Building your Library

As the world starts to edit and reform the books you grew up with, and we learn that digital information isn't as robust as it once seemed, we need to build our own physical libraries

We all know that censorship is coming for everything which isn't already part of the “The Message”. We’ve seen edited versions of Roald Dahl’s beloved children’s books and we now have the spectre of a literary James Bond who seems to believe everything the average Guardian reader does.

You need information and inspiration, education and enjoyment from a personal library. The trick to doing this is to do it gradually and cheaply. I could actually turn a profit on second hand books, but it's not worth all the messing around with postage, packaging and post office queues. Instead I use a handful of charity shops (they sell donated goods cheaply) and ebay for most of everything.

Tips I've found so far

• Look for deals on ebay, lots of big sellers have discounts for buying 2+ books. Amazon can also be good for some second hand books but compare prices and editions carefully. It's not unusual to see a "rare" edition of a book for £200 when there's actually a new edition in print for £15

• Popular fiction typically takes 18-24 months to trickle through as donations, then it's everywhere and cheap.

• Keep a list of books on your phone if you are buying several in a series or from the same author. It's better to go by titles than covers as multiple covers exist, especially as there's usually a different one for different markets.

• Know who publishes decent hardback/hardcover editions of classics and important books. Here that means people like Everyman and the Folio society. Their books certainly come up second hand, and have usually been well looked after. Lots of the everyman series were bought by libraries, and seldom read or issued.

• Any book with a year in the title - an atlas or factbook for example - is basically going to be almost free in a year or two. The information probably hasn't changed.

• Lots of 1920s-1960s DIY and home management books contain all sorts of plans, formulas and serious information.

• Most political books don't age well and aren't worth buying beyond supporting people. Ones from the 90s and 00s are now basically only readable for historic interest.

• Lots of classics are also unreadable to us now - huge sections of late 19th century literature consist of three page long paragraphs of adjectives where nothing happens. This stuff was the tv series of its day and isn't objectively good - it was just widely sold and read. Simply being old doesn’t make something worth reading.

• People automatically think of certain books as being permanent - the Bible, Shakespeare, a few other high end classics. It's easy and cheap to find Some solid editions of these. Due to their prevalence they will be some of the last books removed, edited or reformulated. Homer probably comes into this category too. Older translations will often be less politicised than modern ones - the Classics field has become a minefield.

• Hard cover books outlast softcover books by a factor of ten, and rarely have any price premium second hand.

• Some books will vanish from the world due to their poor quality of printing and construction - pulpy stuff like detective and cowboy books are probably at highest risk of this.

• Cookbooks are probably the single most overpriced type of book. They are bulky, expensive and rarely used by anyone. There are a few which are genuinely worth reading, but especially once you get to TV chefs they’re usually just the same stuff in a new wrapper.

• Niche books turn up more often than you think. I've picked up some fairly specific books on the Russian civil war and WW1 Austria for next to nothing just by looking regularly.

• 90% of what's good will turn up where richer people donate, but poorer places also have some great finds. It either comes from house clearances, the self educated or people who lived there before the urbanisation ruined the place.

• I have literally picked up boxes of books on the street, this has included a sewing manual and some stuff on ancient Egypt. People put boxes out to be taken away with rubbish collection or just because they're lazy.

• Find where the bigger publishers dump stuff. I've got most of Jordan Peterson and Nicholas Taleb's books for £1 as they really didn't sell as well as the noise around them would suggest. Not read them either yet, but they're there.

• A second hand bookshop which also sells remaindered books is a good thing to find. I miss the old days of Galloway and Porter in Cambridge, where you could pick up all sorts of excellent and unusual books for tiny prices.

• Lots of fiction, especially the first book in a series or an author's debut book, can have a different title in the US and UK. Check prices for both.

• Some people pay a premium for dust jackets, slip covers and so on. They don't really do much, are basically sacrificial and take up space. Take them if they're there but don't pay extra for it.

• Use bookmarks, don't turn over the damn corners.

• You can find all sorts of weird stuff in old books - letters, postcards, flyers from events 50 years ago.

• Kids stuff will soon be at a premium - especially non “message” things. There was even a news story about one Canadian school system banning all children’s books published before 2008. If you search for things like "incomplete set" you'll turn up some good deals. Lots of earlier era stuff has been reprinted, especially outdoors things like Dan Beard and Thomas Seton

• Translations tend to come either when a book is popular, or after it’s out of copyright/print and cheaper to do. If you can deal with some clunkier language search for the older ones, there's also less chance of modern political attitudes driving the translation. Translation is its own special topic.

• Let people know you take old books, you'll get offered all sorts of things as people downsize.

• If you buy something and it's crap, just donate it again. If it never sells anywhere it can just be pulped like a female comedian's memoirs.

• Biographies tend to be at their most readable when written by someone who knew and liked the subject. The "critical" one written 10-20 years after their death is often the worst one. Anything which seems to be “authoritative” is probably overlong and in dire need of editing. If there’s a biography written by someone who used to go drinking with the subject, then it’s far more likely to be worth reading.

• Don't be put off by books written by left wingers of the past. A lefty professor of the 1960s would be seen as an ultra-right wing Uber-Nazi today.

• Libraries often sell off old/unwanted stock now they are generally becoming computer centres or doss houses.

• Avoid the facsimile reprints of old books. They're poorly made, badly scanned and next to unreadable as a result.

Any other tips or ideas for building up a small library against the monolith that is modern publishing and censorship?