One of the many strategies we have outlined for building a private library as inexpensively as possible is to collect what other people are not collecting.
Because the law of supply and demand applies to book collecting just as it does to most other commercial transactions, the less demand there is for a particular type of book, the more likely it is that one will be able to purchase a particular title for very little money. Accordingly, if your interests tend towards that direction, it pays to seek out "obscure" topics, authors, illustrators, etc. and build your private library accordingly.
In the four+ decades that we have been involved with books, we have come across a number of interesting private libraries that were founded upon the above tenets. We on occasion will be sharing some observations about such libraries, in the hopes that these may strike a chord with a suitably motivated collector or two. One such library that could be fashioned upon such tenets is a library devoted to survivalist literature.
This literature focuses on "anticipating and making preparations for future possible disruptions in [the] local, regional, national, or international social or political order. Survivalists often prepare for this anticipated disruption by learning skills (e.g., emergency medical training), stockpiling food and water, preparing for self-defense and self-sufficiency , and/or building structures that will help them to survive or "disappear:"
Such literature has a long history, especially among the religious, where apocalyptic literature dates back many centuries. And such literature is a gold mine for historians, who glean from it from it much valuable information about the concerns (realistic or not) of particular societies, or groups within such societies.
The modern locus of such literature is, of course, the Cold War and the fears that this "war" generated about possible global thermonuclear annihilation. Other concerns, though, also have given rise to such literature, including fears of environmental collapse and other natural disasters (e.g., food & water shortages), manmade disasters (e.g., massive chemical spills) and economic disasters (e.g., a global depression). Each of these potential disasters has given rise to its own subset of survivalist literature:
Because much of this literature counsels self-sufficiency, collectors building a private library of such literature will find that there is a lot of crossover with the literature of the back-to-the-land movement....
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