Second Hand Specials

Hello everyone! 

A couple of weeks ago I wrote a little haul post about the books I had recently picked up in charity shops. This post seemed to go down really well with you guys and I even had a few requests to do a post on my more special charity shop finds :-) 

Now I could wax lyrical about the wondrous books you can find tucked away in charity and second hand book stores, but I did that last time! Sometimes I can go for ages without finding anything at all, but then other times I do fantastically. One day last summer was particularly lucky! I was out in our local town of Lymington with my best friend checking out all the shops, she collects books so she knows what she's looking for, when we stumbled upon these four beauties all in one day. 

I'm going to start with the least exciting in terms of rarity and monetary value. Well to me it has a lot of value, but Terry Pratchett is my favourite author. Nation is one of his stand alone books which takes place outside of the discworld. When it was first released it took the world by storm and was turned into a very successful West End play in London. I adored this book and re-read it so many times that my paperback was definitely looking worse for wear. Sadly, as so often happens, I lent it to somebody and never got it back! I can't remember who I lent it to though, so I can't even chase it up. This hardback edition is a beautiful blue clothbound with a lovely dust jacket for protection. I love the inside cover with the dark blue dotted with stars and a tiny crab in the corner. It's so perfect. The story follows a young native boy who is swept onto an island after a tsunami. Slowly he finds other castaways and tries to rebuild a home with them. It is all going smoothly until a real ship is found tangled in the swamp... It is a wonderful tale of adventure, survival and coming of age :-) 

These next two form a set. They are published by Folio Society and form part of their classics collection. Any book fan or collector will know how stunning all Folio Society books are. I haven't actually got around to reading these two yet and I might actually read these on my Kindle or borrow some from the library as these aren't exactly easy to carry around. Such hefty tomes are beautiful, but hardly practical. I love the story of the Three Musketeers and adore the old movies and the newer tv series. I believe I got these for £3 each which is an absolute steal and I almost felt as though I was robbing the shop by getting them so cheap! 

These illustrations are superb and really capture the story!

Finally, this is my favourite of the bunch! Tolkien is one of my comfort authors, I like to read his novels in times of stress or around exam periods and the Hobbit is such an easy little book to get into. This edition is actually quite rare and old, it is a first edition of the illustrated copies by Michael Hague and published in 1984. It does have a dust jacket, but I just love this green cloth binding so much. It is stamped with the gold Tolkien insignia like all of his clothbound books and it looks so fresh and intriguing. It's definitely a jewel in my collection and I was so happy to stumble on it. I think this one was also £3! Online I believe these go for much more, but I'm not interested so much in that side of it. I like to keep pretty editions from my favourite authors for sentimental value. 

That is all of the special books I have found so far :-) If you guys love this kind of post and want updates if I get lucky again then please let me know in the comments below. Have you guys found any stunning books? 

xoxo

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