Antiquarian Books

>>9455297
I feel like they'd fall apart if I tried to read them.

>>9455297
>Does /lit/ have Antiquarian books?
no but my grandfather left me like 100 franklins

id like to start a collection of 'old' modern library clothbounds

>>9455297
I own an 18th century edition of La Bruyère and a 1880s of Taine.

>>9455297
You know what you have to do - transcribe them to digital format painstakingly and ensure their work will remain for posterity

i collect manuscripts

have some 1880 lithographs from a German encyclopedia - maps, anatomical drawings

notary note in french on vellum 1666

some french revolutionary newspapers

annotated poems 19th cent.

not the most coherent collection, but it's fun hunting

>>9456526
Please do this. Sounds like an incredible experience.

I have a few old books, mostly Greek/Latin bought from a used bookstore.
The oldest I have are an uncensored text of Catullus/Tibullus/Propertius from ~1880, and an exhaustive edition of Æschylus with a running Latin translation from 1806.

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>>9455297
My wife and I just bought an 1880 compendium of best medical and longetivity practices, 12 volumes in one massive 15-20 pound book. Fully illustrated with pop-up images, meant to be a total resource for a country doctor. We are going to get it appraised, we bought it for 20 dollars in a tiny antique store in northern maine. Medical antiquities are always mispriced and misunderstood by lay people.

Pic related weve been searching for, around 600-1000 on ebay depending where you look.

>>9459364
Stop making me erect. That's a beauty.

>>9459364
>we bought it for 20 dollars in a tiny antique store in northern maine
This is why I love New England. It's one of the only areas in the US where you can find stuff like that in small towns that are centuries old. Good find Anon.

Got a fuckload of 1900-1920 german books for free from some mid-aged guy, there's so much books I don't even know what to do with them and no one's interested in buying them, thinking of keeping the most interesting ones and donating the rest to an university or something.

>>9461836
A whole bunch of universities are currently purging their collections to make way for "libraries" that are just giant empty boxes with wifi and outlets. Don't trust them to preserve anything.

Oldest I have is a 1929 Concise Oxford Dictionary

>>9461836
if you're looking at making a few bucks, check them out online (abebooks), pick out the best few, and offer the rest to s/h booksellers in the general area as a lot. (if there's a lot of books, they'll usually make the trip themselves so you don't have to haul that shit around). sell the top ones yourself on EBay. if the stuff is all crap, then donate to a charity shop or library.

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>>9461864

>A whole bunch of universities are currently purging their collections to make way for "libraries" that are just giant empty boxes with wifi and outlets

>>9462731
chin up, anon. the good news is that many of them have open sales so you can go along and take the cream of the crop if you have an eye for good books/editions/interesting shit.

>>9455297
Found the collected works of Goethe and Schiller, respectively, nice leatherbound copies from the early 19th century mostly without wear and tear, but they were written in Fraktur so I gave them to my dad who's an antiquarian (privatelu).
I wouldn't mind having them if I'd more shelf space, but realistically speaking I'll never bother with reading them because of the Fraktur hand.

>>9456526
Greatest act you can do OP. Don't let more works fall in oblivion

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>He doesn't own a first edition of John Milton's Lycidas published in 1638.
>Not dropping 110,000 GBP on a book.

What are you, some kind of pleb?

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>>9455297
I own the complete set of the first official history book of my country (Belgium, published in 1835, 4 volumes)

I actually read them all back to back because I'm a trained historian and their assumptions and methodologies are quite entertaining (highly nationalistic, trying to tie contemporary history with unrelated historic events to justify the ancient 'roots' of Belgium as a country, and their positivist methodology).

I have the full set of Dante's Inferno from 1726.

Problem is it's in Italian.

>>9455297

The library of the uni I work at has tons of books from the early to mid 1800s you can check out. Coolest find was an edition of Boswell's biography from ~1820 with the pages uncut. It was just neat thinking that book had been sitting there nearly two hundred years and I was the first person to read it through.

>http://annarborbookfair.com/2016/01/01/thirty-years-of-antiquarian-book-fairs/
thinking of checking out my city's antiquarian book festival for the first time this year