Books are a tenuous combination of perishable materials and discordant chemistry – various types of ink and paper, glue and string and cloth, materials that may be animal, vegetable, synthetic, or all three. These constituent elements court entropy, conspiring to decohere almost from the moment they are bound together. For most books, their purpose is fulfilled in being read and wrecked.
A very few live a different life. Collectible books transmogrify, becoming a precious, lingering signal amid the static, objects with a greater purpose than consumption.
Among and between pages and stacks and libraries and those who tend them, there is a conversation—ranging, intermittent, and only vaguely coherent but nonetheless constant —about the conceptions and expressions of who we are and hope to be as a species. As the books and ideas therein age and stratify, so does the conversation. It becomes a susurration, a quiet cultural undercurrent, consistently masked by prevailing tides and weather. Want of it would still the great ocean of our experience, losing it by failing to gently stir its depths while the majority of our energy is always focused on disturbing the surface.
This is why I steward and share the objects selected.
Rudyard Kipling Plain Tales from the Hills Calcutta:Thacker Spink & Co., 1888.
The first Indian edition, featuring the front cover illustration by Kipling’s father, initialed and dated by Kipling in July 1889, and owned by Kipling’s friend and publisher, Nelson Doubleday.Plain Tales is Kipling finding his voice as an English Euripides, a voice at once both quintessentially of his culture and observationally, compellingly apart—essentially subversive, not, as some veil him, reactionary.
Winston S. Churchill My African Journey New York & London: Hodder and Stoughton (for George H. Doran Company), 1908.
This is the U.S. first edition, scarce in the first state, and extravagantly scarce thus, inscribed and signed by the author in three lines. Churchill wrote, "Uganda is defended by its insects." Directly below he wrote the citation to where this quote is found in the text: "p.94". Below, Churchill signed "Winston S. Churchill".
Isaac Asimov I, Robot New York: Gnome Press, Inc., 1950.
The first edition, first printing of Asimov’s genre-defining work in which he coined the term “robotics” and posited the “Three Laws of Robotics” which have permeated subsequent speculative fiction. This copy is noteworthy for condition and remarkable for being inscribed and dated by the author on the day of publication: “For | Samuel | Cotter | with | best regards | 12.2.50 | Isaac Asimov”.
