Modern Book Collecting discussion

Some books simply never made HB edition. I want some early Dean Koontz stuff(The Sci-Fi he wrote, way back in the day)unfortunately these books are only available in PB (which I don't collect, but in order to get a full line of Deans work, the PB's need to be added.

I guess it's just part of the collectors woes.

Yep, if you want a complete collection you'll need those pb's. Maybe if your lucky, you could get them signed, there would be some value in that.

Well, there are some PB's that are already very rare and priced extremely high. It's not the monetary value that bothers me, it's the quality of the book that makes me cringe.

Yea, paper backs were not made to last, but if you keep them protected they should out last your old duffer butt.

just replaced all my pb anne rice collection with hb. it was quite a pain but going to donate all the old ones to the library.

Brit, did you collect all 1st edition/1st print books in the Rice catalog?

I think there were two that are not first editions but other than that they were. she has a new book coming out in October and I wanted to get a more durable set. I tell you what's really hard to find my Anne McCaffrey Dragonriders of Pern series. Its like trying to find a needle in ten haystacks.

Brittany wrote: "I think there were two that are not first editions but other than that they were. she has a new book coming out in October and I wanted to get a more durable set. I tell you what's really hard to f..."

The Pern books are blue chip books. Your going to pay for those unless you get lucky and scout hard. Usually unsigned copies of Dragonflight run in the 125.00 to 200.00 dollar range. But you can get lucky as I said.

Here's a link you may want to give a quick peek. This is the 1978 edition, book was first printed in 1968.
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookD...

First UK edition 1969
http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookD...

Personally, I love vintage paperbacks. Being a Philip K. Dick fan, that comes with the territory. A lot of my favorite authors subsisted on PBOs for their early careers. And you really can't beat 50's, 60's and 70's science fiction PB cover art. But that doesn't stop me from trying to get my favorites books' first hardcover edition too.

Hi David, welcome to the group.
If I want full collections of authors such as Koontz and Laymon, I will have to take the plunge.

The upside to finding the vintage Koontz pbs, is I could have them signed and dated. Unfortunately Mr. Laymon is no longer with us.

Thanks for the welcome. I have the same issue with Philip K. Dick. I don't expect to ever own anything signed by him.

I did find it easy to collect a bunch of the old PBOs, though. I lucked into a big PKD lot on Ebay. It was poorly listed with a couple of bad photos looking into a box of books. You couldn't really see much, but I was able to deduce enough from the description to guess some of what was there. I was planning on bidding up to $150. I got 35 books for $85. It turned out there were 6 early PBOs, the five Bluebird press trade paperbacks with portrait art, a couple of expensive books about PKD, the five Citadel Twilight trade paperbacks of the collected stories, some review copies of the Vintage paperbacks and a bunch of other less valuable books. I ended up selling the duplicates on Ebay a couple of weeks later in two lots for $50 and kept all the good stuff. I kept about $300 worth of stuff. Had these books been listed separately with decent pictures, the books easily could have brought $300 to $400 on Ebay.

So, my advice is watch for lots on the expensive Koontz material. You never know what will come up.

David, I have found quite a few of the old Koontz books, I just never pulled the trigger because pb really do not fit in my collection. But as I stated, to acquire a true full collection of Koontz books, those paperbacks will be needed.

I always ask myself how important is a true full collection from my standpoint?