Book Nerd Out

This post is my entry in the Book Nerd Out giveaway hosted by Book Riot: Reviews, Recommendations, and Commentary about books and reading (but, you know, fun).

Choosing my biggest "book nerd out" experience wasn't the easiest task, as there have been many. Being the dorky kid in the bright-pink glasses reading the newest Babysitter's Club Book at recess? Crying over the lost dust jacket for Charlotte's Web? Changing my major from pre-med to English in college? Driving through crazy LA traffic to see Patchett, McEwan, Allende or Hornby read? Or maybe the hours scouring the internet for the perfect book tattoo.

Or maybe when I realized that I owned (well, co-o
wned with my husband) a first edition copy of Tree of Codes by Jonathan Safran Foer.

Yeah, that's the one.

It all started last spring when I sucked it up and drove to my Alma mater's (go Bruins!) arch-rival, USC, for the LA Time's Festival of Books. They had stolen it away from the prestigious, picturesque UCLA campus that year and I was mentally composing a list of negatives to blog about when I got home. We stopped at Book Soup's booth and started wading through their tables when my husband asked me about Jonathan Safran Foer's new book. As a fan I felt instant shame, color rising to my cheeks. I had loved Everything is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close- how could I not know he had written something new? Immediately I grabbed it and we start
ed looking at the oddity that is Tree of Codes. For those not familiar, Foer took Bruno Schulz's The Street of Crocodiles and, with Visual Edition's help, created a new story by removing part of the old text by die cutting. It's art.



On the way home we noticed that it appeared to possibly be a first edition and after some research and twittering with Visual Editions we learned that it was. Currently the book is going anywhere from the low $200s to close to $400 (not that I'd ever sell it). It's my only first edition, and while "trophy" items don't generally matter to me, I definitely hold this one near and dear. In an age where people are flocking in droves to digital media I relish this as a possibility for innovation at the print level. In fact, I'm slightly afraid to read it- the delicate pages seem like an accident waiting to happen. Would I push the envelope if I added something about wearing gloves, climate control, and inserting it in my will?

So, this is my "nerd out"- I managed to not know about the new release of a favorite author, freaked out at the first edition status, and allow it to inspire diatribe after diatribe about the future of the book.

1 comment:

  1. Good luck! Even though you're my competition. Wouldn't it be cool if we both placed top 3 on Friday?!

    ReplyDelete

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