Thursday, February 1, 2007

Hints for the Purchase of Books

These hints come from Rev. Samuel Macauley Jackson's "A Ministerial Library", appended to Philip Schaff's Theological Propaedeutic, p. 539.

  1. Buy the latest edition, even although an earlier one can be obtained for much less money.
  2. Buy the work in the original language, save in those exceptional cases where either the translator has presented his author in more intelligible form than the author does himself, or the author or translator has incorporated in the translation matter correcting or supplementing the original.
  3. Buy the work in the edition published in the country of its origin, if the work has gone into a revised edition, e.g., but English books in English editions, because scholarly authors commonly alter, enlarge, or correct their matter in the subsequent editions, whereas the reprint is generally of the first edition unaltered.
  4. Bogus reprints can be detected by the abscence of an American copyright notice.
  5. The new books be found authoratively reviewed.

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