84
What’s the most you’ve ever spent on a book?
(thelemmy.club)
Excluding textbooks for classes, I bought this for ~$300 (several several years ago as a special treat)
Most of my collection is thrifted/bought from garage sales (for a quarter to a dollar usually) but I do have a handful of nicer ones.
I'm curious what piqued your interest in this book. Was it an engaging read?
My most expensive is probably Dindal's Soil Biology Guide (1990), which cost around $300 as well. The print quality is pathetically bad given the price I paid, the spine came off only a few months after buying. Wiley Blackwell 🤢
$300 book should come with a warranty
It’s a set of commentaries on The Book of Documents/尚书, an ancient compilation of the histories of early Chinese dynasties. That text is very laconic and low on detail, but this book adds a lot of interesting stories in its “interpretation” of what Confucius (supposedly) wrote.
I have an interest in historiography, especially Chinese, and relatively few ancient Chinese texts are available in English translation (especially if you give a shit about accuracy, don’t get me started on the I-Ching…)
It's amazing how rich and ancient China's literary history is. I should make more of an effort to get into Chinese writing, all I've read is Shi Naian's Water Margin which was great fun. Maybe Confucius' Analects would be a good place to start with the really old stuff.
The Analects is pretty approachable, although there can be variation in translation. I’ve been reading portions of it through a Classical Chinese primer and you have to make quite a few decisions when you translate it into English. One of the weird things is that nouns can act as verbs, so something like “father father, son son” means “a father acting as a father, a son acting as a son.”
The big thing is to be very wary of any translations of Daoist thought or the I-Ching. I would only trust academic translations. Daoism tends to attract cranks who understand it as a hippie thing, when it is more complicated than that.
Ancient books aren't supposed to be engaging