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document.write('<p class="rss-title"><a class="rss-title" href="https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/" target="_self">Palaver - A forum for Stephen King fans & Book Collectors - Calvin\'s Corner</a><br /><span class="rss-item">For and about those who are Stephen King Book and Stephen King Signed Limited Collectors</span></p>');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?22849-Happy-Birthday-Bev-Vincent!!&goto=newpost" target="_self">Happy Birthday, Bev Vincent!!</a><br />');
document.write('Almost too late! Happy birthday, Bev! Hope you had a very good day!');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?22848-19-Dollar-Bookmark&goto=newpost" target="_self">$19 Dollar Bookmark</a><br />');
document.write('I realize some members may not have Facebook, where I\'ve posted about this a lot - very proud of this design and - I hope - it\'s a worthy follow up to the guide book! In a follow up to A Guide to U.S. First Editions of Stephen King, 19th Edition is offering the perfect bookmark for all fans of the storytelling master himself. With dozens of hidden references to his works of the front and back, this robust bookmark will save your spot if you\'re reading King . . . or any other author, for that matter! https://lightbox-photography-cards.m...-king-bookmark 2.75&quot; x 6.5&quot; Printed on 16pt. Cardstock Matte Finish US Shipping - $0.60 Canadian Shipping - $0.95 International Shipping - $2.50');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?22847-Buyers-obligation-to-inform-seller-of-substantial-below-market-price&goto=newpost" target="_self">Buyers obligation to inform seller of substantial below market price</a><br />');
document.write('What if any obligation (moral, ethical, soul, Karma etc.) does a buyer have to inform a seller that their price is substantially below market value? There are thousands of mitigating circumstances to the answer, yet a passionate but non-abrasive discussion is welcome.');
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document.write('<li class="rss-item"><a class="rss-item" href="https://www.thedarktower.org/palaver/showthread.php?22843-2020-Update-How-long-have-you-been-collecting&goto=newpost" target="_self">2020 Update: How long have you been collecting?</a><br />');
document.write('As a relatively new member, at least compared to a lot of folks here, I had never seen the older &quot;How long have you been collecting&quot; thread. It was really neat to see the people who had originally responded 13 years ago respond again. Someone mentioned that we should start the poll again, perhaps using the calendar year that one started collecting as the response, compared to just telling us how many years. I think it will be interesting to compare the poster demographics between now and 13 years ago, and I am also interested in hearing people\'s stories of how they started collecting, and how their collecting habits have changed over time, or not. I\'ll start. As usual this is probably going to be pretty wordy - please feel free to tell your own story in as much or little detail as you like :) I, like most people here, have always been a reader, so I\'ve always had lots of books around. It\'s hard to pinpoint the exact moment when I became a collector instead of just a book-buyer, because it happened over the period from 2008-2012. In 2008 I was living in San Francisco, having moved there after finishing my undergraduate degree in a different part of the country. It seemed like everyone there was a reader. This was before smart phones, and you could get on any bus or any train and find people nose-deep in books. One nice secondary effect of this was that the thrift stores all had huge book sections to look through. Another nice effect of this was that there was a thriving used book store scene at that time - there were probably a dozen high quality independent bookstores sprinkled throughout the city - most general, some niche, all awesome. Some days, after work, I\'d drop by a couple of thrift stores and see if they had any books I could pick up. They were cheap, too - usually $0.50-$1 for paperbacks and $1-$2 for hardcovers. And often there were clearance sales for $0.10-$0.25 just to empty the shelves and make more room. After some time, I started to see patterns in what was in each of the thrift stores, and what was in the used book stores, and worked out pretty well which books I could pick up in the thrift store for $1 and sell to the used bookstores for $3-4. At first I just used this cycle to buy books from the book stores that I wanted to read but that never showed up at thrift stores. Eventually, this became a regular ritual: on days when I had to work, I\'d check out the thrift stores around my job and hunt for books. On days off, I\'d go to other thrift stores in the city. And probably once a week or so I\'d take all my finds on the bus in big shopping bags and I would start at my favorite used book store (Aardvark, books, who just finally closed in 2019) and make my way through the Mission to Adobe Books (closed), then Forest (moved to Japantown then maybe closed), then Borderlands (still around), then Dog-Eared (still around), and then to Community Thrift on Valencia to donate whichever books I didn\'t manage to sell or get store credit for. By probably 2010, I had acquired enough credit to start getting the nice, much more expensive, first editions that the used book stores carried, and that was probably the &quot;real&quot; beginning of my collecting. Fortunately for me, but unfortunately for the literary scene as a whole, at this point some of the small used book stores were starting to buckle. It wasn\'t actually super fortunate for me - I\'d have preferred to keep my book scouting and book buying going on indefinitely - but it did provide me a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to amass a very nice first edition collection (of general American Lit from the 1940\'s onward, as well as genre collecting like horror and sci-fi) for very, very cheap (considering my only real expenditures were $0.10-$2.00 books). I scored some absolutely killer deals, both at the thrift stores (a first edition For Whom The Bell Tolls for $0.25, a first edition, second printing of A Confederacy of Dunces for $1) and the used book stores (a pristine first edition Rabbit, Run for $30, etc.). The first big shift in my collecting happened in 2012. I really like the novel American Psycho and I saw on Amazon, of all places, that there was a publisher called Centipede Press that was going to release a new version. At that point, other than a few random books at Borderlands, I had no real idea that there was a whole group of publishers out there putting out high quality books, with signatures, at that! At first I just dipped my toe in the S/L pool – a book here and there from the Centipede Press newsletter, and every once in awhile something from the back catalog. Not only did I love the production values, but the books themselves were great! Some classic genre fiction, to be sure, but a lot of titles that I had never heard of before. My first introduction to Tim Powers was when CP announced that they would be producing The Anubis Gates – I immediately ordered a used paperback copy and have been loving Tim Powers ever since. John Farris, James Herbert, R.A. Lafferty – I like to think I would have come across them sooner or later, but CP really sped things up. From 2012 to about 2017 I was still collecting a mix of stuff. Too much stuff! Anything that seemed remotely interesting, or a bargain, and was within my limited but growing budget. Right in the middle of that, in 2015, I moved, and at that time I had roughly ~2500 books in my collection. However, that included both my &quot;collection&quot; books, and my &quot;reading&quot; books, which were clearly becoming two separate collections. The second big shift occurred in 2017 with a confluence of several events. I had been finding these forums pretty regularly in my google searches for rare S/L books (I can\'t tell you how many times it ended up at one of Bob\'s posts). I also was realizing, super late, I know!, that King had so, so many good S/L editions. And the third, and most important game changer, was reading an article about something called Dragon Rebound Editions, who were working on a version of Firestarter made from burned wood boards! Whoa! These three things combined to awaken a Kondo-esque collector in me. Of all the books I had, which ones made me the happiest? Turns out it was largely the S/L books in my collection! Those were the books that brought me the most satisfaction. These were the books that I could just hold in my hand and feel happy about looking at. That\'s when I started to notice all the little parts - headbands, endpapers, paper quality, etc. - that made up the whole of a nicely produced book. The first editions still had a grip, but only if it was the first edition of a novel I really actually liked! This started a massive shift as I began to sell the first editions that were fun to have, but that I didn\'t actually spend any time with (sorry, Hemingway!). I got rid of a huge chunk of firsts in 2017-2018, and still let them go occasionally. I used the money, as well as my growing adult-person income to hunt out the S/Ls from a couple of publishers that I especially like. These are now the main focus of my collecting, along with the occasional first edition. As far as King goes, I\'ve said before that he\'s not a major focus of my collecting. But he still gets outsized attention compared to most other authors. I have copies of almost all of his books in my &quot;reading&quot; stash, and I do collect his first edition books, though I have not spent too much time at this point trying to track down the older titles that I\'m missing. But he has some absolutely beautiful S/L that I\'m proud to own, and I do try to hunt down all the interesting copies & proofs & limiteds of my favorite earlier works: IT, The Stand, and Eyes of the Dragon. This is all done relatively piece-meal, as I try to find room and budget in between keeping up with my favorite small press publishers (Suntup Editions and Centipede Press, followed by Zagava, Egaeus, and Swan River Press, and a few nicely produced titles from Sub Press and the rare Cemetery Dance book here and there). All this said, I\'m gonna say that I stared to become a &quot;collector&quot; at some point between 2010 and 2012, so about a decade now. I\'m very curious to hear everyone else\'s story!! Note: I\'m intentionally keeping the question vague. If &quot;collecting&quot; to you is when you started buying mass market paperbacks to read for fun but couldn\'t bear to part with them, great! It could mean first editions, or S/L, or whatever it means to you when you think of yourself as a &quot;collector&quot;.');
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