"I worked with a guy who bragged all the time about his collection of signed first editions. "
We don't 'collect' first editions, though down the years we've acquired several of them simply because they were the only ones on our 'wants' list that we could lay hands on.
In fact, if you constantly use books as references, valuable old ones can be a bit of a pain in the bum.
Doesn't mean we don't enjoy having some of them - we have some we wouldn't part wih - signed copies of ballad collections by Robert Chambers and his son, Robert Jnr, a copy of Borrows 'Lavengro' that a former owner 'corrected' by visiting one of the author's Gypsy sites and a set of Ford's 'Vagabond Songs' annotated in pencil throughout by Peter Buchan's supporter, William Walker - wouldn't part with them for the world.
One of our jewels in the crown is a slim, rather tatty soft bound book entitled 'Jacobite Minstrelsy'
We found it in a rather cold book warehouse in S.E. London one freezing winter day.
We took it off the rusty Dexion shelf, and when we examined it, it turned out to be a lined notebook containing around 160 songs, all in beautiful copper-plate and writing, with all of tunes carefully hand-written in tonic-sol-fa - you can see the handwriting getting 'old' as you progress through the book.
There is no indication of who wrote it and the only clue to its age is small leaflet advertising a lantern-slide lecture given in 1909, somewhere in the Scottish Highlands in 1909.
It cost us seven shillings and sixpence.
Beginning to sound like a book snob.....!!
Jim Carroll