The Vintage Reader

An excellent piece by Luc Sante, sent by a friend this morning: The Book Collection That Devoured My Life - WSJ.com.

"I need to fill out my knowledge of Prague, 1949, or the Elizabethan prose writers, or the cross-migration between New York newspapers and Hollywood in the '20s and '30s. I buy every book I see about Gypsies, and most firsthand accounts of vaudeville, and almost everything by lesser-known New Yorker writers of the old regime. I'm always on the lookout for memoirs -- frequently by the less-than-famous -- that supply concrete details of daily life, rather than simply lists of names or dates of parties or, heaven forfend, litanies of traumas."

I love this, and find it reassuring that there are other people who have the same kind of collecting quirks I do. I'm always picking up things like homemaking books from the 50s and 60s (especially textbooks for home ec classes); city-living memoirs from the 40s and 50s (mainly New York and Chicago); romance and science fiction pulps—not necessarily the ones in great shape, either; pamphlets of all kinds; pretty much anything published by Popular Mechanics in the 50s and 60s; malt-shop novels from the 50s; anything at all from 1942 onward with helpful hints for rationing; 1960s backlash-against-feminism marriage manuals like The Total Woman (which on its own is so awful I've never been able to get through it); multiple copies of Important Books That I Should Have Read, like The Feminine Mystique; different editions of childhood favorites, like Cheaper by the Dozen and Rose in Bloom; and manuals for machines I don't own, because seriously, you never know when you're going to run across an old Osterizer or a Rambler American with Flash-o-Matic pushbutton transmission, and it would be a shame if you bought it and couldn't find a manual.

So what kinds of books do you collect? Discuss in the comments!