The great thing about broad subjects like History and Food & Drink is that they offer an embarrassment of riches. So many titles have been published about these subjects that one can build a very respectable private library very inexpensively simply by scouring yard sales, garage sales, friends-of-the-library sales, publishers' clearance sales and the like. And, if you build your private library around a series of mini collections (as outlined in our previous posts), you even can achieve a sense of completion, notwithstanding the overwhelming number of titles published for each subject.
Obviously, the more refined your focus, the better off you likely will be (all other things being equal). Collecting in multiple languages, or building mini collections that are large enough to be stand-alone collections in their own right, likely will prove frustrating in the long run (even for those collectors for whom building a private library is ALL about the hunt):
For those of you collecting History as inexpensively as possible, much of what you gather will be in the form of paperbacks, book club editions and the like. And most of it will have been published recently. The further back one collects, the more expensive one's collecting generally becomes. (Even collecting recent titles can be expensive if you are collecting first edition hardbacks, though this can be offset somewhat through the judicious use of readily available discounts--which often reach 40% or more-- from large retailers like Barnes & Noble).
If, despite these admonitions, you nonetheless decide to make antiquarian books part of your collecting efforts, you may encounter a number of concerns that generally can be ignored when collecting more recent titles. We will examine a few of these concerns in tomorrow's post....
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