Guide To Collecting And A Definition of Terms
Hello, and welcome to my guide to collecting antique and vintage books. We will first talk about where to get them. The best thing to do is to go in-person at antique stores, auctions, and yard sales, for you will see what you get and you can check it and you wont get scammed. My favorite online seller is on eBay. It is a seller named antiqueparchments. They have 99.4% positive feedback, 35K items sold, and 8.4K followers. But only buy online if you cannot find it in-person.
Now, how to set them. Set them on a dedicated bookshelf that needs to be checked every so often for some bookshelf's shelves slip off and bend. Remember to never pull a book off the shelf by going to the top of the spine and pulling with your finger. This damages the spine. You actually need to push the two books beside into the back of the shelf and then pull it out with your hand by the spine's middle part. This gif shows well below.
Keep them mostly away from sunlight, and a lot of people put them in acid free wraps or bags. Do not eat or drink near them, for you don't want to damage your old books. Look at every page to find items left behind in the book from past owners, those are so cool. Now I will go to the terms and definitions.
Foxing: Brown aging, moisture, and impurity spots on pages.
Binding: The way and materials the book was made from.
Marginalia: Stuff handwritten in the margins of the book.
Vellum: A white, crusty and plastic-like material used to bind books, usually found from the 1400s-1700s.
Gilt: Gold decoration on the cover and the spine and the tops of pages.
Endpaper: Paper that is at the beginning of the book (and back), mostly decorated.
Boards: The cover boards on a hardback.
Signature (printing): A group of pages that were folded from one page that determines the size: folio, quarto, etc.
Provenance: Ownership history.
Association Copy: A book connected to a notable person from ownership, inscription, etc.
Bookplate: A sticker that goes on the endpaper to show whom the book belongs to.
Frontispiece: An engraving or illustration at the beginning of a book.
