Beginning My Collection

I could have gone out and purchased brand new books… and go broke in the process… but I wanted something more. I was interested not only in the story in each book, but also the story about each book. I wanted to collect each book as it appeared when it was originally published. So I made a clear decision that I wanted to populate my library with first edition books.

I started at the book shop near work. Within a few months I was able to find about 10 of them - Beloved, Confessions of Nat Turner, Collected Stories of Jean Stafford, A Death in the Family, Magnificent Ambersons (without dust jacket), The Yearling, The Fixer, The Caine Mutiny, The Optimist's Daughter, and The Mambo Kings.

The hardest part about collecting Pulitzers is making sure it is a first printing of a first edition. A second printing is not good enough for most collectors. For a variety of reasons the most desirable and most valuable is the first printing. Here is a web site that explains why better than I can:

The what and why of first editions

Another pitfall is the dreaded Book Club edition. These are books that look very much like the first, but there are usually one or two minor things that are different. Book Club edition are have very little value. For more information about book club editions, check out this web site:

How to Identify Book Club Editions

Early on, the only way I could figure out if I found a first edition was to check out eBay or abebooks.com and look for similar books. If I was lucky, the descriptions would sometimes give me clues about what to look for. For example, if someone was selling a first edition for a couple hundred dollars and they said “first edition stated” then I knew that if mine didn’t state “first edition” I probably had a later printing or a book club edition.

Recently I found a web site that lists all of the Pulitzer books, shows me pictures of first editions, and tells me things like if first edition is stated or not. For example, here’s an example of first edition points for Confessions of Nat Turner:

First Issue Points

More tomorrow...