A Really Unique Book

OK I started this group on a lark, a whim. I started looking at my books that no one else on Library Thing had. I notice some fairly ordinary books that no one else had cataloged. I mean someone out there has "Schaum's Easy Outline of Electric Circuits". It is probably so mundane to them as to not add it to Library Thing. Or perhaps it is yet to be Combined! But there are other books I have that must be pretty rare, pretty unique. My copy of "Sailing and small boats" by J. M. Lewis is a Library discard. It has been rebound and batter. I has suffered at the hands of teenager since 1965 in a Junior High Library in Wyoming. Wyoming, not being a sailing capitol, I am sure the book was the launch pad for numerous day dreams. This book is a gem! I treasure it. If someone else shows up on Library Thing with it, I'll be happy someone else is saving a preserving it.

All this thinking got me looking in my bookcase for other little gems. Books I don't particular read but have and treasure. I found this beauty. Wyoming Brand Book this took some work and learning to get into Library Thing. If some one else shows up with this book, I'll have found a new friend. If no one ever shows up with this book, I'll have a mission in life to care for and preserve this book.

What book like that do you have? consider this group a place to talk about those issue as well.

My 1889 annotated edition Chaucer's Canterbury Tales: annotated and accented, with illustrations of English life in Chaucers time by John Saunders doesn't seem to be for sale anywhere and I rather enjoyed it.

My partial set of The Collected Writings of B. R. Ambedkar is also very hard to find. Everyone knows about Gandhi, few know about Ambedkar, and that's really too bad. Here's his Wiki Page for a short intro.

Thanks to misericordia for starting this group and I hope some others will post a few of their favorites, as I think that would be more interesting than browsing through the whole list.

(Pardon me, misericordia, if it sounds like I'm picking on you -- but I guess I am. But be comforted. I'm known for saying truly stupid things, so you'll get your chance at me.)

Ahem. (Steps up onto Pedantic Podium and sniffs audibly.) "Unique" means "one of a kind." It takes no modifiers. Anything less is rare, not unique. (Steps down and clears throat, waiting for tomatoes to be thrown.)

>3 TallyDi:
Oh well yes, it would have been better to say "almost unique" than "pretty unique," and "really unique" is redundant in the same sense as "actually true" but it isn't wrong in the sense of "very unique."

But seriously, do you perhaps think we should start a new thread, or even group, to clear up a common colloquial usage?

Anyway, the purpose of this group (as I see it) is to highlight books unique in LibraryThing (many), not unique in the world (very few). This is a perfectly acceptable use of the word.

Rather than quibble about grammar, I'd prefer to hear about a few of your unique-to-LibraryThing books that you think are especially unusual and interesting.

3> Ahem. Every object in this world is unique; no two objects are exactly the same. Contrarily, no object in this world is unique; all consist of collections of the same few quarks in a small set of obsessively repeated patterns. Without a modifier, unique is basically meaningless.

#5 superb pedantry. Worthy of an award.

#2 that shoudl be combined with Canterbury tales, unless the annotations really are sufficient to keep it seperate. Illustrations aren't.

3> Picked on HA! Go to the site talk and look at my screw up on location tags! This in nothing...But you have a point. Perhaps we should use the term "singleton". NO NO NO that would lead to...something to terrible for words.

5> So everything in the world is unique? Hmm so I guess everything in the world has it own uniqueness in common. So everything object that has at least one common characteristic is not unique across all it's own character. Therefore nothing is unique. HA you should see my talk my way out of a wet paper bag. But you have a point.

4> highlight books unique in LibraryThing...
Yes that is one of the point of the group.

I mean seriously people have you read the whole description of the group? Can you read that without cracking a little bit of a grin?
So to help I have added rule 2.1 to help clear this up.

>6 reading_fox: that shoudl be combined with Canterbury tales

First, it is not a complete edition of the tales, it's selections. Second parts of the selections are done in verse and parts are rendered into prose summaries by Saunders. Third, the annotations are the bulk of the text. For instance, 8 of the 10 pages devoted to the Knight's Tale are commentary and interpretation by Saunders. The ratio is smaller in some of the other sections, but it would be wrong to say this is simply an edition of Chaucer's Tales.

When I bought the book (online) I was actually expecting more of the text of the tales to be reproduced. But I did find Saunders' commentary interesting and so was not entirely disappointed. I also bought (again online) a facsimile copy of Caxton's second edition of Chaucer (original 1484, Cornmarket reprint 1972). Unfortunately, the combination of Chaucer's English and the old typescript make it very difficult to read. I've thought of trying to follow along with one of the online editions, but haven't gotten to that particular project yet. This edition is combined with the main Canterbury Tales work by the way.

>8 eromsted: Shhh lean closer so not everyone hears this. I don't think you understand combining... If you go to the "works" page for your copy you'll see its at http://www.librarything.com/work/2553474. If you do a search for "Chaucer's Canterbury Tales" from the library thing's search tab you'll discover there is a "work" http://www.librarything.com/work/9978. These are for Library Thing's purposes two totally different books. If you where to "combine" your book with the other there would only be one book in Library Thing. Why are we whispering? Well maybe I don't understand it either. And I've been picked on enough for one day ;-) PS I don't think you want to combine this book.

I don't know if it was someone here, but thanks anyway - I tagged my 139 ultb books, and now they're down to 128! 11 books (that I had tried to combine before...really!) have now been combined, with other owners ranging from 1 to 26.

Some of the books I tagged may not count, under one rule or another - mostly the 'really published' one. Some of my music books, for instance, are the comb-bound instruction books handed out in a guitar class given by Arlington Virginia Adult Education. On the other hand my parents, who had taken the same class some 15 years earlier, recognized the books - it's not like they were just made up for my class...Also some fanzines, which could well fall under 'vanity press' rules, though they were put out and sold to people, and I bought them used so they're still around many years later.

Lots of music books, quite a few romances (are people just not bothering to catalog them? I can't believe no one else has these), some computer manuals, some machine manuals/cookbooks (those I bet are just not being cataloged. But they have recipes in them, and I use them frequently), and some craft books. And a few real oddities - Getting Ready to Sail Your Lockley Sailboat, According to my Passport, I'm Coming Home (handbook on culture shock for Foreign Service brats), The Great Golden Gate Trivia Book, and Draw 50 Aircraft, which differs at least in title and cover from Draw 50 Airplanes, Aircraft, and Spacecraft, so I haven't combined them. It's actually Draw 50 Aircraft and Spacecraft, but if I put that title in as a touchstone it goes to the book with Airplanes with no (others) option.

>misericordia, great Group idea. Thank you for posting this (but not quite sure about those rules of yours)

I think my most unique (published) books are forthcoming and will be added in the future: They are prayerbooks from regions of Poland in which the Jewish communities (may have) been completely destroyed during WWII. When I catalog them, I was going to cross-reference the publisher's geography, if known.

For the moment, I'm just grabbing this book since I recently discovered it was quite rare:
Life in London: Or, day and night scenes of Jerry Hawthorne, esq., and Corinthian Tom, accompanied by Bob Logic, the Oxo

but I'm really not sure it's the most rare book in my library. My most unique books are definately the two hand-written diaries I picked up at a garage sale about a year ago, from the Grandchildren, who didn't want them at all, even after I asked "Are you sure you don't want to keep these?"

vintage_books

10> If anyone else thought According to my Passport, I'm Coming Home+ sounded interesting, it's available at http://www.state.gov/documents/organization/2065.pdf

> 1 "...I'll have a mission in life to care for and preserve this book..."

What to do with these gems, finally? Give them away? Sell them to a used book store?
Sometimes, the value of rare books is more than just money.
To the owner, a book can be very valuable, to someone else it might not even be interesting.

12> heh. I got it when I came back to the States, but I don't think I ever read it. Thanks for the link - I skimmed some of the interesting bits. Maybe I'll read it on paper too. I didn't have most of the adjustment problems they talk about - though I do recall periodic amazement that _everyone_ was speaking English!

http://www.librarything.com/work/2090677/book/9556979

Parker Zaner Bloser's Alphabet Antics for Cursive Handwriting is such a sweet book. A couple of my kids have gotten fun ideas for drawing various sorts of illuminated letters from this book. It's "just" an old school library discard, but it's a gem to me.

I always hold library discards especial dear. You should write up a little review or summary of the book.

I've been picking carefully through my pile, so to speak, of ultb's...searching for like-sounding titles, with or without authors...and I'm finding matches for books that had seemed, but only seemed, to be true ultb's, for example,
Gaily We Parade a poetry anthology;
Aunt Sally A Narrative of the Slave Life...;
The Brave and Free a 6th grade reader (tag not working) had been ultb for quite some time, but are no longer.

When I find works which I'm not able to combine myself, I bring them to the attention of the Combiners! group, and someone on there fixes it for me.