Have You Recently Completed a Collection, or Stopped Collecting?

In article ,
(Art Layton) wrote:

(rcbsam0131) wrote in message
. com...
Take me through what you were thinking when you completed the
collection.


I am fairly close to completing my collection of books about the
Vietnam conflict.

How do you decide it's complete? (I presume you haven't got /every/ book
referring to the conflict.) Did you start out with, or at some point make,
a list? Or is it just a feeling that you have a reached a point where
adding more titles won't improve the collection?

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 16:13:34 -0400, "RWF"
wrote:

"rcbsam0131" wonders:
Has anyone recently completed, or is close to completing, a collection?

I don't know if any book collector ever regards their collection as truly
complete.
There is always that copy in better condition that would sure look good on
the shelf...


I don't forsee that I'll ever be "done". Much of my collecting has
moved into the realm of authors whose work was not ever comprehensibly
collected in book form. Current project is Robert F. Young, who wrote
nearly 200 stories...

My attempt to get a signed Arkham House example from every possible
author took a huge blow this weekend when teh Vincent Starrett book
I'd intended to order vansihed over the weekend, To make matters
worse, a friend confirms the existence of a volume previously not
thought to exist in a signed state...


Cheers,


John

On Wed, 14 Jul 2004 16:13:34 -0400, "RWF"
wrote:

"rcbsam0131" wonders:
Has anyone recently completed, or is close to completing, a collection?

I don't know if any book collector ever regards their collection as truly complete.
There is always that copy in better condition that would sure look good on the shelf...

I gotta go with Bob on this. I'm lacking one Conklin paperback and
one hardcover-with-jacket to complete a set of firsts; but whereas
I've been extremely fortunate to find very fine copies of a lot of the
41 anthologies Conk did, there will *always* be a few I need to
upgrade - and this leaves alone for the moment the question of foreign
editions. I have most of the UK reprints, but I may never have the
Spanish or Japanese issues. And, as Conk signed very few books, I may
never have more than the single autograph I have now.

Add to that the fact that I'm an amateur bibliographer, and....Nope,
the collection is never quite completed.

I am fairly close to completing my collection of books about the
Vietnam conflict.

How do you decide it's complete? (I presume you haven't got /every/ book
referring to the conflict.) Did you start out with, or at some point make,
a list? Or is it just a feeling that you have a reached a point where
adding more titles won't improve the collection?

There are thousands of books about Vietnam. Some are government
publications with reprints of letters, memos and cables. Others are
comic books or paperback action stories. Some have (IMHO) no redeeming
literary value or are unreadable. Collecting them may not add anything
(except variety) to my collection.

I started with Ken Lopez's list of the 50 best fiction books about
Vietnam and expanded on that. For example, Robert Olen Butler wrote
several books about Vietnam, but I ended up collecting almost all of
his books because I liked his style.

How did I decide my collection was complete? First, using the opinion
of other collectors and dealers about what was worth colleting.
Second, my own opinion about the literary value of what is left.
However, I recently purchased four books to add to my collection. Two
were written by Michael Lanning who was a company commander in the
199th LIB in Vietnam. I purchased those because of a pesonal
connection with his unit. Another was a history of the 199th LIB;
again a persona connection. And David Maraniss's book, "They Marched
into Sunlight", non-fiction about concurrent events in Vietnam and
Wisconsin in 1967.

What would I like to add? Better copies of Bernard Fall's two books. A
copy of Wolff's book, "Ugly Rumours", though at $1000+ not likely. And
Wolff has repudiated the book! I would like to add books written by
Vietnamese authors, but not those approved by the communist
bureaucrats in Hanoi.

If anyone is interested in a substantial bibliography for Vietnam,
please go to
http://people.clemson.edu/~eemoise/bibliography.html

Art Layton
Stamford CT

In article ,
(rcbsam0131) wrote:

Hello again - let's try it this way: is it possible to ever stop
collecting? Or, if one could complete a collection, what then?

Start another one! I expect most of us have done that at some time or
another. It's particularly common among modern-first collectors, where
the books that form the core of the collection /are/ finite and clearly
defined (also, I suspect it's partly because people tend to grow into and
out of liking particular fiction writers more frequently than they change
their broader interests).

But I suppose the only truly complete collection would be something like
Borges's Library at Babel.

"rcbsam0131" wrote in message
m...
Hello again - let's try it this way: is it possible to ever stop
collecting? Or, if one could complete a collection, what then?

Thanks to all who have responded - Ron Bishop

No - I don't think *I* will ever stop collecting. I limit my collecting to
a relatively small genre (ghost/horror fiction), but even within this
there's a massive amount of collecting to be done.

I started with a single signed Clive Barker book & started collecting those.
Since Mr. Barker is very generous to his fans, autographed copies are very
easy to come by. Then I got a copy of Night Visions 3, which is an
anthology that Mr. Barker contributed to. That got me started on trying to
get all of the Night Visions books, which in turn led to collecting signed
anthologies in general... somewhere in the mix I started in with all of the
Bram Stoker Award winners. And who can collect horror books without
including Stephen King? And so on...

So even if I complete a portion of my collection (all the Night Visions
books, for example), I still have so many other areas to fill in, I doubt
I'd ever be done.

If by some off chance I suddenly found myself a very rich (let's say I won
the lottery), and within a couple of years had completed all of my
collections, then I would probably just increase the scope of what I'm
collecting. Include older books, lesser known authors, etc. Perhaps even
switch to an entirely new genre.

I think part of the facination with collecting (for myself, anyway) is that
there's ALWAYS something else to find; there's never an end to what's out
there. Even if I had a copy of every known book ever published, there are
sill thousands of new books published every year. So I suppose the only
reason I'd stop collecting is if I lost interest.

Elston Brooks, a now-deceased columnist for the _Fort Worth Star-Telegram_,
covered this topic back in the 1970's when, as an adult, he decided to
collect the complete set of Big Little Books. "I had 250 of them which I
let my mother give away to an orphanage when I went into the army." He
asked readers to help him, and they did. Then he asked on radio and TV
shows. Slowly, but constantly, people began giving him their old Big Little
Books.

That wasn't quite enough, so he took ads in book publications across the
country. Soon they arrived from distant states, and even Great Britain.
Since Brooks was an entertainment reporter, he got to travel a lot, and used
that advantage to scour used book stores all over America. One New York
City book dealer reamed him with this: "If I had any Big Little Books, I'd
burn 'em up. They cost 10 cents back in the 1930s and guys like you are
driving the prices crazy. They're too much trouble at those inflated
prices. Bale 'em for waste paper, I would."

On the positive side, Brooks said that there was no greater thrill than to
arrive home each night and find an oblong package with an out-of-state
postmark waiting for him on the porch. "I had the collector's monkey on my
back. In six months I had whittled the want list down to only 19 missing
books. I found the mother lode in Chicago."

Somebody gave Brooks the name of a book dealer in Chicago, along with a
warning: "I wouldn't advise going. The dealer's a little eccentric."

Fat chance. Brooks walked into the place nonchalantly during his next
business trip, and Gosh! Seventeen cartons of Big Little Books piled on the
floor!!!!!!!! "It was the most difficult thing I have ever done in my
life, but I stayed away from the cartons for several minutes, pretending to
browse in other sections of the shop. Casually, I said to the owner, 'Oh,
what are these? I think I might have had some of those little books when I
was a kid. What are they called?'"

The owner said: "Let's not con-around. Let me see your want list."

Defeated, Brooks pulled the list out of his pocket. Later that day, he flew
home with his want list of "gotcha's" at 248 Big Little Books.

After 14 months of this, he had only two books to go. A prominent Fort
Worth publisher gave him one of the missing ones at a business luncheon.
"They wanted me to have it because they couldn't stand the thought of a big
boy crying." Only one more to go!

Then, came the Big One. A woman phoned Elston Brooks and said she had the
prized book he'd been looking for, "Gentleman Joe Palooka." That would make
the grand total of 250 books, and it would all be over. She said all Brooks
had to do was come and get it, free.

"I was a collector too," she told him. "I was after a certain kind of tea
cups. I know what it feels like to finally find the last one. But now it's
over, and the thrill of the hunt is gone."

Brooks wrote: "She was right. I had special book shelves built, and there
the 250 Big Little Books sit today. Unread. I'm always afraid someone will
phone and ask what I'm doing, and how can a grown man say, 'Oh, just sitting
around reading "Flash Gordon in the Water World of Mongo"?'"

*******
Speaking personally at last, I've been sorta/kinda collecting _Doc Savage_
books. These are the reprints published by Bantam during the 1960's and
1970's. I seriously doubt they'll ever be republished, since the stories
were originally written at least 70 years ago and some topics they cover
would have a very difficult time getting past the Politically Correct Nazis
today. I'm told that these reprints are difficult to locate, and very
expensive when they are found. So I just trip over them occasionally at
thrift shops and garage sales. Besides, I like to actually *read* the
things, and sometimes Life just gets in the way. But it's still a lot of
fun! When a book dealer tells me she won't take anything less than ten
bucks for a paperback copy of "Man of Bronze," the first book in the series,
it's a flush of great joy when I find the same book at a Salvation Army
store for only a buck.

You know that feeling, right? Of course you do!

Speaking personally at last, I've been sorta/kinda collecting _Doc Savage_
books. These are the reprints published by Bantam during the 1960's and
1970's. I seriously doubt they'll ever be republished, since the stories
were originally written at least 70 years ago and some topics they cover
would have a very difficult time getting past the Politically Correct
Nazis
today. I'm told that these reprints are difficult to locate, and very
expensive when they are found.

Most of the Bantam Doc Savage reprints are readily available on eBay.
The 2 in1 editions and Omnibus editions are a little harder to find.
I put together a set a quite while ago (pre-eBay) and it took me less than a
year.

--
Bob Finnan
The Hardy Boys Unofficial Home Page
http://users.arczip.com/fwdixon
New & Out Of Print Books, Books-On-Tape, Videos, DVDs, CD-ROMs For Sale
http://users.arczip.com/fwdixon/hbsale.htm
.................................................. ....................

"Art Layton" wrote in message
om...

I am fairly close to completing my collection of books about the
Vietnam conflict.


Interesting posts--I'm always intrigued to hear about military history
collections.


Today, making my usual rounds I found for $1 a signed copy of Robert
McNamara's *In Retrospect: The Tragedy and Lessons of Vietnam* (1995). The
book is in pretty rough shape (VG-/G+, both book and jacket), but there
don't seem to be a lot of copies for sale with McNamara's signature directly
on the title page. Seems like a good addition to a Vietnam collection, were
I assembling one.


William M. Klimon
http://www.gateofbliss.com

"Matt J. McCullar" wrote in message
. ..

Elston Brooks, a now-deceased columnist for the _Fort Worth
Star-Telegram_,
covered this topic back in the 1970's when, as an adult, he decided to
collect the complete set of Big Little Books. "I had 250 of them which I
let my mother give away to an orphanage when I went into the army." He
asked readers to help him, and they did. Then he asked on radio and TV
shows. Slowly, but constantly, people began giving him their old Big
Little
Books.



Funny, just today I picked up a copy of Bill Borden's *The Big Book of Big
Little Books* (1997). I don't collect 'em, but I liked the graphics.

Here's an example of another collection being brough to conclusion: the last
individual to assemble the Zamorano 80:

http://www.dsloan.com/Auctions/A12/A12Contents.htm


William M. Klimon
http://www.gateofbliss.com