My Most Valuable Books

good morning it's tuesday so sarah and i have about 3 000 books in our library and they are all great and i value them all very much but today i would like to share with you the most valuable books in our library by the way i'm defining value as their monetary value multiplied by the number of tiers i would cry if i lost the book so if a book is worth a hundred dollars and i would cry 10 tiers if i lost it that's a thousand points okay so i don't really collect fancy first editions but i do have some and the most financially valuable book in our library is probably this first edition of slaughterhouse five sarah got this from me many years ago and it's now worth like two thousand dollars which makes it stressful to even touch that book is really close to my heart partly because i ended up in kurt vonnegut's hometown living and working in his very long shadow and partly because when i read it in 11th grade english it helped bring me to life as a reader i also have a first edition of octavia butler's parable of the sewer which i got for 65 and is now worth quite a bit more than that i love the cover design of this book so so much but also it's like one of the most important american novels of the last hundred years so it's pretty cool to have a first printing of it okay two more fancy rare-ish books first this gorgeous first edition of annie dillard's pilgrim at tinker creek i think about this book almost every day and the end papers are phenomenally beautiful and i know you're not supposed to read fancy books but this one isn't worth that much money because it's not in good condition so it's also my reading copy then there's this first edition of mark twain's christian science this is a late twain book devoted to absolutely eviscerating religion in general and christian science founder mary baker eddie in particular i have very complicated feelings about the book so much so that i wrote my college thesis about it and then my parents gave me a first edition of it as a graduation present so while it would only sell for like 60 dollars it's worth much more than that to me speaking of which all of the most valuable books in our library are not financially valuable they're just irreplaceable like this copy of toni morrison sula is worth about two dollars but i've been reading this particular book since 2004 and it has all of my like marginalia which is alternately cringe inducing and lovely for rereading then we have this copy of sarah's book you are an artist i love this book and use it all the time to help me think creatively but this particular book is valuable to me because sarah signed it and the inscription is lovely so you know how most writers use like strunk and white style guide or the ap style guide or whatever i use instruction booklet written by my college professor perry lentz it covers everything from like m dashes to the difference between lie and lay and it is my writing style guide like i have large swaths of it memorized side note over the years you may have heard me say the social order instead of society that is because of instruction booklet where lentz argues very persuasively that society as a word obfuscates hierarchies and inequalities that are better captured by the phrase the social order all right it's time for the most valuable book in our library which i think would retail for about seven dollars but i would cry a million tears if i ever lost it it's the spring and the fall a book co-written by sarah eurestgreen and me so when we got engaged sarah gave me this book which contains every email we wrote to each other during the year and a half between when we became friends and when we started dating last year one of the project for awesome perks was a podcast sarah and i made called like letters where we analyzed some of these emails and we're gonna do it again for this year's project for awesome i just love reading through this book with sarah it's just so wonderful to have this document that charts how we fell in like with each other and then in love with each other so yeah don't print your emails except occasionally do print them because this is my most valuable book by a very wide margin let me know in comments what your most valuable books are hank i would have included one of your books except in going through my copies of them i realized you've never signed one for me i'll see you on friday

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Id: UY9ACqF_RXU

Length: 3min 55sec (235 seconds)

Published: Tue Feb 15 2022