FS works that you rather wish you had bought.

I keep regretting not having bought the Canticle for Liebowitz LE. I don't jump up and down about it as a book, and the Folio volume didn't quite get me over the line. Nonetheless it nags at me.

I wonder if others have similar nags?

Studies from Nature LE. I kept umming and ahhing until I figured out it I really wanted it – by which time it had sold out, and now sells for a big premium on the secondary market.

My first thought was "yeah - all the ones that skyrocketed in price on Ebay!". But I don't play that game.

Mine used to be The Day of the Jackal. But now that it has been reprinted, I don't really have any (it'll be included in my next order, probably at New Year's Sale time).

>2 BorisG: That'd be my choice as well. All the others are ones which came out before I started buying from FS. So I didn't really miss them as I didn't know about them when I could have bought them. Of those I would have most liked to have picked up The Wanderer & Other Old-English Poems.

Gulliver’s Travels LE. If I remember correctly it was even discounted towards the end. The other LEs in the series were also great, but If I was to pick one that would be it.

>5 bacchus.:
A good many of the old LEs were discounted towards the end, including some that now carry a premium, e.g. Moby Dick, which I got for a song, and Liber Bestiarum, which was on the list for years.
Gulliver's Travels was a bit of an anomaly as the only volume in that series that wasn't a children's book, though often mistaken for one by those who haven't read it. Fortunately the artist had, and his work captures Swift's acerbic wit perfectly. One of my favourites, though it needs careful handling.

Probably the PKD Complete Short Stories LE. I have the Selected Stories SE, but knowing that there's a ton of material in the LE that'll probably never make it into another Folio edition gets my goat sometimes.

Poetic Edda and The Wanderer for me.

The Limited Editions - Leather Bound and Solander Boxed: Decameron
Don Quixote
Les Miserables
Moby Dick
Ulysses
War & Peace

I have The Aeneid.

But to be honest, I wasn't in a position to afford back then.

>9 LesMiserables: Having just read your list, some of the titles as follows:

https://www.librarything.com/topic/358856#8650058

If I have a problem, it is too much stuff, not a shortage of stuff.

I buy tons of stuff from estate auctions and resell most of it, so I have a bit of a different perspective on these things.

I do value nice things (hence liking FS over penguin, for example), and I do own a lot of nice stuff, but all of it was purchased at a fraction of its value.

I am steadily tempted to sell valuable things before they lose their value, because I know that all these values are transient. It's a balancing act between how much I like things and how much I could sell them for.

I don't regret not having bought anything. I know there's endless stuff for sale out there and that I'll quickly forget something I missed out on. Plus, it would be pointless to look back and have regrets about something you can't change. Plus, I'm pretty committed to being cheap, so I'm not even thinking about buying most things unless it pops up for cheap; I'd have to really want something to pay out for it and there's not much I'm lacking for.

I try to control my impulse to "collect" things and to focus only on practical things, otherwise I could fill endless amounts of space (which I don't have).

I generally don't keep "limited editions" because I find them to be a lame marketing gimmick. At best they are luxury items which are impractical to me.

In summary, no, I don't regret not having bought any book and the idea of that actually makes me laugh.

>11 jsilver2: I have a good friend who is more into deals than things.

You say you buy a lot of things. I buy very few things, but given the shortness of life I prefer them to be nice. I prefer to get something on sale of course, if I can, but I'm not opposed to paying full price for something that will give me a lot of pleasure or utility.

What I tell my friend is that the value of 90% off something you don't need or want is -10%. It's a not a good deal. But really, I don't think he's wrong, he just likes the thrill of the deal.

It sounds like you spend a lot of time and effort to make money back from those estate sales. Maybe you could buy fewer things, pay more, and use your surplus time and mental cycles to create something else of value?

No judgement (really!). I find the different value calculations people make fascinating.

Re: original topic: I can't think of a Folio Society title I regret NOT buying. I did wait until the Gargantua LE was down to single digits though, hoping for a sale.

I do regret not buying the Centipede Press Elric though. I would like to have a copy (it's the only halfway decent edition of Elric ever printed), but by absolute press standards it's only an average small press title, and now sells for stupid money purely due to scarcity. I even intended to buy it, but wasn't dialed enough into the market for such books at the time to know that I would have to buy it on the day of release. Live and learn.

I have a long list of out of print FS editions I should have bought when they were available, but now cost far too much on the secondary market. They include :-
Mapmakers
Leaves of Grass
The Young King
Eugene Onegin
Vita Nuova
Chinese Fairy Tales & Fantasies
Song of Roland
Wrinkle in Time
Story as Sharp as a Knife
Religion and the Decline of Magic
Lost World
In Search of Schrodinger’s Cat
Epic of Gilgamesh
Deptford Trilogy
Mabinogion
Melmoth the Wanderer
East of Eden
Night by Elie Wiesel
If anyone in Australasia wants to sell me one of these at a reasonable price, send me a PM.

>11 jsilver2:
We are alike in some ways and opposite in others. I have never sold a book, although I sometimes give them away to friends or charity.

I agree with you about limited editions, though. I own a lot of them, mostly from Easton Press but also from several other publishers. With rare exceptions, I don’t buy them unless I would pay the purchase price even without the number or signature, and I don’t care about the printing method (letterpress). My idea of a quality book is one with a desirable text, a font that is easy to read, a size that is comfortable to hold, and one that is well-illustrated in terms of both beauty and quantity.

>13 wcarter: I don’t know about the others but eugene onegin is available on the secondary market for £20-30.

>13 wcarter: PM’d about a couple of the books.

>9 LesMiserables: Likewise!

>15 anthonyfawkes:
Thanks, grabbed a copy that was for sale in Australia.
Buying from intercontinental sellers is painful as the postage cost can often exceed the book cost!

>17 wcarter: I’m sure you have all of them, but as FitzJames mentioned in another thread this seller has quite a few Folios for sale in Australia

https://www.ebay.co.uk/sch/i.html?_dkr=1&iconV2Request=true&_blrs=recall...

An interesting range. I rather expected after asking the question to finish up with a greater list of regrets, but oddly it's still mainly just Liebowitz. I also guess I regret not having bought all the Patrick O'Brian series - I think when it was published I'd just finished a read through, and the next re-read seemed perhaps a long way off (although I have done so every few years since). Similarly I'd quite like a copy of Atlas Shrugged, but I wonder, although I like it, whether I'll actually ever re-read it. It can be something of a slog in places (particularly the long speech towards the end).

In my case, it's mostly Book of the New Sun LE. I read it long after it had run out, having bought the SE.

The SE is serviceable, not Folio's Best (it's C&C printed). But the LE was more manageable, with better materials and had Wolfe's signature, written few months before he passed away. Similarly to Mantel.

>6 Jayked: Peter Suart’s illustrations are my main regret for missing this. They must look wonderful. I only came to appreciate him later, after getting my hands on Master and Margarita and Zarathustra.

>20 dyhtstriyk: Ah, that one too. I purchased the SE, but wasn’t to my liking and I sold it after reading. In retrospect, the LE was well worth the money.

The two volume Paradise Lost from not very long ago. It was even discounted 50% during some sale ($75.00 CAD or some such). I passed because I considered it oversized at the time. Dumb.

Liber Bestiarum for me. I have the 1993 presentation volume version and I kept telling myself that I couldn't justify spending hundreds of pounds on the facsimile edition.

Just off the top of my head, mostly higher-end SEs and LEs that I could not afford at the time:
> News from Nowhere
> Religion and the Decline of Magic
> Beowulf (2010)
> The Vision of Piers the Plowman
> LE Johnson’s Dictionary
> LE Gulliver’s Travels
> LE The Rime of the Ancient Mariner
> LE The Faerie Queene

And really dreaming big: The complete Letterpress Shakespeare.

>12 abysswalker: I agree with everything you said there.

And, just to be clear, I wouldn't suggest that anyone else operate in the way that I do because it wouldn't make sense for most people.

I do however think that the drive to "collect" things is often an unhealthy one, and I do think that everyone should understand the value of items in the true context of things: if you are the wealthy upper class person collecting these things, I'm the middle class person buying them at 10% of their value after you pass away. So you'd better get your value out of them while you can!

>24 Son.of.York: It took me 2-3 years to find a price I was willing to pay for the complete Letterpress Shakespeare but It is one of my favorite productions by Folio and a purchase I have never regretted. I live in the US and there were multiple full sets in the UK that were reasonably priced that I had to pass on due to the shipping but every now and then a set shows up.

My biggest regrets are Book of the New Sun LE and the earlier LE set of LOTR, The Hobbit and The Silmarillion.

Faerie Queene for me. I'm still hoping in vain FS releases a standard edition of it someday though it's been 13 years so I'm not holding my breath.

'Tis Small Gods for me. I have Mort and never thought the Pratchetts would cease so abruptly. Second-hand market prices are... dispiriting.

>28 FitzJames: Small Gods for me too. I remember thinking I'd pick it up later once the discworld set is filled out a bit more...

>29 EdmundRodriguez: That alas, was precisely the lines my thoughts ran upon.

The Letterpress Romeo and Juliet is the one for me, at 500€+ on the secondary market it’s way too much of a stretch for me now (please message me if you have a copy for sale at a more reasonable price). Second is The Book of the New Sun LE, would love to read that through in four nice hardcover volumes. At the time I decided against it, trying to be strict on my book buying. Also should have bought Thus Spake Zarathustra for £15 in the sale or whatever it was…

Some interesting thoughts - thanks. We're a philosophical bunch, hey.

I'm also very conscious of the collecting / having too many 'things' dilemma and have thought about it off and on.

At various times over the last few years I've swung towards scaling back the things I own, and as I get older (passed the 50 mark now), I am finding that things matter less to me. But that's also a consequence of having things in the first place, and having all of what I need. That's a profound privilege, of course, and not lost on me at all.

But I do like my book collection, and it does make me happy every day. But then, it's 'only' about 600 books, and I'm definitely not buying many more, and concurrently getting rid of books I don't want any more.

While I make it a rule not to have regrets in life (things happened how they happened, you can't change the past), to answer the original question, the only three books I'd love to have are the LE Moby Dick (couldn't afford it at the time), and Thus Spake Zarathustra and the original Clockwork Orange, both of which I ordered but had sold out by the time they came around to packing my order.

>32 Jeremy53: Your reply resonates with me. Having read through this whole thread I'd say that in response to the OP I personally don't regret missing out on any, as after all there are more important things in life. Nevertheless, I'd question my purchasing logic back then as I'd say that the funds were there if I had to total the accumulated SEs that I bought instead.

>32 Jeremy53: I'm also in my fifties and find myself thinking along similar lines to yourself.

I do suffer the occasional pang at missing out on a few titles, such as Finnegans Wake or The Malay Archipelago, but I have plenty of other beautiful Folio volumes to enjoy so the pangs are easily quelled. And, after all, much as I love my books, they're only 'stuff'.

Edit for spelling.

The Folio Society book that I regret not buying at the time is the limited edition of Tales from the 1001 Nights. Folio released it at the very beginning of my foray into finer press work (seeking nicer things in the same way as >11 jsilver2:). At the time it remained available, I was concerned about the size and it would have been my first LE and the most expensive book I'd ever purchased by a considerable margin. Now, I'd love to have it.

I have always had more books than I needed, and I tend to give many away. Since making more expensive book purchases, I have also started to resell some of my nicer books (I tend to keep things in very good condition) when I've taken my pleasure from owning them. I hope to sell, trade, or make a gift of the few folio editions I've purchased that I was able to find peace with less expensive copies (or with not owning the book to reread). I am currently working to shrink my library and consolidate all the books I've read and collected over the years into a smaller library that I intend to revisit more frequently.

I share (what I read as) >33 LesMiserables:'s desire to be able to make more considerate purchases at the time with the funds I had available. If I knew then what I know now about the growth I'd experience and the things I would prefer... >32 Jeremy53:'s response also resonates a great deal with me, specifically the privilege of having what I need and being pleased and grateful for what I have. "A man is rich in proportion to the number of things which he can afford to let alone."

>33 LesMiserables: Better 10 books to actually read than 1 book to sit on the shelf that you're scared to touch lol.

I consider myself very lucky that I stumbled across FS in 2012 when their books were still quite affordable from them directly and second hand. As a result, I got everything I really wanted back in those days, and before Brexit made things a lot more expensive and difficult on top of other changes. I would have enjoyed the limited editions of Dune and more so A Canticle for Leibowitz, but the price was in those cases just too high for me to tolerate for what you got, so I didn't buy those. Since I still stand behind my view on what they charged for what you got, I don't regret that, though I would have enjoyed the books at a lower price. But that's just not the same as something having been for sale when you didn't know about it or couldn't afford it, and then missing out because it's not available at all or just too expensive on the secondary market. I'm content with what I have and don't have from FS.

Pepys LE in wooden block and Travels in Arabia Deserta

>38 lgreen666:

Luckily I have the Travels in Arabia Deserta and the Pepys LE--but not in the wooden block. I still pine for the wooden block.

>36 jsilver2: Ha ha, yes I hear you. I'm too anxious keep my LEs on my shelf in case of accidental damage, so I have them migrated to a secure vault for security, triple boxed for UV damage and surrounded by hygroscopic desiccant for humidity.
I won't actually read them, but know they are there, safe. ;-)

Okay, totally absurd, but a nugget of truth in there too perhaps!

I had ordered We the last time it was on sale. The package never arrived. In the mean time the book sold out. I got a refund by never had a chance to get the book. Maybe they will do a reprint at some point.

On the flip side of this, are there any ‘desirable’ Folio titles you currently own that you often think you should get rid of but just can’t quite seem to commit to selling / giving away?

When I look at my shelves, the standouts are:
- The Drowned World (I enjoyed it but felt very dated)
- The Worst Journey in the World

Definitely regret not buying the Marple and Poirot books. They were affordable back then and today they are way too overpriced when offers on eBay or elsewhere. I bought some others and those are books I‘ve all read more than once.

Other than that I was mostly successful to get my regrets on the second market. Although I am also currently thinking of getting rid of some, because it’s tempting and the shelve space runneth out…

I would (redacted) for a Mappa Mundi.

Pictorial reviews of many of these desired books, both SE and LE, can be seen in the Folio Archives at https://www.librarything.com/topic/266300

Missed out on "The Rise of Rome" and "And Then There Were None".

Also, Beevor's "Berlin" and "Stalingrad." Although "Stalingrad" isn't too rough on the secondary market.

>44 gmacaree: Mappa Mundi is also one of my regrets - probably my main regret!.

and Finnegans Wake.

But I managed to acquire an Arabia Deserta at auction for a reasonable amount a few years ago :-)

>9 LesMiserables: LesMiserables, interesting list. When they came out I bought Les Miserables, War & Peace and Decameron. Of the three I most like Les Miserables, but then, I read it in high school and the translation I read worked for me. I has been one of my favorite books ever since. Decameron is quite interesting and I like it a lot. I'm not sure why I bought War & Peace, as I had never read it. When I did try to read it it didn't work for me.

>39 podaniel: Know that your pun has not gone unnoticed, sir.

I wish I had bought The Golden Bough when it was on clearance for 50% off. It still evades me on the secondary market for a reasonable price.

Problem for me with The Golden Bough is it's abridged. For less than the price of the FS edition, I got the full 12 volume 3rd edition. With dustwrappers.

Haven't bothered with the newer history books as I've usually got the hardback from when it came out, and I can't justify another £100 or whatever on upgrading something still in pristine condition...

Several titles listed in >9 LesMiserables: >13 wcarter: >24 Son.of.York: were also published by the LEC and the cheaper Heritage Press. While I dare not recommend one translation over another, the LEC titles are among the more affordable 'fine press' books one can purchase these days. I started hunting them when I could not find a corresponding FS edition and soon got lost in the world of George Macy.


>31 stopsurfing: Also should have bought Thus Spake Zarathustra for £15 in the sale or whatever it was…

Your remark compelled a search down memory lane and I'm glad I found my 2018 Summer Sale receipt sooner than later or I might have turned the whole room upside down in my quest [for the truth]... such is my OCD!

Of course, these links also confirm my findings but then we miss the other details, like what £70 (incl. shipping) could buy you at the tail end of the good 'ole days! :)
https://www.librarything.com/topic/292634#6513775
https://www.librarything.com/topic/296381#:~:text=Thus%20Spoke%20Zarathustra%20%...

>52 mr.philistine:
Oh what a difference six years makes!!

>53 wcarter: And only 6 months earlier my humble 1st purchase from FS during the 2018 New Year Sale was enabled by the lively discussion on this thread: https://www.librarything.com/topic/278764

If I remember correctly, a flat rate of only £8 to ship ROW (in my case 5.3kg) was the icing on the cake!

>54 mr.philistine: Oh! To have been a part of those halcyon Jurga and Silvia days!

Beautiful books at very good (during sales) or at least very reasonable prices (without discounts), very good shipping fees, and pre-Brexit no tax (or now more than twice the actual tax due to the new ROW prices) on top of it all. Those were the days. As a rule (there are exceptions) I also preferred the style of illustrations back then, and a lot of the limited editions were a pure joy and something unusual. Suffice it to say, I bought a lot more from FS back then, partly because I was more willing to take a risk on something unknown with the visuals and prices as they were. I certainly wouldn't today.