[Michael Juster]

Yes, I'm with Andrew, I started collecting first editions in used book stores with a 1 dollar limit in 1978 that held for a decade, and finally I allowed myself inflation factors that took me to 3, 7 and then 10 dollars.

I do it for the kind of kick Andrew is describing, but I do have some astonishing first editions that I bought for a dollar: Auden's The Dyer's Hand and Kahn's The Boys of Summer (the greatest sports books of all time). I have a post-Civil War first edition of John Greenleaf Whittier for which I paid three bucks and first editions of Wilbur, Sexton, Roethke, Berryman & many others, some of them signed. I have a couple books from Maynard Mack's library. I have a number of first editions by great poets of the Harlem Renaissance. I have to admit I broke my rules and paid twenty bucks for a signed first edition of Gwendolyn Brooks' Blacks that also had a note from her tucked inside.

I thought I had found a rare gem in Cambridge four years ago at a going-out-of-business sale--a first American edition of Eliot's Practical Cats, but it turned out the publisher flooded the market in the thirties with phony first editions at a jacked-up price. It wasn't worth $1,500, but I could have sold it right away at my $15 cost, but it was too good a story to give up.

None of this on-line, by the way. That kills the fun.