What makes a book valuable is when more people want to buy it than there are copies readily available. It's very difficult to predict. Generally speaking, books with small print runs are going to be more valuable than ones with large ones; but the vast majority of books of any kind, especially in the internet age, turn out to be completely worthless almost as soon as they are bought.

Signed copies are not in themselves valuable; it has to be an author with some cachet, or scarcity. In that case, it can make a big difference. Presentation copies (signed, with a handwritten dedication to another famous person) can be valuable too, but in general you sound like you're not in the market for signed editions, unless you are getting them signed yourself.

The bog-standard "collectible book" is a modern first edition, i.e., a novel written by an author of high stature. First novels are often good, if (but only if) you hit upon a first novel by a nobody in a tiny print run who turns out to be a superstar later. But if you just bought every first as it came out your investment would be wasted, because most of them will be worth $0.01 on Amazon within a year.

The other thing that matters so much is condition, condition, condition. Perfect books hold their value, and maybe appreciate; bent, knocked, or dented ones don't. It's as simple as that.

Genre fiction can be a good area to collect in, especially sci fi. Another area where books often appreciate is photography books, monographs of top photographers. They go out of print, and if the photographer is hot they can then sell for a ton of money. But again, you have to guess who's going to be hot.

In the internet age, all sorts of oddities are turning out to be hugely valuable, while the wide availability of other stuff that had previously been assumed to be fairly reliable has collapsed its prices. For instance, I've tried to sell some books in the past, and the only two I ever made a quick killing on were a rare aquarium book by this Japanese guy, and a collector's guide to Hamilton watches. I was shocked -- they both sold for over $100 within minutes after being listed. Loads of other really good collectible stuff never attracted any interest at all. Supply and demand.

The best place to learn is used bookstores, specifically ones that do a lot of collectible business. Go to Wessel & Lieberman in Pioneer Square, or John Michael Lang in Ballard, and just browse. Browse and browse and browse. Look at the books. Look at the prices. Find similar books where one is $10 and the other is $200, and see if you can tell why. Look on Ebay, and sort the books section by price, and see what goes for a lot of money, and why. Get ahold of bookseller catalogs, too -- same thing. Also, learn the lingo -- learn what words like "rubbed" and "chipped", "octavo" and "12mo" mean. Look on sites like Abebooks and see the difference in price between different editions (or even the same one) of something.

The trick is to find out what's available now for cheap that will be dear tomorrow. The only way to really do that is to learn the business a little. Ask questions; a lot of booksellers love to jabber endlessly about their trade, and most of them are pretty smart.

In addition to knowing books, you have to know your subject. If you're just wandering into B&N trying to guess what's going to make you rich, forget it. If you're buying SF, you have to REALLY KNOW SF, and you have to be able to tell what's good and what isn't. Same with photography or anything else. What are you interested in? Those are the books you should be looking at.

You probably won't find anything you're interested in on this blog, but you should read it, for his insights into what makes books worth more or less, and how that changes over time: http://www.bookride.com/

Go to the library and check out a few book-collecting books, starting with the classic "ABC for Book Collectors" by John Carter and Nicolas Barker and "Book Finds" by Ian Ellis, or whatever else they have. Be prepared for a lot of stuffy, stuck-up guff from some of these books, which sometimes appear to be written by semi-senile old duffers droning on and on about that 1732 Principia Mathematicus by Sir Ethelred Bunnywhip QV RSC Msc.PRSD that they spilled port on during that terrible thunderstorm in 1919, blah de blah de blah, but there's some good ones too. Carter is great.

Whatever you do, don't turn into one of those pricks who goes to yard sales and thrift stores with a scanner and scans everything and leaves it in a big pile afterwards. Everybody hates those guys. Yard sales are a terrible place to look for books, anyways, unless you're looking for 1980s college textbooks or the complete sermons of Billy Graham in two hundred baby-blue volumes. The only time you'll ever find a good one, it will have been dropped in a toilet. It's easier to find good books in a thrift store but you have to have the patience of Job. Stay out of antique stores.

He is fantastic. Where to start would depend on what you want.

If you want to be blown away with complex, deep, and transcendental writing then start with Perdido Street Station. Down side? It can be a tough read just because it is so dense, and to really appreciate the book you gotta read it like three times.

If you want to start with his more accessible books, but ones that will still let you see his genius and come to understand a bit of his writing style then I would recommend you start with Kraken.

Have fun!

Great, great question.

First off, it should be said that this is essentially an unanswerable query. Or, at least, the beauty of Pale Fire is just how many different ways it can opened up and plunged into. As is often the case, Nabokov practically double dog dares you into multiple reads here.

Or, as my supremely kind 2nd grade teacher often told me: "It is okay, Matthew. Every one of your answers are right."

That being said, my approach, and one that I found struck a great balance between Shade's controlled, melancholic voice and Kinbote's increasingly erratic, thoroughly entertaining ramble, was by reading the forward, then the first Canto in its entirety, then the footnotes to each line of that Canto in their entirety. Afterward, I went back to the second Canto and repeated my pattern.

This kept Shade's words fresh in my mind while exploring Kinbote's “explanation” of them. It also allowed me to absorb Kinbote’s labyrinthine tale in large chunks, which helped in stitching it all together at the end. Of course, I always, always, followed his recommendation in certain footnotes to see yet another footnote, which, of course, derailed my entire process.

But that’s part of the fun - completely surrendering to Kinbote’s logic. It has that mad, Willy-Wonka-is-at-the-helm-of-this-boat-and-driving-us-straight-over-a-chocolate-waterfall quality to it.

Hope you’re enjoying this book. I think it’s a pretty great one.

Disclaimer: I am a nerd for this kind of stuff.
I LOVE Cabinet Magazine. I have been a subscriber since issue 18. The collection of non-sequitur re-affirms my opinion that people are passionate about the most random things and the human race is just nuts! nuts! nuts!
Sometimes I read an article and think 'there can't possibly be such and such an organization, theory, or historical event', then look into it, and there is!
Admittedly, there are some articles I just cannot get through, no matter how many times I try - far too specific language about math or physics that I just have no clue what they are talking about.
But I think it is good mental exercise to challenge your brain with academic literature and get some of your culturing from (in my average person's opinion)
obscure sources like this super - cool mag.
That's my opinion..anyway. I love it.

Browse to your heart's content, pithy. And if the staff at the bookstore make you feel uncomfortable for browsing, you should feel free to find another store that's worth supporting. Finding books is often a pretty in-depth, personal experience, especially if you're in a used store where you're searching for authors you (might) like in a limited selection, looking for totally new-to-you books, or searching where the books are arranged a little idiosyncratically. Books are technically a "luxury" item, which means that booksellers should want you to be spending time in their stores, browsing through their books and hopefully sparking the desire to read as many as possible. You can't want to read it if you've never seen it or heard of it. Just as clothing stores should want customers trying on heaps of their clothes, bookstores should want you wandering their stacks and flipping through first pages. There's no need to buy every time you browse, but it is good form to spend what book-buying budget you have at the stores where you also regularly browse, thus supporting their awesome atmosphere. As long as you aren't being a jerk (reading and spilling on un-purchased books in the cafe as noted above, sitting down in the aisle and reading an entire book only to leave empty-handed at the end of the day, talking loudly on your cellphone, or, say, scaring the cats), browsing is a big part of a bookstore customer's expected behavior.

I've read Messiah, which I thought was good. The Children of Dune miniseries came out before I got around to reading the book. I thought the miniseries was great, so I might not even bother reading the book.

The accepted wisdom among sci fi fans seems to be that the first three books are good; anything after that is crap and only gets worse as you get into the books written by Frank Herbert's son.

A really good memoir should open up a person and show the reader what makes that person tick, not just show off what a person has seen or done in their lifetime. That's the most compelling part of every entertainment in the world- really good books, plays, movies, t.v. shows, and even relationships satisfy our curiosity about the "other"- who are they really? And why? And what does that tell me about myself? It's why little brothers the world over read their big sisters' diaries, why reality t.v. got so popular, why everybody likes pop psychology and why our culture has such a weird obsession with serial killers.

A really bad memoir creates a persona that the person himself does not possess. It cheats us out of the window into his life that the memoir promises. Whether this is done through bending the truth, pushing an agenda, or hiding behind a contrived voice ("I'm so folksy and wise" is my personal least-favorite), it makes the whole concept of the memoir useless.

Hey there. Yes - this is Torey Hayden's book Ghost Girl: The True Story of a Child in Peril and the Teacher Who Saved Her. The author of several books about severely abused children, Hayden is one of the leading voices in what the UK's Bookseller magazine snarkily but aptly referred to as 'misery lit,' together with Dave Pelzer, Jeannette Walls, and Frank McCourt. 

I did a two-part book list of related reads titled "Magical Misery Tour" for the NoveList Plus database, which you can access via many libraries, logging in with your library card. (This is a really nifty database, btw, filled with helpful information for readers, and lots of neat book lists and articles and things - check it out). There are a lot of other interesting titles on there of child abuse, drug abuse, and cetera. The title I myself especially like in this general area is Frank Conroy's 1967 memoir Stop Time.

I'm curious to hear what people say - I have not read it, though owing to a quirk of fate I wound up with TWO copies of it, as it was a selection of both the Rumpus Book Club and Indiespensable. Like you, I'm trying to figure out whether I want to even try - I'm a fairly slow reader, and so I am a lot more adventuresome with novellas than with doorstops.

I don't wanna become a one-trick pony here, but the dedication to 'The Abortion', while not as sincere or lofty as any of the ones mentioned so far, got me to read the book in the first place:

Frank:
come on in —
read novel —
it's on table
in front room.
I'll be back
in about
two hours.
Richard

And, yeah, the Little Prince.