What Is The Oldest Book You Own?

[Extollager]

I don't own any very old books as I just get books I want rather than getting them for age or sale value.

Right. Many years ago, in high school, I felt the attraction of collecting Arkham House books, and just decided: no.

Later (1980s) I got hold of some of those old Arkhams on inter library loan and....found they weren’t all that good!

Instead I developed basically a working library, as it sounds like you did. The closest I came, I suppose, in recent years to succumbing to the urge to Collect was with regard to the Penguin Travel Library of roughly 1984-1992. There’s a thread on that here for those interested. I paid a fair bit more for a copy of Barbara Greene’s Too Late to Turn Back in the PTL than, I think, I’d have had to pay in a different edition.

I predict that book collectors and comic book collectors will be forced to downsize, or will be dying, and they or their heirs will be putting stuff on the market and there might even be a glut of such things, especially if hard times develop from the virus and the economic actions that governments have taken, etc.

 

[BAYLOR]

Nevermind.

 

[Mad Alice]

I've seen the Domesday book and the Guttenberg bible.
I have a book of poems from 1885.

 

[Danny McG]

*Shrugs in indifference*
"Smelly old booksies"

 

[Derek Smith]

I have always been interested in Egyptian mythology, when i was 13 i bought a second edition "Book of the Dead", i still have it:-

 

[Bick]

I'll play.

Oldest generally: American Notes & Pictures from Italy, Charles Dickens (from 22 Volume Collected Works, c. 1910)
Oldest SFF: Gods of Mars, Edgar Rice Burroughs, (1935)
Oldest SFF magazine: Astounding Science Fiction (Sept 1939)

 

[Vince W]

If that's the Everyman edition, a translation by Kirby, you have the book that turned Tolkien's imaginative world upside down when he was young.

That's the one.

 

[tegeus-Cromis]

I have these three volumes from a set of the complete works of Samuel Johnson, from around 1811.

 

[Extollager]

And I’ll bet the paper is still in pretty good shape.

 

[tegeus-Cromis]

And I’ll bet the paper is still in pretty good shape.

Yes, the paper is excellent. The leather covers much less so. Which is why I was able to buy them, a couple of decades ago, for $5 a piece.

On the other hand, I have several early 20th c French books in which the paper is so acidified that I'm reluctant ever to open them again.

 

[Extollager]

I was able to buy them, a couple of decades ago, for $5 a piece.

It's funny how inflated the prices of some "collectibles" may be -- books and comics that were published very recently; while books that are pretty old but that still possess intrinsic value might be surprisingly low in price. That Coleridge Table Talk was $25 (I think postage was about $5), and the Hand-Book of London was not quite $39 US postpaid about 15 months ago. You might be able to get a well-worn but interesting old edition for no more than, or even less than, a modern POD paperback edition of the same book. But again, I'm not thinking in terms of books in ideal "collectible" condition, but of old books one might want to, you know, read.

 

[KGeo777]

An 1880s book of Gustave Dore illustrations for the Bible.

 

[hitmouse]

Probably Buffon’s Natural History pub 1792, although I have a copy of Life of Pythagoras somewhere which might be older.

 

[HareBrain]

Flotillas by Lionel Dawson, 1935 (about captaining one of the early destroyers in WWI).

 

[hitmouse]

Oldest SF is a copy of Rudyard Kipling’s With the Night Mail a story of 2000AD, printed 1909.

 

[Elckerlyc]

The wedding bible from my grandparents (1920).

 

[Extollager]

Hitmouse, would you care to show some more of the copperplate engravings in that Natural History?

I wonder if anyone has kept alive that skilled craft -- anywhere in the world -- of the sort that people did for book illustrations, as opposed to fine art.

 

[Avelino de Castro]

Hi all.

Just wondering what the oldest book you own is?

You can subdidvide that into SFF and non-SFF if you like.

Also you can inlcude what is the oldest book you have ever seen or handled in the flesh?

My father has a french dictionary from the 1890s handed down from my Grandfather.

I'm currently considering purchasing a series of 3 leather-bound volumes from Holland, published in 1677.

A friend of mine has a full reporduction of the Book Of Kells, which is quite beautiful.

I have a copy of Candide by Voltaire that's printed at the beginning of the twentieth century and several books by Asimov, first editions of his mysteries and short stories in paperback

 

[hitmouse]

Hitmouse, would you care to show some more of the copperplate engravings in that Natural History?

I wonder if anyone has kept alive that skilled craft -- anywhere in the world -- of the sort that people did for book illustrations, as opposed to fine art.

I am afraid the elaborate copperplate was reserved for the frontispiece. The rest of the book has some interesting pictures, archaic use of the letter s, as in the very mannered dedication below.

 

[Extollager]

Hitmouse, I have facsimile editions of a few books with the peculiar S, but no original editions with it!