The Organic Growth of a Book Collection

While it is recommended (by more serious collectors than me) that a book collection should have a focus, a niche, something that makes it unique - I say, why? Let your books accumulate over time, sell or toss what you don’t like, and what is left over will as surely as not be your book collection. If you read just one kind of book, a single author, or stay exclusively within a genre, then yes, you will have a specialty. If you do not, then determining what you want to focus your energy and money on can be somewhat daunting. So, I say don’t stress out over what should or shouldn’t be in your collection, it is just not worth it. Your collection will be unique because it is yours. Let it grow from book to book. If you love a book, search out a first of it. If you really like an author, find his or her first work. Upgrade copies of your favorite books as you see fit. Let it grow from you, not some list.

It is also often recommended to collect what you like - and this, I believe, is great advice! Perhaps it is the only real advice I can honestly offer to someone interested in collecting books. My favorite band is the Grateful Dead and over the years I have gathered together enough Grateful Dead related books to say I have a collection of them... but, I also like baseball and have quite a few baseball books (novels and nonfiction) as well. Does that make it a different collection? I like to read award winning novels (Pulitzer Prize winners, National Book Award winners, Hugo and Nebula winners, etc.) and the ones I really enjoy, and that fit into my budget, I will search out first editions of. What does this do to my collection? A bunch of random prize winners scattered throughout... oh, the horror! My list of favorite authors is a long one - I enjoy speculative fiction, literary fiction, poetry, mysteries, thrillers, suspense, and histories and biographies of various sorts - but it is a rare writer where I dream of owning everything they ever wrote. So, do you know what you get when you mix all my books together? My book collection!

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A book worth reading is worth buying. ~John Ruskin