The trouble is, I love hardcovers …
and I struggle to resist a bargain. So whenever I visit a good thrift
store, I usually come home with a few new copies.
But by the time I get home, someone has
placed another copy of that same hardcover onto my shelves.
Or so it seems.
Early in my days of accumulating titles
by favorite authors, I kept lists. Being a low-tech person, I used
index cards. They worked great, as long as I updated them and carried
them along. Somehow that practice fell by the wayside. And I began
looking for books by other authors.
I'm safe if I do my shopping online at
home. When a fellow collector alerted me this past week to a listing
on E-bay, I could say thanks and assure him I already had a nice
copy, with dust jacket.
But garage sales and thrift stores are
another story – especially when I visit on half-off discount day.
My son tells me there's a smart phone
app that lets you scan a book's ISBN and check the title against your
personal database. Great idea – if I carried a smart phone. Buying
one would likely cost more than I'd save on duplicate copies.
Meanwhile, if you could use a nice
hardcover first printing of Black Order
by James Rollins or The Language of Bees
by Laurie R. King, let me know. Somehow I got spare copies.
