Everything, it appears, is collected by someone. From fine art to celebrity hair follicles. If it exists, someone somewhere will be its archivist, slavishly tending to their garden of things, adding to it and ensuring it betters anything else that could have been collected by any collecting rival.
Books are an obvious collectable, with their varied editions, printing errors and signed copies, they offer a breadth or possibilities to the collector. Yet some things holds more sway than any other, a first edition. Simply by looking on eBay or AbeBooks, you can tell the significance heaped onto these initial prints from their monetary value. Why are they so important you might ask? A valid question indeed. Certainly they are the prints of text that had been untested in their quality and popularity amongst the book buying public and academic interpretations, they are the purest untainted, undiluted versions, closer to the fingers of the author than the copious versions to follow should the book become successful. However what really matter is surly the contents of the novel, the assembly of the words into meaning and not the means by which the words on their pages are bound or forged in the furnaces of book publishers before all others.
Browsing eBay I chanced across a tomb of Philip K. Dick artefacts, being sold off by a poor (soon to be a little richer) individual who had either realised his collection's monetary value outweighed its personal value or whom had taken a stand against the collection, realising that the ideas in the books offer him more than their collectors kudos.
However, while I believe in the ideas above all else, my recent discovery of an old edition of Dicken's Christmas Stories, which had likely been held by both my now deceased grandparents, and likely great grandparents, in addition to other family members in between. I came to wonder whether they have, in some way, imparted something on the novel they placed back on the shelf and whether in fact, we all add something to a text with every read. I doubt this is something that overawes the substance of the novel or the intentions of the author, rather its a separate entity, lingering long after the reader has departed, leaving their pages folded, torn, unintentionally letting the oils from their fingers discolour the pages in conjunction with the effects of time, dust, light and smoke which cling to each page for their right to be remembered.
I seldom pick up a book and stop to think whether the other readers came to the same conclusions about its characters, how they felt as the narrative concluded or even whether it brought tears to their eyes, but there is always undoubtedly something tangibly different about picking up an old book, tattered by several readings, and a crisp new copy straight off the production line. A new book offers a chance to be the first to impact the integrity of the artefact, leaving behind evidence of your personality; clean, tidy, careful with the pages or treating the book with an over-friendly carelessness, resulting in creased and notable damage?
So, is a first edition really worth many times more than the new book hot off the press? Like a typical Libran, I answer both yes and no. The text of the novel remains the same, the story it harbours will not change, however, the added historicity of the physical object may change they way you approach a book, imparting some of its ingrained past as you turn the pages and forge your own understanding.
Image provided by HoskingIndustries (via Flickr).
