Taking sides: New books vs. Second-hand books.

all the books I buy (with v rare exceptions) are second hand.

d00d:

I think the smell of olde books smellz good.

It has a refreshingly musty smell, like moths and dustmotes in a library or something.

I enjoy them both equally. One might feel that a secondhand book has been somehow loved and enjoyed, but I would suggest not very much, otherwise, what's it doing in a secondhand store? But then new books are rather clinical and uninspiring objects, as well as grossly overpriced. I think that if, however, I was given a choice between a new or a secondhand edition of precisely the same book, I would take the newer one, simply because it would be more "mine".

I just got these- Martin Amis "Other People", Jane Austen "Persuasion", Saul Bellow "The Actual", Brian Boyd "Vladimir Nabokov: The American Years", Mikhail Bulgakov "The Master and Margarita", William Burroughs "The Naked Lunch", Italo Calvino "If On a Winter's Night a Traveller", Elias Canetti "Crowds and Power", Truman Capote "Music for Chameleons", Raymond Chandler "Trouble is My Business", Joseph Conrad "Chance", Philip K. Dick "The Game-Players of Titan", "Galactic Pot-Healer", William Faulkner "As I Lay Dying", William Golding "To the Ends of the Earth; a Sea Trilogy", Edmund Gosse "Father and Son", Christopher Isherwood "Berlin Stories", Henry James "The Bostonians", James Joyce "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", C.S. Lewis "The Magician's Nephew", "The Silver Chair", "Of this World and Others", Norman Mailer "Miami and the Siege of Chicago", "Ancient Evenings", "Harlot's Ghost", Gabriel Garcia Marquez "The Autumn of the Patriarch", Friedrich Nietzsche "Twilight of the Idols/The Anti-Christ", Sylvia Plath "The Bell Jar", James Purdy "Out with the Stars", Jean Rhys "Voyage in the Dark", Muriel Spark "Curriculum Vitae", Laurence Sterne "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy", Lytton Strachey "Queen Victoria", Mark Twain "Roughing It", Evelyn Waugh "Remote People", Edmund White "A Boy's Own Story", Tennessee Williams "A Streetcar Named Desire and Other Plays", Tom Wolfe "The Pump House Gang", "Radical Chic and Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers"- for about $15 all up from a bookfair, so I'm in favour of secondhand I guess

I adore each for their qualities. New, well, because they're mine first and I get to begin their history. Used, because there's a history of ownership and reading love wrapped around them. Or not. One can just tell that it was purchased for the sake of looking erudite to one's friends and associates. Pages are pristine. Spines are in sturdy condition. Covers in good order. I enjoy the bit tattered, slightly ratty kind of book that has been well-read (and to my mind, well-loved).

I suppose used is a bit ahead of new, because I'm also a greedy reader. My local Friends of the Library hold two massive used book sales a year from the donated used books people drop off. I can purchase several pounds of excellent reading for ten dollars. It was my treat to myself the first time I was in college and perpetually broke. I could eat that week *and* purchase books...how damn lucky I felt :) (Still do...)

writingstatic, I disagree, just a bit, about the secondhand books not being loved. People drop off items to our FoL group all the time, mostly because they're moving, their relatives have passed away, they're clearing space for more books they received, etc. One woman (I volunteer to help sort and shelve the donations) remarked last night, she still keeps some of her paperback copies of books that she's finally bought the hardback version. The hardback last longer, but the pb was her first copy and hard to let go. I have the same tendency. The pb is falling apart, I go get the hardcopy, but keep the pb out of love.

I do confess, some of the books I've donated (to our sales or my friends) are ones I either did not enjoy or have fallen out of love with them. It's not often though...

Best thing is unread second-hand copies, obviously. *I* wanna crack the spine, okay?

I love shiny new books. I think that if I pay more for them I end up reading them sooner, partly because I have to really want something to buy it new. If I go to a used bookstore I usually get some things just because they're cheap, and even though they're interesting they end up sitting around for months unread.

I found a gorgeous 1st ed pbk of Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail that I have now utterly destroyed. I think, the more crackedier the spine, the more loved the book, therefore falling apart 2nd hand books=classic.

in pakistan we get second hand books for as low as 20- 40 rupees per copy.. 1 pound is 97 rupees and 1 dollar is 60 rupees... for a thousand rupees (10 pounds/16 dollars) i usually get a good 35 battered books every few weeks..
from iain banks, jill tweedie, rita mae, zadie smith, toni morrison, larry heinemann, alice walker to saki, franco ferruci, ondatje, alex garland, forster, d h lawrence, p g wodehouse to naipal, arthur hailey, nancy friday and ed mc bain and italo calvino, the second hand book bazars are undiscovered treasure houses.. and that, darlings, is the gross advantage of living in a disadvantaged third world country..

I don't even crack the spine of my own books. I like my spines to stay nice and intact.