Advice to Graduate Students on the Fine Art of Buying Books (Prompted by Several Hours of Moving Books Around)

Ow. No, that's not part of the advice.

• Editions, editions, editions. Literary criticism is temporary, but the literature itself is forever (one hopes). If at all possible, buy the best scholarly editions available; if not at all possible, given how much scholarly editions can cost these days, buy the nearest possible thing. For anyone doing 18th and 19th c. literature, Oxford World's Classics and Penguin Classics are your friends; so are Broadview (reprints of rare novels and poetry collections) and Kentucky (18th-c. women's fiction). AMS, Scolars Press, Arno, and Woodstock all offer useful facsimile editions, but can be exceptionally expensive. When in secondhand bookstores, keep an eye out for old Virago reprints (mostly 19th-c.). Everyman and Pandora reprints should be treated with some caution, as they can suffer from typo-itis.

  
  

• Anthologize. Buy up the period anthologies from Oxford, Penguin, and Blackwell. Look for useful old anthologies, like Norton's two-volume set of 17th-c. verse. Be on the alert for editors who spend their lives doing anthologies--for example, Peter Haining, who has assembled several volumes devoted to 19th-c. mystery and horror.

  
  

• Be referential. Load up on Oxford companions to whatever, the Cambridge companion series, dictionaries of literary and rhetorical terms, and biographical dictionaries. Learn how to spot-check entries.

  
  

• Don't buy literary criticism or theory until you're ready to specialize. Seriously. If you're going to be lugging books around from one state to another, you want them to be relevant to your work. Once you've identified your Ph.D. fields, start buying general works in those areas. Put off the most specialized purchases until you begin writing your dissertation. Ask yourself how many times you plan on using a given book--or, if you can only access it via interlibrary loan, how long you're going to need it.

  
  

• Is there a library in the house? Adjust your purchasing habits to the strengths and weaknesses of your own campus' library. At a small campus, you may find yourself needing to buy everything in your area of interest.

  
  

(Owww. Did I say that before? And I've still got seven bookcases to go...)

Comments

[anon]

Excellent advice -- particularly when you're in the 'criss-cross the country' portion of your career. I have a huge amount of lit crit that, after fifteen years in the academy, has gone partially stale. But I'll never reget picking up good or even mediocre editions of obscure texts.
I have a stunning amount of Dryden, for instance.

Buy the expensive stuff at the remainder stores and used stores: the Oxford hardcover editions that cost 100.00 each.

Anthologies of plays and pamphlets are particularly good, since these things tend to get edited in waves.

Then again, there are always the books that I really should buy and haven't -- the only book by Greenblatt that I constantly use is the one I don't own. And there are the ones I can't afford: the Oxford edition of my playwright, which periodically shows up on ABE in places like Australia and South Africa, and costs upwards of 700.00.

[Bill Tozier]

If I may offer some minor additional advice (prompted by nine solid weeks of packing and moving four bibliomaniac households of myself, my mother, and her friends), which may be useful even to engineers, scientists, or others whose book-buying is profligate:

- Consider buying 12" x 12" x 16" book boxes by the 50-pack from Uline (do not consider for a moment substituting boxes scrounged from behind a supermarket). Standardization of size is your friend, a hobgoblin of the very little mind you will have left after packing, say, 120 boxes of indispensable volumes. These boxes, if voids between volumes and between their tops and the lid of the box are filled with crumpled newsprint, can be stacked four-high, labeled on three sides with detailed contents, and stacked on an industrial pallet in a basement or out-of-the-way room for many years with little danger of causing hurt. Or handed to movers to their great relief (since they will not have to pack the books) and yours (because the movers will not be obliged to interleave and crumple the pages, cock the bindings, break the spines and otherwise ruin your life and deal with the $8000 insurance claim you drop no their bosses.

As the boxes are packed, consider making a manifest. That way you can leave the stuff in stacks for months without qualms, as it sits there poised waiting for your time of need. And when such need arises, it will be like Christmas, a whole miscellaneous box-full of wonderful old books you haven't seen for ages.

- Do not scrimp when buying book cases. Standardization is once again your friend. IKEA. Or, for the smarter set, barrister bookcases.

- When buying a house, you should seek out radiant heat. Forced-air heat is a baneful source of dust. Books stored in a house with radiant heat are inevitably clean, dry, and well-preserved.

- eBay. Original and other early editions of most great works are available regularly on eBay, offered by people who have no clue of their proper antiquarian value and therefore sell them for a song. If you need (say) a complete English edition of Froissart, then set up an eBay search that notifies you whenever any listing contains that word. One may (one has) bought excellent readable editions (covered in dust and bird-lime, but who's finicky?) for a pittance.

[maitresse]

wonderful advice, thank you so much! any tips for those of us who move country to country, and not state to state?