By your own admission, you are the type who buys whatever book or books appeal to you at the time: a paperback romance, perhaps, along with the latest critically acclaimed biography, a pop-up book for your youngest child and a really nice hardbound translation of some forgotten Chinese classic. If you have set aside a special little place in your home to store these books, you have a private library:
Many of my friends and colleagues in the publishing, bookselling, library and book collecting communities--you know who you are!--have done the concept of the private library, and book collecting in general, a great disservice by continually harping about focus and condition. Not every reader on the planet is interested in, or can afford, a room full of custom-crafted mahogany shelves upon which sit endless rows of first edition, first printings of [fill in your favorite author], all in pristine condition (both book, and more importantly nowadays, dustjacket).
A lot of folks prefer a less expensive, more haphazard approach to building their private library, an effort that book lovers everywhere should endorse just as enthusiastically as they embrace the costly, decades-long, very focused efforts of people like J.P. Morgan or Henry Huntington.
Especially when one is just beginning to put together a private library, it is difficult to know what, if anything, one wants to focus upon. As time passes, I suspect most folks alternate between accumulator and collector, with some portion of their books having a specific focus, while the remaining portion is a mishmash of whatever has recently struck their fancy. I have put together, or have helped put together, numerous private libraries in my four+ decades of active involvement with books, and the highly focused collection has, in my experience, more often proved the exception than the rule. Which is why such collections always make the news when they are sold or are transferred to institutional safekeeping.
Having said all this, there is no doubt that a well-focused collection, in the best possible condition, will always prove a more valuable asset than a melange of mixed condition paperbacks and hardbacks. Other collectors will lust to acquire your private library (should you choose to focus your book collecting efforts in this direction), as will major scholarly institutions. No doubt your name will be writ large in Posterity's hall of book collecting fame.
But this is an observation about the marketplace; it is not an aesthetic statement. Collect what you damn well please, and to hell with the naysayers!
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