Being a Bibliophile on a Budget

A short guide to cost-effective collecting

Samer Kayali, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

I am a man possessed of bibliomania. If I had my way, most of my earthly resources would be put towards the acquisition and reading of fine books. However, reality intervenes and prevents me from achieving my dreams. My book acquisitions are thus limited; though I have dream books, or “grails” I would like to achieve in my collecting life, I cannot simply stroll into a rare bookstore or an auction house and purchase them at full price. Instead, I content myself with collecting nice books in affordable ways.

I’ve spent a lot of time learning about books and shopping for them, in person and online, in bookstores and thrift stores and antique stores, on Craigslist and Facebook marketplace and everywhere imaginable. I’ve learned a couple of things about finding diamonds in the rough, and I’d like to briefly share some of them in the hopes that some of you can purchase these books before I can find them and save me some money.

In short, effective book collecting on a budget requires three things: clear goals, accumulated knowledge, and a touch of obsession. At the end of this, I’ll provide a list of sites I often use to purchase books for excellent deals, so skip there if you’re in a hurry.

Make a List, Check it Twice

I spoke to a rare book dealer recently who told me that the most important thing in collecting is setting parameters or boundaries or goals for your collecting. Because none of us are limitless, it’s impractical to indiscriminately acquire every nice book in existence. Instead, it’s far more practical and achievable to set your sights on a limited scope.

Perhaps you have a specific recent author you enjoy, and would like to acquire first editions of each of their works. I’ve made it a goal to collect first trade editions of all of Kurt Vonnegut’s works, for example. This gives me a manageable list of titles to seek out. Your goals could be as narrow as you like (say, you want to collect every special edition of the Silmarillion ever released like a collector I follow on Instagram), or as broad as you like (say, you really want to collect 20^th century Science Fiction first editions), but the limits have to exist, or the process will be overwhelming.

If you’re struggling to nail down precisely what you want to collect, I would suggest looking at your current shelf and see where your current obsession guides you. Have you found yourself buying a lot of works by one author? Are you drawn to a specific genre? Start there!

Of course, these are self-imposed limits, and they can always change. Once you’ve scratched your itch for one author, you can move on to another. The point isn’t to restrict the fun of broad collecting, it’s to create manageable goals.

Never Stop Googling

The most important thing to know about book collecting on a budget is that collecting well requires a hefty trove of knowledge, which is far more important than money. Anyone can purchase any book they want at a price any book dealer will charge.

Give it a try: any book you dream of owning, look it up on Abe Books or any similar site. I guarantee it exists, and if you had enough money, you could buy it right this second. The problem, of course, is that paying retail or collector price is prohibitive to almost all of us. I, for example, would love to owned a signed copy of Cormac McCarthy’s early works, but if I don’t have a casual $10,000-20,000 to spend, I’m out of luck. 

But if you want to collect well, and also collect on a budget, you need to accumulate knowledge more than you accumulate dollars. This means that once you know which authors, books, and editions you want to collect, it is your responsibility to learn everything you can about those books.

There are plenty of free resources available to you to educate you on this front. Let’s say, for example, you are a breathless Earnest Hemingway fan, and you are really interested in procuring a stunning hardback copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls. But you aren’t interested in just any hardback For Whom the Bell Tolls, you really want a first edition, first printing, with an intact and authentic dust jacket.

If you come across a copy of For Whom the Bell Tolls in the wild, how can you tell what edition it is? How can you tell which printing it is? How do you know if the dust jacket is original to the book, or authentic? One resource I’ve found helpful is an archived website called First Edition Points. While the site is no longer being updated and maintained, it is held as an archive of valuable information about rare and first edition books you might be interested in. So, keeping with our Hemingway example, we can see that according to FedPo, a first edition copy of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls should have an A on the copyright page. The site also includes photos of the various parts of the book, dust jacket, etc. for your comparison.

Another site with similar resources is Biblio. You can search up a book you might be interested in purchasing, and Biblio will often have a landing page with major information about the book’s publication, as well as points of identification for first printing books and dust jackets.

This sort of information is crucial as you begin to collect, if you are picky about which editions you own. For many mid-20^th century books, the first edition of a book and the Book Club Edition of the book are superficially similar in many ways, but BCEs are far more common, to the point of being relatively inexpensive in almost all cases. If you simply want a nice copy of a nice book, a BCE is perfectly acceptable. If, however, you want to collect in a discriminating way, you’ll want to be able to tell the difference.

In short, the greatest tool available to you in your book collecting search is knowledge. Knowledge of the books you want and what makes them special is the comparative advantage you possess over any random person who walks into a bookstore, shops at the thrift, or browses online listings. It’s what will enable you to spot a gem at a distance and snag it where hundreds of other people may have passed it by. You will only accumulate this kind of knowledge by persistently searching up information on the books you find as you browse. This is time-intensive but pays dividends in the long run.

Local Habits

My greatest recommendation to you is to regularly peruse every thrift store, secondhand shop, and used bookstore in your immediate vicinity. While many stores catch rare book finds and put them in segmented glass cases for inflated prices, if you are persistent, you will inevitably find books for below market value. With sufficient knowledge, I can almost guarantee you can stroll into any thrift store in any town in the United States and find at least one book that would sell online for greater than what you can purchase it for there. As a newly-discriminating collector, this doesn’t mean that you’ll want it. However, if you develop a lightly lucrative side-hustle as a bookseller yourself, you can use those proceeds to fund your pricier purchases.

One habit you must develop as a book-acquirer is that of opening every book of interest you come across in these in-person settings. In thrift stores, particularly, you are likely to come across books that are signed and inscribed by the author, or else owned by a person of historical interest. The only way you can find these things out is by opening the books, and always being willing to search for what you find there.

The combination of clearly defined goals, growing knowledge, and a bit of obsession allows you to find books for unbelievable deals, either to add to your own collection or to sell to fund your book-buying habit. And, along the way, you just have a lot of fun. What could be better?

Sites for Searchers

I have a routine and a habit: this is, checking a slate of sites almost every day to see if anything of interest has been posted. I’ll link them below, and provide some information to guide your use of them. In addition to these, you can certainly find the occasional deal on your local Facebook marketplace or Craigslist, but they tend to be even more hit-or-miss, so your mileage will certainly vary.

Abe Books

Abe Books is now owned by Amazon, which is a real bummer to me, but it nevertheless remains a trove of excellent books of all sorts. While it’s possible to find the rarest of the rare books available on the market on Abe Books, you can also find some serious deals, particularly among lesser-known authors.

My biggest tip for an Abe Books browser is to always read the descriptions provided by the seller. Here you will occasionally learn that a book is inscribed by the author, though the seller may not have labelled the book as “signed,” or that a book was owned by a person of historical importance. Paying careful attention to the things noted only in the description, not in the pictures, has allowed me to get some really fascinating books over the years. The search tools on Abe Books are quite useful, allowing you to see, e.g., only hardback first editions by a particular author. Highly recommend.

Pango Books

This site is like a more organized, less scary Craigslist with shipping. Individuals and bookstores alike list books for sale at a range of prices. Because the sellers are usually individuals, not experienced booksellers, pictures and descriptions can be frustratingly useless at times. Nevertheless, at these prices, you can often afford to take a risk. Pro tip: find the authors you are interested in and, on a regular basis, search them up and sort by “recently listed.”  

Mercari

Like PangoBooks, individual sellers will use Mercari to sell a mishmash of books with a mix of quality. Again, finding what you want here requires persistence, sorting by “recently listed,” and a lot of sifting through useless results, but occasionally your persistence will pay off.

Half Price Books

If you have a half price books store near you, I envy you. If you don’t, their online store is clunky and glitchy but contains some gems. I suggest searching an author you’re fond of and searching by “collectible.” There are some really excellent books for really excellent deals floating around out there.

ShopGoodwill

Goodwill’s auction site is a blast for anyone who, like me, loves thrifting. The book selection is haphazard, but given enough time, you’re bound to find something good.

Unclaimed Baggage

This is a bit of a weird one. The books for sale here are priced very weirdly, so you may be unable to find anything that truly seems worth the time and the money. But, like with the others, with persistence, I have been able to find some excellent selections.

Book Finder

Let’s say you’ve put your newfound knowledge to use, found an excellent book for an excellent deal, but decide it’s not best for your collection. You sell it to someone who can appreciate it more, and now you have a bit of a budget to get something nice. Bookfinder is the single most useful site for hunting down a specific copy of a specific book you are interested in. It will compare listings across dozens of sites to give you an idea of prices, and has tools to filter by precisely the sort of book you’re looking for (1^st edition, signed, etc).