Today’s Book Blogger Hop question is…do you have an Instagram account? And since the answer is no, that wouldn’t be much of a response! So, I thought I’d answer a question I missed from earlier in June: You have just won a $100.00 Visa gift card. Will you spend the entire amount on a rare collector’s edition you have always wanted, or buy several newly-published books? Explain your choice.
Kind of…neither? I don’t think I could come up with several newly-published books I’m interested in buying (well, until a few friends who are working on their next books come out with them!) Also, new books usually turn up at the library. I would probably look through the books I’ve read in the last couple of years (also from the library) and buy several of my favorites. I’ve done that periodically. I also might fill out a few collections that currently have gaps, and since they’re mostly very old kids books I would buy used, I could spin $100 into…probably eight or ten books, easily.
As to a rare collector’s edition–well, this will probably say something about my socioeconomic status, but…$100 isn’t going to get me a rare collector’s edition. Off the top of my head, the ones I’ve been tempted by:
- $4000 copy of A Fighting Man of Mars, previously owned by the author’s daughter and personally inscribed
- $3000 copy of Winnie the Pooh, signed by the author (I looked at that in-person at an antiquarian book fair, and felt like I was handling a museum piece by touching it)
- Anything signed by L. M. Montgomery, can’t recall costs but undoubtedly in the thousands
- $300 signed copy of Auld Licht Idylls by J. M. Barrie, signed by the author, the only actual possibility and one I wish I’d bought!
So…with $500 to spend on books, I’d hunt up something signed by Barrie. But $100 would get divvied up into favorites I haven’t added to my collection yet. What would you do with $100 to spend on books?
I have spent £100 in a bookshop relatively recently, but either before or when I first got my kindle. most of them were hardbacks in the realms of gardening, cookery and environmental issues including new bird books. Ones with colour photos in the text in other words.
I think I’ve got as many of those as I want, so… I have no idea what I’d get, although I suppose I could purchase around 20 of the things on my TBR for my Kindle if I was lucky. I wonder if I’d ever get around to reading them?
There are no rare collectors’ editions of books I would want – I just don’t have any collections like that, so I wouldn’t spend the $100 on that. I read a lot of books for pleasure, mostly on my Kindle, that I buy at a reduced rate because they are ebooks. 90% of them are not worth buying for my bookshelves, even if I enjoyed reading them. I do a fair amount of religious reading (mostly biographies and other books related to the charism of St. Francis of Assisi). I could see myself spending $100 on some of those books. They are in the 10% I’ve read on my Kindle then gone out and bought for my bookshelves. So I’d put the money to good use. 🙂