Collecting vs.Accumulation...

On Mon, 10 Jan 2005 05:23:14 -0500, "William M. Klimon"
wrote:

I don't do that often, but I have or have had
books in Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Norwegian, Armenian, and Japanese that
I clearly won't read.

My first thought was "What a ridiculous thing to do"

My second was "Russian, yes. Japanese, yes. And it's unlikely I'll
plough through much of the French either" 8-)

I don't do that often, but I have or have had
books in Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Norwegian, Armenian, and Japanese that
I clearly won't read.


My first thought was "What a ridiculous thing to do"

My second was "Russian, yes. Japanese, yes. And it's unlikely I'll
plough through much of the French either" 8-)


Ordinarily, I draw the line at books I can't read. I had a chance
to buy a pre-war German edition of "Mein Kampf", black leather
binding, onion skin paper, fancy endpapers, for ten dollars at a
flea market a few years ago. It had a German xx-mark note glued to
the front of its cardboard slip cover box -- must have been from
the days of runaway German inflation that took place in the 1930s.
I didn't buy it simply because I don't read German, although I
found the book interesting.

wrote:
Re Gnome de Plume's desire to collect every printed word of half a
dozen
authors: does this mean you'll collect
books with blurbs written by Your Guys,
books with brief appreciations of Ms.X
by Your Guys in a festschrift publication,
and ad copy written by The Chosen Six
in magazines or on cereal boxes? This
may sound snotty, but I'm really interested
in how complete a completist considers
truly complete.

i can't speak for GdeP or any other completist, but in my own case
i would unhesitatingly answer yes to each of the above. furthermore,
unlike most of the respondents on this thread, i try to acquire works
by anyone i collect, or on any topic i collect, in any language.

with respect to my current completist obsession, fiction and
literature which mentions the board game of Go, i have been somewhat
forced to limit myself largely to western languages for three reasons:
1- the sheer volume of material in japanese, chinese and korean is
such that i couldn't possibly buy or store more than a tiny fraction
[prolly less than one percent] of even the major core essentials of
such a collection. those "first editions" of Tale of Genji or Dream of
the Red Chamber could stretch the budget a tad.
2- such a library would involve many thousands of authors in every
possible genre, most of whom have never been translated into english,
and their use of Go is in most cases a very minor aspect of their work.
thus it would be impossible even to research adequately what books
exist that i'd need.
3- even though i don't read any language but english
[all-too-typical yank there] at least with anything in the latin
alphabet i can recognize titles and authors when scanning bookstore
shelves, and know enough basics like "depot legal" to have some idea
whether the info on the indicia page means what i think it does.

so, if anyone is aware of any good secondhand bookstores --
general or genre -- who do business in english and are willing to fill
customers' want lists in big batches of semi-common stuff, please let
me know.

chiwito