The key to being a successful book collector is knowledge. While our book collecting guide is a useful resource for novice collectors who want to learn more about book collecting, we recommend building a mini-library of books designed to help book collectors.
If you only own one book about book collecting then it should to be ABC for Book Collectors by John Carter. It was first published in 1952 and it’s still the cream of the crop. At the front and back, it displays the names of all the important pages (pastedown endpaper, free endpaper etc) on the relevant pages. It defines all the key rare book collecting technical terms, from first editions to signed books, and is interspersed with Carter’s wry comments about what’s right and wrong.
We also recommend book collectors use bibliographies. These books systematically list the works of an author or publisher or even a genre. Bibliographies are exhaustive, covering translations, short stories, anthologies, and even articles in magazines along with key information such as publisher and publishing date. If you want to collect the complete works of a major author, then a bibliography is essential. For immediate assistance in understanding rare book jargon, our glossary explains dozens of terms.
Books about book collecting
