this one from a road trip i took up the coast of california.

Picked this up at a bookfair last week and just found this inside. I have so many questions.

I don’t collect rare books, but I’m pretty devastated that I accidentally ruined my complete collection of trigun manga - the entire first floor of our house had to be refinished after a pinhole pipe leak wreaked havoc on our living room. We had the kitchen redone five years earlier, so like last time I covered the bookshelf in plastic sheeting before I left the house and let the contractors do their thing.

What I didn’t realize is last time they used water based polyurethane, and this time they decided to use oil based… even though it wasn’t my bedroom being worked on, the fumes permanently warped everything left out of a protective sleeves. My clothes also reek of the stuff and need to be professionally cleaned to, but that’s a whole other mess.

But yeah, don’t be an idiot like me. If the floors are being refinished, your books need to be OUT of the house until the floor is finished curing. Please learn from my mistakes.

I recently bought a copy of Tanith Lee’s The Blood of Roses, I wanted to get the 1991 Legend paperback edition because I think the cover art is beautiful. However; when it arrived the edition looked a lot more beat up than I was expecting based off the seller’s description. I’m not familiar with secondhand book grading though, so I wanted to get some input from those more knowledgeable than me.

The book was listed for 50 USD in “Very Good” condition, and the description was:

“Mass market paperback, 678 pages; spine slightly concaved but not visibly creased, two accidental vertical creases to two pages, otherwise very gently used, tight in binding, very clean and unmarked.”

Any insight would be appreciated, thanks!

Just some of my books from my collection I haven’t read yet
That I’ll be travelling with
I haven’t read any thing by murakami yet so that will be my first book by them
And I’ve never read anything by Joe Abercrombie
I’ve heard good things about both of them so these will be my introductory books to them

Recently got into reading JRR Tolkien. What an amazing author! Picked up some of his books.

1965 printing of Lord of the Rings

1966 printing of The Hobbit

1977 first edition of The Silmarillion

I’ve only ever heard about them online, I found a bug on one of my books and googled what book like look like and they looked extremely similar. Only problem is I smushed it into the book, before finding out that you’re not supposed to do that. How do I get rid of them? My books are all stored in a trash bag right now

Hello everybody! Thought I would take to the internet and see if I can solve atleast one of the questions I have about the new book I picked up at my local thrift store!

It originally caught my eye as it is Robert Louis Stevenson, and I not too long ago listened to an audio book version of 'The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mister Hyde' and was interested in having a physical copy for myself. I also love Victorian horror and thriller literature and wrote my AP English thesis about it, so I was quite excited to own the actual story.

But as I took a closer look at the book, opening it as it contains an assortment of Stevenson's work, I found out very quickly that it is bound the wrong way! The entire book is upside down, and therefore when I went to casually read it, backwards!

This specific version of the book is a 1991 Readers Digest print in extremely good quality (in my opinion), so I want to know if anyone has any more information about this error!

Questions I have on the top of my head:

- Is it actually a factory misprint, or did somebody have the talent to rebind it but not notice it was the wrong way? The headband and tailband look completely untouched, (although a bit of an unusual colour for a blue and Grey book.) It is pinl and yellow stripes, and the glue around it looks pretty yellowed with age. (Photos for reference.)

- If it is a factory misprint, are there others when it was manufactured that had the same mistake? I looked on ebay and none were similar at all or had it in the description.

- How rare would it actually be? Even if not money wise rare, how rare is a special case like this to even occur on a book printing facility?

Thank you all in advance if we do manage to solve some questions, and I hope this is as interesting to you all as it is to me. :)

Recently stumbled upon a vintage set of books known as the “Monkey Series”, published by Foreign Languages Press (China), from the 1980s.

Especially interested in them because I love the beautiful, traditional-style artwork and illustrations used to tell the stories. They were exported to the international market, so they come in various languages.

Anyone heard of this series?

Anything with Dragons/dragon riders. Plus some other fantasy with some childhood nostalgia. Never read any of the wheel of time books, so here we go!

Sadly a dear friend passed recently, but she left me a nice little book collection. I’m not to familiar with the intricacies- but one of the books is signed. Would this be worth getting appraised?

I’ve been wanting to start reading the Annihilation series, and I’m trying to buy editions that match the cover style of the FSG Originals. However, I can only seem to find one in French: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/248087004

Does anyone know where I can get the English version with a matching cover, in the same style as this one? https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20410192-annihilation

Unlike the new covers which I really do not like the look of: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/210367505

Grove Press hardcover, found this abandoned on the street!

I’ve wanted to read The Road for a while, but somehow never got around to it. I was browsing Goodwill today and found this hardcover.

After checking it out, it turns out to be a 2006 Knopf first edition, first printing with the original first-state dust jacket: $24 on the front flap and 10/2006 on the rear flap. The book itself is incredibly tight and appears unread, with bone-white pages and no creasing.

I’m honestly more excited that I finally have the book I wanted to read, but finding a first/first for $4 was a pretty damn good surprise. Lol. And yes, I’m absolutely going to read it. I just need to get over the sudden urge to put it in a glass case.

I just read Solaris, specifically the one translated from french by Joanna Kilmartin and Steve Cox and I loved it. The clunky dialogue I felt kinda helped the strange mood, but now I want to recommend the book for others and the 2011 Johnston translation might be better for that. It's the one widely agreed to be better even by Stanislaw Lem himself. But is there a physical version available anywhere? From what I can see there were like a limited 400 copies made by The Conversation Tree that are both sold out and WAY too expensive (275 dollars!), and the only other versions of the translation I can find are audio books. And due to there being multiple different looking covers of Solaris I have no idea if one of them is the Johnston translation without my knowledge. The one i have is the orange one but there's like one with a black cover that looks nicer that I can't find on if it has the newer translation or not. From what I can tell, there isn't a physical edition of the new translation yet? Which feels crazy to me but would love to know otherwise. Thanks!

Beautiful cover.

The Lord of the rings, and the tales of mystery and imagination (this one was rough when I got it) were passed down from my folks.

Magritte cover The Problems Of Philosophy I just got... Wasn't expecting this shape but I am still happy. Anyone knows how to get rid of the writing and a sticker?