[Finnucane]

I have a fair number of autographed books, but I work in publishing so a lot of them are signed by friends and people I've worked with. Which means there's no way I'd willingly part with them. I'm less interested in 'collecting' as such so much any more. And my cookbooks all show visible signs of use.

[dhosek]

I was more of a collector as a younger person than I am now (as evidenced by my 2000-volume personal library). I generally only sought out first editions by authors that I really loved (Graham Greene being the primary exemplar). Most of the signed books I have are either written by friends (oddly the Pulitzer prize winner in my friend circle isn’t from my writing life but from my music life) or were purchased second-hand and already signed. I will admit that I’ll generally prefer a reader edition of a book over a collector edition—I own both of Greene’s retracted novels, one was dirt cheap from a second-hand bookshop in Canada and has a slightly warped spine so that the book viewed from the top is a parallelogram rather than a rectangle, and the other I paid a bit more for, but not at the extremes of price because it has a library rebinding (from the era of libraries rebinding hardcover books to increase their shelf life, a practice which has since been replaced with plastic-wrapping the dust jacket).