Invaluable.com Dream Literary Collection

It's close to Christmas (only two days away!) so I thought it'd be fun to do something different. The folks at Invaluable.com, an auction site, contacted me about making a dream literary collection and I thought it'd be fun. Since it's almost Christmas (I'm not going to stop saying that, it took me long enough to get into the Christmas Spirit this year), it sort of ended up as a Christmas wish list of books.

By the way, I should state upfront that I'm not getting paid for this in any form. I'm participating because I want to. Making wishes never hurt.

Anyway, I started out browsing the rare books on invaluable.com and taking note of perfectly good books that I've been wanting.

Like a First Trade Edition of The Tale of Peter Rabbit, because my inner child said so.

And I don't know how many of you were reading this when I was still in IB, but I did write an EE (Extended Essay) comparing Shusaku Endo's Silence and Graham Greene's The Man Within. Sadly, I didn't see these two books, but I did see a first edition of The End of the Affair.

I'm always up for some Graham Greene.

And for the inner child (again), I saw a special edition of Elsie Dinsmore, which I remember reading in the primary school library (I can't remember if I was actually still a primary student at that time, because I spent a lot of time there, even during Secondary School).

This comes with another story called "Rab and his Friends". Never heard of it, but I'm always open to reading more books.

And then, things got... slightly strange. After clicking through pages of medical and legal texts (hi medical and lawyers doing research!), I found that there were Japanese and Chinese books here! You can imagine my eyes sparkling right now, if you want.

The first one I saw was this lot of four Chinese picture books

It looks unassuming, but when I clicked on a preview image...

PRETTY.

And then I saw a Japanese cloth-bound book

And you know, I'm not good at old Japanese. I know enough of standard Japanese to take all my classes in it, but old Japanese stumps me. So I clicked on the book not expecting to understand anything. And then I realised it was full of pictures.

This is when I got excited and went to search for other Japan-related books (I searched for Chinese stuff too, but nothing else caught my eye). And that's how I found the Accordion Book.

According to the description, the whole thing is made of one long piece of paper, and has a bunch of paintings, calligraphy (poetry? short stories? I have no idea) inside.

Looks like a combination of both to me. Makes me want to go learn the old Japanese, but my brain probably won't be able to handle it.

The last book I found is a ukiyo-e (woodblock) collection from the artist Utagawa Hiroshige, called "53 Stations of Tokkaido". I've always liked ukiyo-e, even if I suspect I'm not appreciating it properly, ever since I saw a ukiyo-e exhibition.

I guess I just love the lines and the colours.

This was actually pretty fun. I like looking at pictures of books, and if I had money, I'd probably be bidding on the Chinese picture book and the 53 Stations of Tokkaido, because they are beautiful. And maybe the Accordion one too.

Once again, all the listings can be found at Invaluable.com . Thanks for inviting me to do this, it was really fun :D