Booking Through Thursday: Collectibles

The weekly Booking Through Thursday question for today is:

• Hardcover? Or paperback?
• Illustrations? Or just text?
• First editions? Or you don’t care?
• Signed by the author? Or not?

Mostly I just collect what I like to read, in whatever format. I like the idea of first editions, but not enough to pay the extra price. Books signed by the author are nice, too, and I have a few, but I don’t really seek them out. Most of my biographies, Christian fiction, and Christian non-fiction are paperback because most are easily available that way — some might be in hardback but would be harder to find. I do like the classics I’ve collected to be hardback, and most of them are. It just seems more…classic. Plus I would like to pass them on to my children: though currently none of them are really interested in the classics, maybe some day their wives or children might like them. Illustrations? In general it just depends on the particular book. I think most of my classics are pretty much just plain text; some have drawings at the beginnings of chapters. There is one I bought, though, for the illustrations even though I already had a copy, and that’s Little Women, one of my all-time favorites. I saw this one in a bookstore in the mall (which, sadly, all seem to have gone out of business, at least here locally, and I miss them), and it reminded me of the types of books I used to read when I was young. The cover is gorgeous, and it has many colored illustrations inside.

I’d love for at least all of my children’s classics to look like this. It might be a bit daunting to a child, though, as it is a pretty thick book — about 3 “, due to the larger type as well as the illustrations. But I do have dreams of reading this with a granddaughter some day.