buy was without a shadow of a doubt the 2 vol. The Shorter Cambridge Medieval History for AUD$20 delivered in excellent condition.

My highlights are all Folio volumes:

- Letterpress Hamlet from eBay for £85, delivered
- Atlas Shrugged and South Polar Times from the pop-up sale for £20 each. Brand new, but did have to stand in the cold for an hour.

Edited to remove one that was in 2020 (oops...)

All four volumes of Ideas a History Fire to Freud and Ideas a History Wittgenstein to the World Wide Web by Peter Watson form Oxfam. £58.00 in total. A great read.

Direct from FS, my #1 book on the wishlist: American Gods. £79.95

Billy Budd, Married Mettle Press. Forgot how much I paid for it but astonishingly cheap for a bronze/wood binding, letterpress on handmade paper.

For me it was Good Omens in the Occult edition, non-FS.

Churchill's WWI history The World Crisis Folio Society set in new condition for $175

Best bargain buys of 2019:

The Folio Press Shakespeare. 1976 – Limited edition – 37-volume set in six slip cases.
Ebay - Buy it Now.
£100





The Folio Jane Austen. 1996 – Full-bound in blue-green leather.
Ebay – Buy it Now.
£65

>8 bookfair_e: wow, very nice!

I didn’t really get any great bargains in 2019, but my best buys were FS News from Nowhere and BOTNS.

The Gormenghast Trilogy, by Mervyn Peake, second hand, on Ebay. I can't remember what I paid for it, but it was an excellent deal and the books were in perfect condition and tight. It didn't feel like anyone had ever read them. I had been wanting them for so long and devoured them immediately!

>8 bookfair_e: The Folio Jane Austen. 1996 – Full-bound in blue-green leather. Ebay – Buy it Now.

That's astonishing. I have no idea how I missed that one. You must have been very quick. Well done!

Best Non-FS Buy in 2019:

The Gododdin, Dolmen Editions, 1977, edition of 650 copies. Illustrations by Louis le Brocquoy.

The original limited edition had a full black cloth binding. This is a unique copy with bespoke contemporary full burgundy morocco binding with cover designs (both front and rear) by the artist (le Brocquoy) in black morocco and gilt with calfskin-backed clamshell box. It was a presentation copy to Morris Cox, poet and proprietor of the Gogmagog Press upon his birthday in 1981.

Price: $700. This may not sound as if it is a bargain but a fine binding in full morocco with onlay designs from a noted artist, a unique copy with this provenance, should have sold for considerably more than this.

The Gododdin #2

The Gododdin #3

The Gododdin #4

Best Folio Society purchase in 2019:

War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy (2 volumes), 1971. Full blue morocco bindings in the original slipcase, all in fine condition.

Price: $150.

Tolstoy #2:

>16 dlphcoracl:
I'm searching for the very same thing now, but can't find Fine for that sort of price. (Congratulations, of course!)

>16 dlphcoracl: Thanks, as always, for the nice picture of beautiful volumes.

Best Non FS purchase of 2019: Heart of Darkness - Chester River Press - Price Undisclosed. My favorite purchase of the year by far as it fulfilled a several year long hunt.

Best FS purchase of 2019: A combination of The Princess Bride and The House at Pooh Corner. Each of my daughters is devouring one of those two books. It's so nice to see them reading my FS books and I hope this is the start of a life long love for finer printed books.

>20 Sorion:
Congrats on the CRP Heart of Darkness! That's one of the highlights of my collection. I was lucky enough to buy a copy from the press before it sold out.

The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood, McClelland and Stewart, Toronto, 1985, 1st edition / 1st printing, $125. Not that rare but an excellent deal.

Best Buy FS: complete set of Folio Press Fine Edition
My favorite purchase of the year: The Foolscap Press beautiful edition of John Mandeville

Intending to spend a little less in 2020. Try to buy nothing before the LE sale, but you know how that goes.

Best FS purchase: Riddley Walker (summer LE sale)

Best Non FS purchase: NASA Past and Present Dreams of the Future

Best overall: Shakespeare's Twelfth Night. Hodder Stoughton 1908; Limited Edition of 350 in full Vellum. Signed by Illustrator Heath Robinson. Maybe not perfect condition, but still a very good deal at $60.





Folio Society: I got the three Gill Limited Editions and the Morte d'Arthur for combined less than $1,000 (not bought together). Not a steal, but I am quite happy with growing my LE collection to finally officially reach stage 10 of F.A.D. I was also quite happy with News from Nowhere for $100.

My best buy was the Temple of Flora LE (Full book, not just the plates) for $220 on ebay. I think postage was another $80 but still well worth it!

I just picked up another copy of Paradiso for $95 AU from a second hand book shop. It's up on ebay now
https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/164033619400

They had Inferno and Purgatorio for $95 each too but I thought that they would be harder to move (And as someone who was missing Paradiso for years, seeing one pop up meant that I had to pounce on it!).

I bought my first copy on ebay a few years ago for $500. There are other copies going for closer to $700 now.

By value, the LEC Little Women in Fine condition with Announcement and Monthly Letter for $5 plus $4 shipping in the Amazon Marketplace. Thanks to a LT tip.

My FS best buy of 2019 was picking up the complete Raymond Chandler novels for $4.77. Only good condition, but for $0.68/book, I'll take that every time. Second to that was finding the complete Hemingway novels in mint condition for $15.93.

Printed Maps of Tasmania (where I was born and raised). A limited edition of 20 copies half leather bound for A$400 (about GBP220). Not cheap, but rare and beautiful.
See - https://www.flickr.com/photos/warwick_carter/48704450293/in/photolist-2hcR3eB-2h...

My best buy of 2019 was Burton's Arabian Nights. To give the particular edition its full title:

"The Book of the Thousand Nights and One Night. Translated from the Arabic by Captain Sir. R.F. Burton. Reprinted from the original edition and edited by Leonard C. Smithers. Illustrated by a series of seventy-one original illustrations reproduced from the original pictures in oils specially painted by Alberet Letchford."
'Library Edition - Illustrated' of the Kamashastra Edition. Original publisher's half red morocco over green cloth sides, spines gilt, top edges gilt. 12 volumes.

Sets with the "original leather-covered presentation box, lid gilt-lettered in Arabic, lined with green cloth on the interior, with spring lock" go for many thousands, and even sets of just the books, like mine, i.e. without the box but in "very good" condition, can go for around £2000 -£2500. So, I was very pleased to snap it up for £200 from the Oxfam shop in Henley. Not only that, but when I asked them if they could send it to me (it's a large and very heavy set), the man offered (gratefully accepted) to deliver it in person free of charge, as three days later he was due to visit his mother who lives only about 3 or 4 miles from me. As Alan Partridge would say: "Back of the net!!!!!"

(Edited to add the number of volumes)

>30 boldface: To that I can only offer *high five*

In reading this thread I found that I overpaid for everything in 2019.

>32 Forthwith:

Yes, but is your library larger? Have you been compelled to read more? If so, money well spent.

>33 treereader: Yes and Yes

My biggest purchase of 2019 finally arrived today.

I am stunned by the quality of many of these titles. And for a 92 year-old book, the Nonesuch Dante is beautiful to take in.



Edit: Feel free to ask for pictures of any of the titles. Interiors, pages, art, etc.

>36 MimeistKoenig:

That's gorgeous.

>36 MimeistKoenig: Oh my, I am drooling!

>36 MimeistKoenig:

Simply fabulous. That by itself would define a successful year of book collecting.

I am just happy that I am on the Suntup numbered track. Bought all, happy with all. Latest release is a signed LE of Thomas Harris' Red Dragon, sold out in 28 minutes. It is a beauty.

The FS Lord of the Rings trilogy, great condition, slipcase and all. $25.

Found it in a tiny used bookstore in Florida while my parents and I were passing through. For some reason they thought that was half the original sale price.

Picked up the full 20 volume set of FS O'Brians at an auction in the UK for £780, plus shipping to New Zealand. Not cheap but still better than trying to acquire the later volume individually.
Have been a lifetime fan of O'Brian and have read the whole series three times now (about once every ten years). Tempting to read it all a fourth time in the FS editions.

>12 dlphcoracl: dlphcoracl: Thanks for the enablement! I'd not come across The Gododdin before and so after some research on the 'net I took the plunge and ordered a copy (the standard one, bound in black cloth of course) from a bookshop in Dublin. It arrived this morning - lovely little book and very reasonably priced at 95 euros (perhaps due to the lack of a dust jacket?) So - thanks once again!

>43 malc79:

Thank you for the kind comments. Y Gododdin is the Welsh answer to Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a medieval tale of chivalry and combat nearly one thousand years old. The Dolmen Press was the major private press in the Republic of Ireland in the 20th century, providing a vehicle and platform for a large number of Irish writers and poets not named Heaney or Yeats to see their work in print in a private press edition. The best of the Dolmen Editions are superb.

Two volume Holy Bible illustrated by Gustave Dore and (professionally) hand illuminated by a previous owner.

Picture of binding added to my member profile. Books are nearly a foot and a half tall. Thousands of tool impressions.

I took a punt on buying some Limited Editions Club volumes of Sherlock Holmes (the Later Adventures). No slipcase, but the starting bid was low, and I got them for £20 plus postage.

Went to the limitation page and saw that it was not one of the regular series. Embossed on the final page is a seal marking the set as one of 15 presentation copies.

And in the space for the limitation number was written "Conan Doyle Estate".

>36 MimeistKoenig:

That's a wonderful purchase, congratulations!

As a newly bitten Gaiman fan I'd love to hear your impression of the Sandman editions you have there.
What do you think of the binding? Do you get the impression that it will hold up?

The one that springs to mind for me was a first edition of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, by Richard Flanagan. Nothing rare or special as a collector’s item (though probably my best read of 2019), but what made it memorable was that it cost me €3 and when I opened it I found a €5 note that the previous owner had used as a bookmark! Like a gift from the gods...

>48 stopsurfing:

Yes, that would be a welcome find in any book. My only similar discovery came in one of the 44 volumes of Hugh Walpole that I bought as a collection: the whole of the author's fiction, all but one of the books first editions, uniformly rebound in full green morocco somewhere around 1950 at what must have been very considerable expense. Hugh Walpole's current popularity allowed me to buy the lot for about £200 on eBay, which already seemed a gift. Some time later I opened one of them, a signed limited edition of Harmer John, only to find three old £5 notes together between two pages, evidently as a little stash rather than a bookmark. I haven't yet read all 44 volumes, so it's possible that other such surprises await.

I was going to read through these and congratulate the purchases that made me develop an inkling of jealousy. Then I realized it was basically the lot of you, so congrats!

>49 terebinth:

That's great. I thought I'd done well to find a similarly bound signed set of the four original Herries novels, albeit for rather more than you've paid for everything! However, I did secure a complete set of the leather pocket editions recently, although that edition never included the final three or four novels. I also recently obtained the two privately printed limited editions, The Crystal Box and Extracts from a Diary, the former of which, I discovered on arrival, contained a small signed Christmas card incorporating a photo of Walpole with his dog in his garden at Brackenburn, near Keswick.

(Edited to correct title)

>51 boldface:

Ah, that's a delightful bonus indeed. I don't have either of the privately printed books (yet), and had only begun reading Hugh Walpole at all a couple of months before acquiring these 44 volumes at a stroke: all the trade-published novels and short stories, six of them in the large paper signed limited editions, plus The Waverley Pageant, and including as seen here both limited and trade editions of Harmer John. Some of the early books have various ownership signatures, so most likely the collection was assembled or completed in the 1940s/ early '50s before being sent to the bindery. A discovery easily as welcome as the three fivers was a presentation inscription in the copy of Walpole's first book, The Wooden Horse. That volume also carries a lightly pencilled price of £8. 8s., presumably when in its original binding, still a week's salary for many when the author's stock was relatively high.

>52 terebinth:

Thanks for posting the photos. Very nice indeed.

I've always thought that Somerset Maugham's lampooning of Walpole in Cakes and Ale was unduly spiteful, but the latter's partly consequent decline in popularity has resulted in a market usefully beneficial to us modern afficionados. I've similarly benefited with the currently unfashionable Walter Scott.

Walpole was a friend of Arthur Ransome (they met in Russia during the Revolution) and by coincidence I have received just this evening an alert on a first edition copy of Swallows and Amazons with an asking price of £15500!

Yikes. Yes, I've benefited too from the ready availability of good editions of Sir Walter at modest prices, and generally from the way many of the authors I have found most rewarding over the years are either firmly out of favour or have never yet been in it.

The Hugh Walpole bindings aren't the most elegant I've seen, but are certainly among the most sturdy. They're stamped at the back "De Luxe Binding by the Collectors Book Club London", in what seems to have been a house style of that obscure and probably fairly short-lived operation: https://www.abebooks.co.uk/servlet/SearchResults?bi=0&bx=off&cm_sp=Searc... , just four books and all in the hands of one New Jersey dealer.

>47 WhiteBeard:

Are your Absolute Editions falling apart too?

I dug mine out recently for a reread and the pages look wonderful but the binding is really struggling. :-(

P.S. did you mean >35 RATBAG.:?