One of my gifts came today.. Yay!

[Noxious]

I'd love the Kerouac and the Thompson books. (Especially Thompson's stuff -- it always amazed me how good a writer he was, despite the fact that the man shouldn't have been coherent enough to string two words together with all the stuff he was always on. XD) I'd imagine a first edition Kerouac to be fairly pricy, especially if it's one of his more popular works.

It goes beyond the pricey thing. I would even go as far as to say people who have these collections feel like they are protecting the books from the careless that would grab them up. My first edition of on the Road was, well, so ridiculously priced that I would rather not talk about it, plus the previous owner (who had 3 first editions) wanted to talk to me on the phone for over 2 hours to convince them to gimme and even then it was only possible because I sweetened the deal with a first edition Demon Box by Ken Kesey. Thompson gave me some SERIOUS hell as well and Fear and Loathing is still out of my grasp beyond the Rolling Stone magazines that contain *almost* the entire series. I paid about $700 dollars for Thompson's "Hell's Angels".

[Sherlock Holmes]

I rip torrents of e books and read them on my laptop 8D

I like ebooks for lighter reading. (Fiction, short stories, etc. It's convenient to have all those books readily available, but taking up no real space in my house.) But, for more serious books, I always prefer having a physical copy for some reason. (And for books that I really enjoy - I'll always buy a hardcover version if I really love a book, so that I have it for my shelf.)

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It goes beyond the pricey thing. I would even go as far as to say people who have these collections feel like they are protecting the books from the careless that would grab them up.

I would agree with this. I take very good care of my books because I want them to last, where other people are so rough on their books.. I almost feel like I'm preserving a bit of history or something (especially if we're talking about first editions), which is partly why I adore old books in the first place. (And antique things in general. I always wonder what their story is -- who owned this before me? What sort of person were they? Where did they live and what did they do? Etc. I find it kind of fascinating to think about stuff like that.)

[Noxious]

I would agree with this. I take very good care of my books because I want them to last, where other people are so rough on books.. I almost feel like I'm preserving a bit of history or something (especially if we're talking about first editions), which is partly why I adore old books in the first place. (And antique things in general. I always wonder what their story is -- who owned this before me? What sort of person were they? Where did they live and what did they do? Etc. I find it kind of fascinating to think about stuff like that.)

Definitely! I wouldn't say the majority of my collection is anywhere near perfect condition, and I actually appreciate the fact that a few of them have notes written in them. I love reading other people's notes and trying to decide who they were, what their entire chain of thought was. ^.^