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Thursday, May 31, 2018

The Wonderful World of Books

I finally found someone at work who likes some of the same books that I do. I discovered this when she was reading a Sandra Brown book during lunch and we started talking authors we enjoyed.

Before I started writing seriously, I spent years combing through used bookstores and library sales, looking for the hard-to-find titles by my favorite authors. There are some books that I never did find. Like the Jayne Ann Krentz McFadden romances. I only found one omnibus version in all the time I searched. For the most part, though, I manged to find all the titles I was looking for.

Of course, because these books are old Loveswepts, Harlequins, and Silhouettes, they're out of print and some of them are worth a lot more than half of the cover price. Or they were. I'm not sure what the value of collectible paperbacks is any longer.

The other quirk I have is that I like my books to be as perfect as possible. When I go shopping for an actual physical book, I will study each copy to ensure I buy the one in the most pristine shape. After I read a book, you literally can't tell it was ever opened. I'm that careful and particular. It's also part of the reason why I keep a database because I can't tell by looking at a book whether or not I've read it, so I needed some way to know what was TBR and what wasn't.

So back to the woman at work. I was showing her my books database and she spotted Sandra Brown books she'd never read. They happened to be old Loveswepts and were difficult to find. We're talking original Loveswepts, not reprints.

The last time I loaned a book to someone, it was a LaVyrle Spencer single title book and I'd bought it new in the store, so it wasn't a collectible. This woman ended up buying me a brand new copy because she'd messed up the cover.

Which is my long way of saying that I don't want to loan out my books, especially not my collectible titles. They were too hard to find.