Collecting (Hoarding?)

First of all, hello! I'm back from my wedding/honeymoon, and have gotten back into the swing of things at work. I've also started getting back into the reading habit, which is wonderful. We didn't have much energy for reading on the honeymoon, so while I did manage to get through the majority of One More for the Road in the airport, I didn't get much other reading done.

I did, however, come home with about 30 extra pounds of books. 30 pounds? Maybe I'm exaggerating. But we had to get an extra carry-on to carry them all home, and that thing was HEAVY! Between the two of us, we stopped in at least four different bookstores in our travels (I admit, that was something I was seriously looking forward to once we had decided on London) and spent about £100 on books (I had to control myself). Chris found a couple of Thomas the Tank Engine books that he had been looking for, and that made him happy. I ended up buying the most, but it was worth it.

Among my finds were several Wilkie Collins books that I haven't been able to find in bookstores in the States. I bought Armadale and a few others, as well as the British edition of Room, which I have been wanting to read for months.

My biggest problem was putting back all of the British editions of books I already owned. For example, I had to put back several Ray Bradbury books, one of Katharine Kerr's, and several Dan Simmons books. That was my primary excitement about shopping in British bookstores, along with being able to get books I can't here. But I did manage to get one special edition of one of my favorite books: This edition of Hyperion. How awesome is that?! I know, the cover is plain, but you don't see things like this every day.

I guess you could accuse me of being a hoarder, but I prefer the term "collector." This makes my... fourth or fifth copy of Hyperion, which is exciting! Granted, two of the copies are the same mass market paperback, one is just newer because the other is falling apart from all my reads and notes. And now that I have other Collins books, I can actually display them! We will be reorganizing our books in a few weeks and I plan on putting them in the display bookcase with the glass sliding windows. That does mean that some books will get moved out of there, but they were only in there because I had nowhere else to put them.

That reminds me, I need to pick up the books from my parents' house that we used for the centerpieces. Curious to see what they looked like? Here: