[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).