The Most Valuable Sci-Fi Book I've Ever Found [Thrift Store Haul]
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- Опубліковано 28 вер 2024
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In this installment of "Matt buys more books than his small apartment can accommodate," we see the rarest, most potentially valuable genre book I've ever thrifted.
![A Free Box Of Sci-Fi Books, Full Of Splendors [Haul]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/dzxP3ZUOSNM/mqdefault.jpg)
Years ago I was working at Barnes and Noble and the man himself, Brandon Sanderson, came into the store. He talked to the guy at the customer service desk who pointed him at me, since I'd previously mentioned that I was reading the Mistborn series. Sanderson asked how I felt about the series and I had to admit that I read the first two and then got about 50 pages into the third before I got busy with other stuff and never went back to finish it. We then stared at each other awkwardly until he wandered off. Good memories 😅
Lol
You were honest! Shake it off. He was the weird one. Haha ✌🏻🤠
Jooooo... did the guy seriously just go silent when you told him you didn't finish the third one?
I'd be so appreciative of someone reading two of my books. Can't imagine going cold or awkward because someone didn't finish my third book lol...
I got as far as book 2, my son said book 3 was better but still disappointing after book 1
He should have thanked you! Constructive criticism is a gift.
In May I was surfing Craig’s list and found someone selling a whole book collection over 4000 books and in the photo on one of the very distant photos showing full bookshelves one title caught my eye. I told my wife we have to run out to check it out. After negotiating the women came to a price of $250 for all the books and she threw in all 5 of the bookshelves. The one small paperback I had seen in the photo was titled Rage it turned out to be a mint condition of Stephen Kings Rage first printing oop paperback that I turned around and sold for $2000 and ended up with so many other hidden gems.
Incredible. Wish you'd made a video.
What a huge find. You have to love idiots that sell their stuff without researching it's potential value
When confronted with something like this (1st edition The Stand for $2), all you can do revert to childhood and say "Duuuude! Sweet!!!".
Congrats Matt on the Stand! So excited to get two videos in one day!
Congrats on 3k subscribers!!
Speaking of Brandon Sanderson and first editions, first printings...last month I found his The Way of Kings at a local charity store for $1. It's worth about $150.
I work at a used book store and I can confirm, $2 for a first edition of The Stand (any edition, honestly) is a freaking steal!
I love Neal Stephenson but it’s definitely something of a guilty pleasure for me. I can get why most people find him incredibly dull, but my engineering side appreciates the deep and dry dives into things like orbital mechanics and cryptography.
Cryptonomicon was dull in places with a weak payoff. Snowcrash and The Diamond Age were pretty damned good.
The Stand was the scariest book I have ever read. And I probably read a first edition back in the day. Good find, congratulations 🍾
I just bought A Fire Upon the Deep yesterday, in part, thanks to your previous recommendations.
Great haul! Congrats! Fun to watch.
The copy of Lord of the Flies I got back in junior high is the same edition you got! I seriously adore that angsty, expressionistic cover. Also, it's been over a decade since I've been big on Stephen King, but I still freaked over your copy of The Stand! I used to hunt his first editions in thrift stores and yard sales but never managed to get earlier than Pet Sematary (and even then, never a first printing)! Teenage me would have had an aneurism finding an original of The Stand. And it's actually a practical early edition to have because--in my opinion--the original '78 cut of the Stand is leagues better than the over-bloated '90 one.
That story about Sanderson was classic…thats what I love about your videos ….honesty.
I'm thrilled to have found another person who adores Jack Vance as much as I do!
I had a Zen moment a few years back when Hurricane Katrina wiped out my First Editions book case. We lived at the mouth of the Pearl River and the water rose ten feet in 45 minutes. I lost a few Arkham House firsts, a signed Frank Herbert, (not Dune,) and a curiosity, a signed copy of a science fiction book written by Buzz Aldrin and John Barnes, "Encounter with Tiber." We have moved to higher ground, and keep a lot less stuff around. Good haul!
I realised I'm late to this party, but congrats on finding The Stand. I would've been so excited to pick it up for negligible money, I would not have been able to part with it. Maybe you changed your mind? 😊
I found a first edition of The Stand at a fund raiser book sale several years ago. Unfortunately it did not have the dust jacket.
A Hal Clement book I haven't read "Still River," must find.
Piers Anthony did a fun total recall with se really cool stuff that wasn't in the movie.
MirrorShades was THE book for Cyberpunk other than Neuromancer back when it was happening
Interesting, didn't know that
@@Bookpilled it was a quick jump in when cyber punk was getting more recognizable/ marketable
I don't remember if Neal Stephenson's first cyberpunk novel was out yet at that point. That's the other BIG title I'm forgetting.
I may still have my copy of Mirrorshades. Don't forget Burning Chrome, another of the very early cyberpunk classics and maybe the best title ever.
@@johndillon8051 You're Right.
I'd argue that Burning Chrome is both better and WAY more important to cyberpunk as a subgenre that Neuromancer. Easilly. But I've mentioned it so much already ( I *think* on this channel, but definitely on Media Death Cult) that I figured no one wanted to hear me sing that old song again!
But if you want to go down the rabbit hole, a lot of PKD's short stories had a lot of influence on the subgenre as well.
@@johndillon8051 I adored Burning Chrome when I read it. Many of the collected stories in the anthology stayed with me better than a lot of the cyberpunk novels I read later. I ended up buying a First Edition Hard cover of it.
Fire Upon the Deep is the GOAT 🐐
Edit: I have a copy just like that signed by Vernor Vinge. My most prized book
I must say i’m a little bit disappointed, i thought you’d found the actual Holy Grail, but The Stand is cool i suppose
I think those are only in the UK.
Aren't you supposed to be reading The Stand??
Wow, I remember so many of these books. You’ve also given some authors to read. Thanks 😊.
First line is about Fire Upon the Deep and I’m a fan for life. Carry on, tell me more.
Some great finds! I also paid $2 for the most valuable book I've come across. A first edition hardcover of Anne McCafferys Dragonflight.
Not gonna lie....half way through I skipped to the end to see that epic book you found, nice work, hope you get make good💲💲 on it 🙂‼️
Sanderson is one of my all-time favorites. He's so good :)
Stick around til the end of the book…jes…stick around to the end of the book…again….classic….made me laugh out loud!😅
I still have the first release paperback of Mirror Shades and the Tarot series.
Truly though nothing is better than finding those books you gave up hope of finding in the exact right edition as well, I just recently acquired rare editions of Moorcock, Hancock, and Bunyan for less than $80 total instead of the 6-10k it could have cost me. Got a nice complete Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever set recently as well all in first Edition hardcover with perfect jackets.
All the recent luck has me worried that this is the last sell off before everything can only be found as a fluid edit on a kindle, corporate fears cutting swathes across the page pushed forward on the winds of social trend as the words swirl around in the wake only to come to rest in new configurations.
In my defense I have been sleeping less than three hours a day and living in 100-120° heat all week.
8:58 - Fowler is a bit hard to categorize, but what I read from her was superb.
How did you get on with Three to Conquer? I loved it (also Wasp): terrible world building, terrible characterisation, but great fun.
Awesome find on The Stand Whoot I am going through my estate sale haul now and just recently listed my first "Fuzzies" book I have also sold The Annihilation Series as a trilogy for a great amount Wrote down all the authors names and will be doing research over the next few weeks!
I got all excited for a minute when you showed the last book! I have that book with that exact cover but my gutter code isn't the right one. Mine was AA48 which means it was printed in 1985 but otherwise it looks identical to the T39 copyright page. Hope yours sells for a ton! :)
Oh my gosh!! That “vintage” Lord of the Flies!! That I bought new for high school. Vintage?? Haha
You must find and read Cordwainer Smith: The Rediscovery of Man
Norstrilia
The Best of Cordwainer Smith
Robert Silverberg raves about him. I have read him and he is on another level. Stories like Scanners Live in Vain, and The Game of Rat and Dragon rewire your brain. Vintage sci fi all the way.
I recently picked up a copy of the Rediscovery of Man after it was recommended in a lecture. I'm looking forward to it, never read any Cordwainer Smith before.
Those are fantastic titles!
He already showed Norstrilia in a previous video. He may even have read it by now (since I'm ten months late with this comment)
$500 for a Stephen King book! Now you can buy a totally rad Gucci bookshelf!
Cryptonomicon will make you forgive him for the pic.
I love how you don't correct yourself. That is hilarious!
nice books. i do sort of know a lot of them. great find on king! i may have a $100 book, always coming home by ursula leguin. def not as big as your title. i read the gene wolfe original paperbacks. what a trip. everyone needs to read them. regarding the ballantine adult fantasy series: i got to have lunch with Ian Ballantine. i honestly did. he makes an appearance in Dinotopia as a character.
Damn that’s a helluva find, congrats! Still hoping to find something that rare haha
I actually have a single volume, albeit book-club hardcover edition, of Asimov’s Foundation Trilogy, which he signed for me when I saw him lecture in college, way back in the early 80s. He really did have mutton chops…
when you opened it up I thought it was going to be signed lol nice finds
12:10 - _Cities in Flight_ didn't work for me, either...
Haldeman wrote a lot of great things and Hemingway hoax was great fun.
As soon as you started unwrapping and I saw Stephen King on the spine and how thick it was, I knew it was The Stand. And how can any fan of Science Fiction call The Hemingway Hoax obscure!?! I jest btw. I have that book as a First Edition hardback and it is a weird as $H!+ story. I also have never been much impressed by Neal Stephenson. Absolutely brilliant finds!
Y t t
Called it!
My favorit fisical copy i have is " the congress" from Stanislaw lem
Shameful to say, Fire Upon The Deep has been sat in my to read pile for over a decade and i've still not gotten around to reading it! That mirror shades is new on me, looks really interesting, I'll have to look for that. That Orson Scott Card I've never heard of (not his biggest fan tbh, Only liked the first Enders Game and wasn't a huge fan of that) but that's immaculate condition and signed so I have a feeling you'll make some good money on that, although I've found some signed books I honestly thought HAVE to be worth good money and turned out not to be. Like I recently got hold of the Sandman - Book Of Dreams short story collection, first edition hardback, signed, but when I searched online for a valuation, it's not being sold anywhere near what I thought given the rarity of the book, edition. condition and signed. Song for Kali has been driving me insane to find, I might be the person who buys that from you. Stand on Zanzibar won the Hugo award which suprised me until I read it, because I'd always thought of Brunner as a bit of a hack before then (My own impression made through no actual reading lol, But I WAS a teenager back then). The moment you read Sanderson you'll change your opinion, incredible author. The Southern Reach Trilogy (That starts with Annihilation) is my second favourite series of all time, behind another Vandermeer series called Borne which are the books Borne, novella Strange Bird and Dead Astronauts, but they're not books for people who need their plots and themes spoon fed to them. For example, Dead Astronauts takes place in 4 different dimensions following the same character in each as they react differently and sometimes bleed across in to each others dimensions. Are those Conan books worth reading? I've stayed away because they seem hacky but you always seem to hold them in high regard so i'm wondering if I've been missing out. Shocked to say the least you don't rate Barker, but then the world would be boring if we all liked the same things. I feel I must correct you, Kafka's The Castle is NOT a sequel to The Trial. I get the confusion, The Castle's protagonist is called K and The Trial's protagonist is called Joseph K, but they're not the same person as they clearly have 2 different personalities. I'm curious, will you really sell that Babylon 5 book for $30? In the UK it costs brand new the equivalent of $13.37, do brand new books cost so much more than we pay over here? I've been wondering this for a while watching your videos, like here you talk of a book costing nearly $5 from a thrift store, that's £3.75 here and I'd only have to pay £3.50 maximum for brand new hardbacks in thrift stores, the kind that were xmas presents and never opened, I'm just so shocked at how much more you guys are being charged over there for certain things when the most expensive things, electronics, cars, houses are so much cheaper for you guys. The price we'd pay for a 2 bedroom house in our equivalent of your ghetto is what you pay for a 4 bedroom detached house with a pool! I cannot abide Heinlein, Stranger in a Strange land was great and then halfway he changed it into a completely different genre of book and derailed it. He also writes the most one dimensional female characters who are just there to be sex fodder for our hero and act dumb or in the wrong way, that made me stop reading The Moon is a Harsh Mistress halfway through. I can NOT believe you found a first edition of the Stand, and for $2! Congrats man, you'll make a LOT from that.
The link to your etsy shop is broken.
Oh no, The Stand? I hoped it would be a more interesting book, something on the same level as 'A Fire Upon the Deep' but one that I haven't read. Never mind, at least your video makes me want to read 'A Fire Upon the Deep' again, cheers.
Cryptonomicon and Great North Road are both awesome.I wouldn't give you 2 cents for The Stand,boring as hell.
Forget Peter Hamilton.....if you value your SF soul.
Apropos Jack Vance....the best way in is to buy the five volumes published by an Australian company (Subterranean press ed. by Terry Dowling & Jonathan Strahan) covering his early works, but includes most of the short works and even some of his shorter novels.
....and then go to the best (to my tiny mind)......The Planet of Adventure volumes (4 of them). I envy you if your going to it for the first time.
What does forget if you value SF soul mean?
Really? That's what you took from the note? Hamilton's world has an afterlife...idiot.
@@Scottlp2 Incidentally "idiot" related to Hamilton not you. Thought that should be made clear. I can be very brusque sometimes. OK mostly.
Sell my books! Puh-lease!?!?!?!?!? lol Nice haul!
I also just got the fuzzy papers and fuzzies and other people. Not worth very much but good books to read. I am fairly sure you are supposed to return the books back to the little library after you read them and not just take and never return.
Or at least trade out..
You were willing to pay $25 for The Stand and stole it for $2. Wow!
Congratulations!
"Asaac Asimov"? How about Isaac?
Hello, where can I go to buy some books? I would like a special delivery for Christmas. ;)
Love High Rise (all Ballard really) and Stand on Zanzibar. Shockwave Rider was good, just not as good as SoZ.
Hemingway Hoax is an absolute must read.
9:38 - Come on, it is not _that_ bad. I find the idea of a world-circumnavigating SFF magazine publishing house as a keeper of the civilization very ingenious. It does get a bit bogged down in, umm, not perfectly executed action scenes, but still. And it is rather difficult to write characters supposedly more intelligent than you are - even Banks does not always succeed.
Please read Iain Banks
I find the videos fascinating although I’m not into the genre
*yet
Simmons not only writes award winning Sci-fi and Horror, but has written award winning, hard boiled detective fiction. If you haven't read the Kurtz series, do yourself a favor. Such a shame he turned into a far wight wing nut.
P.S. - Never recommend Song Of Kali to a pregnant woman.
now I will never not say Assic Izimov
Love Asimov
GREAT SHOW LIKED AND SUBBED
Whoaaaaa!!!!
Lamma!
It’s FOTD is my fav too 👍
Hi! I'm a producer for The US Sun. We would love to feature your video in an article. Would you give us permission? We will credit your page. Thanks!
People bang on about how amazing Kim Stanley Robinson is but I find him annoying. He has to explain the hell out of EVERYTHING. He can't just say "the sky was a beautiful azure" he has to wax lyrical for paragraphs about how blue the sky was (just an example). It's annoying when I have to wade through all this verbose nonsense just to get to the story. Of course this was a long time so I may have a different perspective now. However, I'm not prepared to give him another chance just yet. There are so many more books to read first that I'll enjoy.
Aaaaaaaaah........Stephen King....ugh!!!!
Fire upon the deep is .... pointless and simply boring
If you had no interest you could have left it for someone who did, but I guess that's scalping for ya.
OooOOOoOOOoOOhhh!!!!
I guess that's a burn for ya.
yeah that Stephenson pic is accurate regarding some of his content. But! Anathem is pretty amazing anyway. And I adored the Diamond Age when I read it long ago.
For me the "must read" from Julian May is the four books which make up The Saga of Pliocene Exile.
There are more books based in the same book "universe" but differ in setting and time.
Awesome. So pleased for you. Plugin for Iain M Banks Culture novels. Keep on dude. All the best from Scotland.
I am happy for you for your "holy grail" find, but I have difficulty relating to book collecting that views them as rare, appreciating objects, rather than containers of content, of thoughts, ideas, stories, imagery (and facts, of course, but that's for some other channel). I mean, there are many books where the physical DTB object adds to the reading experience compared to the "bare" text, but not that many, and for those that do, fifth printing of third re-issue is as good as the the very first.
That said, even though I read now practically exclusively on kindle, to the extent that I buy e-book editions of works I already have in DTB form but want to re-read, I cannot bring myself to part from any of thousands paper books accumulated over half a century that line my walls.
I can't wait to read Fire Upon The Deep!
Seems like someone with such obvious socialist leanings such as yourself would have a bit of a harder time ripping off that ignorant bookseller. I guess altruism has its limits...
Try Stephenson's Zodiac -- it's short and smart.
Fred Pohl made an anthology based on his career as a magazine editor during the 'golden age' named "Yesterday's Tomorrows" ISBN-10 : 0425056481 The stories are good, but what is gold is all the editorial comments that put them in perspective in the timeline of the genre.
I own the Verner Vinge book. It’s brand new from when I bought it too many years ago. Maybe I should read it?
I've yet to see this guy get a Gordon R Dickson book.
He has, though. In an older video.
Julian May's Milieu Duology and Many-Colored Land series are immersively fun (at least to me). Been a favorite of mine forever.
I had a hard time finding the first Foundation novel in the used shops too, kinda weird because there are mountains of copies out there.
And I wish my brothers read books. Lucky you.
I agree with you on "Red Mars". It was a fantastic read. Green Mars was ok, but I barely made it through Blue Mars. I only find wished it because I had already come so far. I would recommend sticking to the first book in the trilogy, and just forget that there are two sequels.
I thought I'd give social interplay a go.....now I wish I hadn't. The End.
Great find in purely economic sense. Personnally I couldn't stand The Stand even I liked reading King in the 80s. Too long and boring. I never quite forgive King for making Harold, the character I identified the most with, a bad guy.
We understand. Speaking is optional. Reading is mandatory. 😉
You'd best check what a first edition hardcover book edition of PKD's Man in the High Castle sells for.
Be aware that a lot of Conan books aren't true Robert E. Howard Conan. A lot of rewrites, adaptations, and pastiches are out there. Don't settle for anything but true REH.
Have you read the E. E. Smith space operas?
Great Haul!!!
I AM AMAZED........
You are my soulmate :)
I never finished The Stand. Got to a point where I knew a character I liked was almost certainly going to die and the situation seemed so deeply unjust that I couldn't finish the book
Your passion for books is inspiring. I will be reading the books you recommend.
Congrats on that find. I guess it's long gone by now.
Great variety there -- have some - want some , taking notes.
Haven't finished The Stand yet - it's a bit predictable so I feel I have to retry and slow down into his meticulous pace.
The record for minutely detailed scifi must be 2 of the works of German author Franz Schätzing; the Swarm & Limit.
I found the last one in German and I'm taking it on as a challenge.
Kim Stanley Robinson doesn't even come close in lengthy info dumps!
I've read several Dan Simmons horror novels including Song Of Kali and thought I don't remember much detail I seem to remember not thinking much of it. Is that first printing Stand the original version from 1978 or the uncut version from 1990? The thickness would suggest the latter.