Leigh Hunt Quotes

I love rare books. Not that I own a lot of them, mind you. You couldn't quite call me a rare-book collector. But I did once work in a rare-books library, and I wrote a novel about a rare book.

I like Victorian children's novels extremely a lot. If I would say I collect anything, that's what I'll hunt for now and again at old book stores.

Any given day, you'll find me at secondhand bookstores.

Book collectors are thrill-seekers. It is a vegetarian hunt to be sure, without much exertion or risk, but the endorphin rush of the chase and the adrenaline high of the capture are much the same with first editions as I imagine they must be in the pursuit of 10-point stags, largemouth bass, or 20-foot waves at Maverick's.

What do I miss? Second-hand bookshops where I can find things I had no idea I wanted. AbeBooks helps, but it doesn't have that smell.

I was lucky enough to be given books that weren't top sellers; books that were kind of under the radar.

I've been a book collector since I was young, since I was a kid.

With all of their benefits, and there are many, one of the things I regret about e-books is that they have taken away the necessity of trawling foreign bookshops or the shelves of holiday houses to find something to read. I've come across gems and stinkers that way, and both can be fun.

I don't care whether a book is a first edition or not. I'm not a bibliophile in that word's natural sense.

I have this obsession with really cool, old books.

I'm really a library man, or second-hand book man.

I collect books, primarily first-edition 20th-century fiction.

My specialty as a collector is books that almost have value. When I love a book, I don't buy the first edition, because those have become incredibly expensive. But I might buy a beat-up copy of the second edition, third printing, which looks almost exactly the same as the first edition except that a couple of typos have been fixed.

I've always spent money on books. I've always enjoyed handling books - the size, the format. I feel very strongly about original ephemera.

Despite all the Internet has done to make prices transparent and bibliographic information universal, you can still find - at book sales and thrift shops, auctions and even fancy dealers - unrecognized or underpriced rarities. Getting something valuable for cheap is the basic, greedy thrill of book collecting.

I love going to tag sales, to auctions.

I am a big book collector. I love books.

Sometimes when I pick up a book off the shelf, when I'm buying a new book to read, I'll look at all of them and they all have the exact same words inside, but I'll think that one is meant to go home with me. I'll never pick the first thing off the shelf, I'll always go one behind.

The oldest books are only just out to those who have not read them.

At a flea market I always head for the junk jewelry table first.

I am something of an aficionado of thrift stores. In my youth, I regularly searched their shelves for old books.

Whether you're going to a museum or a flea market or flipping through a book, always be on the lookout for something special.

We should all miss bookstores. They let you discover things.

I read a lot of obscure books and it is nice to open a book.

Capra's great passion was Dickens. As soon as he had some money, he bought some of the rarest and most extraordinary editions of Dickens's work, and he was very proud of his collection.