Note the prefix: rather than talk about their contents, I'm asking you, the members of this lovely forum, to showcase your books as physical items! A bit of a shame I can't do the same for favorite movies or records, however, as I don't have any physical media for those, not unless hard drives count.
First up is not something I would call a favorite, I just include it because of how I use it, both for this post and in general, as a portable table. I could probably take a picture of the whole chart spread out, but that would take a lot of work....what do you think? xD
You'll see a lot of Bibles in this little showcase of mine, as I grew up in a fairly religious household, and most of my extended family are fairly religious, too -- as for me, I suppose I am religious, but all but one of these Bibles I keep more for scholarly or literary reasons. Of all the books I here showcase, this is the only one that's been with me probably since I was born, and one of two books that sparked my bibliophilia. The other one is this book about various noteworthy battles, from the one between Nelson and Napoleon near the Nile delta to the Six Days' War, with these truly remarkable illustrations and photographs, given to my grandfather by his temporary boss from the British embassy....that young me promptly lost, taking it to show and tell.
No, I have not forgiven myself for that, and yes: as much as I love them, I'm not very good at taking care of my books. This particular condensation of Greco-Roman myths, I first read when it was gifted to me by one of my teachers in primary school -- that copy, however, as well as the first, what, two? three copies? succeeding it, I've since lost.
Though not all old books of mine got so wrecked. A Wrinkle in Time was, I believe, the very first novel I read on my own, and I likewise believe that this is that particular copy. It might just be because I'm not much in the habit of rereading novels, whereas something like Edith Hamilton's Mythology, I treated more as a textbook.
Some textbooks do have a lot of sentimental value for me, and there's a few I've read, cover-to-cover, without particular prompting. Most notable of these, I think, are my older sister's world history book, whose historiography was probably pretty bad, but hey, to preteen me the partition of Poland might as well have been a fairy tale. That book, I've since lost, abusing it as much as I'd abused my first few copies of Mythology; this one, which I got much letter, fared much better.
A couple more textbooks I got that I really liked, though I don't remember reading them cover-to-cover. The one on the left, I got for my humanities class in high school, the same one I mentioned for my thread on nudes, but it's the one on the right that's gotten quite sticky over the years....actually, over the one year, as I had this manual open alongside the non-human cadavers me and my mates were dissecting for the college course where this was needed.
And here's a couple more books that I used like textbooks. The one on the left is my copy of Thomas Bulfinch's Mythology, yet another condensation of Greco-Roman (along with Norse, English, Welsh, French, and even a bit of Indian) Mythology that I came to enjoy; the one on the right is my old annotated copy of William Shakespeare's Sonnets, to which I give about a third of the credit for teaching me meter.
This is the physical copy of all of Shakespeare's works that I now use. I found this at a secondhand bookstore I've been visiting ever since I was a kid, from where I also got....
....this chonker of a home economics classic! Where the Oggsford Shakespeare, I got last year, this one I found last week. I can't really call this one a favorite, though, as I've barely used it, and have no intention of going through it cover-to-cover.
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