Where do you get your ultb

I was looking over my mere 30 ultb and realized, most of my ultb are not coming from used bookstores. I am getting them from regular retail bookstores.

Retail Bookstore...9.....30.00%
"Inherited"..........8.....26.67%
Other................8.....26.67%
Used Bookstore...4.....13.33%
Library Discard....1......3.33%

I consider Inherited book to be previously own by someone other than me now in my procession, other than as a gift.

How about you?

No clue; don't keep track of book sources. Wish I had but too late now. Just as a guess, a lot are technical publications and were probably ordered from Amazon.

The Esperanto League of North America sells used books online, $5 a pound sight unseen. It's a pretty good source. Estate sales were also a good source. Buying books for Project Gutenberg has given me a number of books that I wouldn't otherwise buy or keep that are ultbs.

Jes sed ne tiuj libroj En Esperanto?

I don't tag or log provenance, but a quick look at my books seems to indicate that most ultb are used, whether from a used bookstore, library discard or church rummage sale (most), or bought from biblio.com or eBay. On a random sample page, 38% were bought new, but mostly in unusual venues such as a Chinese-language bookstore in Toronto, a museum in Italy, local history section of a bookstore in Inverness. Counting new books from eBay and Biblio/Abebooks which I included in the 38% new, again these were ordered from far-flung places e.g. Hungary, the North Coast of Scotland, etc. The following page was similar with 30% new from such venues as the Ukranian "pavilion" at Toronto's ethnic festival Caravan, Catholic bookstores, a quilting store, and educational book suppliers. Only a few were off the shelf of a mainstream bookstore.

418 books... too many to check them all. :)

I get mine from the ULTB Bookstore of course! They only sell items that are unique to LibraryThing. ;-)

P.S. None of you are allowed to shop there. Sorry.

I get my ULTBs mostly from thrift shops and rummage sales. I am not sure why this works, but here are a couple of speculations:

(1) People in the northern and western suburbs of Philadelphia are so smart that even their discards are interesting, or

(2) These folks are silly and buy obscure books that they find they don't like, then discard them.

To be fair to my neighbors, I should add

(3) I am the only person around here willing to spend 25 cents or so on books nobody else wants.

For me, just over 1/3 (12 from 34) were bought new when the books were still in print (i.e. at full cover price.)

6 are from second-hand sources of various types (from a belgian flea market to antiquarian shops)

2 were gifts, bought new

2 were remaindered stock (a discount bookseller)

The rest were acquired at conferences or otherwise through work - sometimes handed down from retiring co-workers.

6 of my 28 concern pretty obscure American Civil War personalities or subjects that no one else (apparently) is interested in bought mostly from amazon, although I got one of them at a hardware store that is long since out of business. There are a few ancient books from my grandparents' house concerning Quakers and religion, a couple of regional cookbooks bought in Florida and Iowa, a children's book from the grandparent's house, a couple of regional mysteries gotten from a friend, a law book given me by a co-worker, a children's book bought on amazon and a book about a cat who is a knight bought over this past weekend at the local (and only) independent bookstore.

I couldn't tell you precisely where all of my ULTB's come from but I have just picked up my latest one from the local Saturday market.

I bought two ultb's at a garage sale today...but the seller had had a store of some kind, or a booth at an antique mall. My finds:
Come and Caper (a children's songbook) and That Curious World of Nature (nature & geography of the USSR).

I just counted - and I have four children's songbooks which are ultb. Interesting to me, anyway!

Well my latest ULTB, Things for the surgeon, involves body-snatching. Interesting to me, anyway!

Most of mine are used books - from yard sales, library book sales, church sales, whatever. Very few from used book stores, actually. Oh, and quite a few are mooched - which means used and got through Bookmooch. I do have some I bought new, mostly music books - filk, which doesn't have a lot of followers. Not doing a full breakdown, but 27 of my 120 are filk books that I think I bought direct from the artists. Plus a couple eBay and con finds.

Possibly a few of what look like ULTBs to me might need combining, but at the moment I have one inherit, one from a supermarket, two from discount bookstores, six from mainstream highstreet bookstores, seven gifts and two from internal publisher warehouse sales... :-D

* 57 of mine are sheet music, which has mostly been inherited, bought at library sales, or gifted to me
* 227 (at least) were purchased in Mexico (where they have some marvelous used bookstores, mostly in Mexico City)
* 62 (at least) were purchased in Madrid (mix of used and new)
* 7 were purchased in Guatemala
* 2 were purchased in Honduras

The remaining 180 were not well tracked, but look mostly like online purchases from eBay, Amazon marketplace, Powells, etc., but some were from brick-and-mortar used bookstores. Most of these are also in Spanish.

Out of my 53 ultbs 1 is a magazine that I have no idea where I got it.

I have been know to purchase boxes of books at estate auctions and 19 of them came that way.

I picked up 8 at various antique malls / shows.

6 are from Google books.

13 I got for classes over the last few years.

5 came from eBay

1 is from the Conner Prairie living history site near Indianapolis.

A lot of mine are Sotheby's auction catalogs; quite a few are guidebooks to small museums.

Out of the current 84 :

5 - Thrift shop / Used
2 - Contest or promotional giveaway
7 - Bought new
8 - Gifts
62 - Inherited or belonging to close family

1) The majority of my ULTBs are japanese-language books, bought through amazon.co.jp or ebay.

2) I collect books about hamsters. I've managed to find a number and some are old and out-of-print, but hardly rare or sought-after, so unless a member inherited the book from their gramma, there'd be little chance of anyone having a copy.

3) One of my ULTBs was a book I was required to buy for a college course on the "Psychology of Gender". The book deals with a (fictional) sect of monks who are all eunuchs. I have a suspicion that this particular book was written by a friend of the course professor and was a "vanity publishing" type of thing. Indeed, checking into this further, although the book is listed on Amazon, there is only 1 copy available from an outside seller and the publisher is listed as Xlibris, which is a service that YOU pay to have your work published, rather than the other way 'round.

4) Two of my ULTBs come from an independent bookstore specializing in selling remaindered books for a fraction of their "list" price. Both are beautiful art books and I was surprised that either of them would be a ULTB. I'm guessing that large booksellers such as Barnes & Noble, etc., weren't interested in carrying the titles because they aren't nice happy pretty art books, they're somewhat avant-garde, "strange" art books, so they simply weren't carried in many places so other LT members would have been rather unlike to run across them at all, let alone buy them.

5) I have quite a few fake ULTBs. CAN SOMEONE TELL ME HOW I CAN HELP THE SITE OUT BY TELLING ME HOW I CAN DO THIS "COMBINING" THING??? Specific example: Here is the page for my "ULTB" copy of Sabotage Cafe: http://www.librarything.com/work/9704488/details/57837123 and here is another page for the same book, owned by 42 other members: http://www.librarything.com/work/2726217 How can I link my edition up with this page that already includes a number of combined editions, but not MY edition?

>19 unicoherent:
5) Usually through the author page is the easiest way. However - there is some problem with your single copy as it shows as a 0 copies - and that is why it is not visible on the author page...

19...Combining on LibraryThing turns out to be a pretty arcane business, so I suggest you not leap in until you've been by the Combiners group and had a chat with them. I've been around for a while, and if I needed combining done I would ask someone to do it for me.

Robert

>19 unicoherent:, >20 AnnieMod:
Following the link to alucek's copy of Sabotage Cafe tells me it is a private book. I thought you couldn't combine private works.

19> Post something in the Combiner! group page. They are happy to fix these kind of things.

Books on Hamsters? Non that is a interesting collection. 27 Books about them at that! I like this one. The Wild Hamster Whats the cover look like?

>22 abbottthomas:

It is the "bug" I suspect - if a book cannot be found it is presumed private. Although it can as well be private. .
If you remove the book info and just look at the work, it is http://www.librarything.com/work/9704488 which has 0 copies. I can combine it if needed but it should not be saying 0 copies if it really exists...

PS: And someone decided to combine both works anyway -- I still think there is an udnerlying issue here but oh well

A few of the books in my hamster book collection are non-fiction, "how-to-care-for-your-pet" type books, but only like 4 or so, and I got all of them as a kid before I started collecting hamster books. I certainly _could_ increase the size of my collection by buying more books of that genre, but they don't interest me all that much. All the others** are children's fiction where the main character/narrator (if not ALL the characters) are hamsters. There are many more out there that I will probably buy someday when I student loans aren't breathing down my neck and all. Like there's a whole series about a hamster named Freddy (Freddy in Peril! Freddy to the Rescue!) and also a bunch about another fictional ham named Humphrey that all have titles of the form "____ According to Humphrey" Ex: Friendship According to Humphrey, Summer According to Humphrey, etc. and then there are the books by Carl Norac which are meant for really really little kids and have titles like "I love to cuddle".

**When I said "All the others" were fiction I was actually lying. One, entitled "Happy Hamster" is actually a recipe/lol-cat-photo-esque book where you are given directions on how to make special meals for your hamster and lots of pictures are included depicting hamsters eating the end product of each recipe that also have speech bubbles saying random things... usually just things like "yum!" or "goodie!" - not weird or humorous things, so really kinda superfluous. But adorable all the same. When I saw this book I thought it HAD to have been written by a teenaged Japanese girl, but turns out to have been by a 30-something-year-old dude from the Netherlands. In his author photo he looks likes he's on speed or something *grin* And then there is "The Hamster History of Britain" which I guess is non-fiction? The book writes about actual some events actual events in the history of Britain, though it is very, very condensed & simplified (it is largely a picture book, made for kids without the attention span for much) with the caveat that all the characters are hamsters, not humans. But other than an incorrect depiction of the species to which the historical figures belong, I don't think there are any other outright errors, thus I'd consider it non-fiction.

As to the covers, most of my hamster books are coverless, and I can't find pics online, so I've been meaning to scan, but low priority tasks tend to go undone so long they get forgotten *wry look of 'what can you do?'* I'll put it on my computerized to-do list and see if having it visually written down will inspire me to act upon it. Most likely it will... if only as a way to put off doing some else! *grin & sigh*

And thanks to the several of you for recommending asking the combiners group about my question!

TO MISERICORDIA
RE 23>
I actually _have_ gotten around to scanning at least some of the covers of books from my hamster collection that had no cover. Didn't have the enthusiasm to finish 'em all off in one go, but as a gesture to you I picked out The Wild Hamster to scan before I went off to other things. It should be visible now. He's not very wild looking in the picture. Nor is he wild in his demeanor in the story. Quite docile really. The plot, which is very basic b/c it's a very short children's picture book, is that the hamster (in a time long, long ago) keeps eating and grows bigger and bigger until he's larger than an elephant. The villagers are afraid of him and want to send him away, but the child who loves him has a better idea: a giant wheel is built for him to run in which provides power for a mill. The villagers profit amply from this and the constant exercise prevents the hamster from growing any larger. And that tradition has been carried on to this day, which is why hamsters are given wheels to run in.

I also added a book to the site manually, but it was a normally published one, it just wasn't in the system because it's written in Chinese and is not the sort of book that a Chinese university would have in its collection since the intention of the book is to teach readers how to swear in English. And not just mild swearing either - it gets really nasty! But having gone through the process of adding a book manually, I am now left with more questions about how I would add a book of my own making. There is no publication data whatsoever. There is no author for some of the books (I guess I could list myself and put the word "editor" in parenthesis after my name). There is no ISBN, no Dewey Decimal classification, some of the books contain no words at all - only images, so do they even have a primary language? You could say the language of the title is the primary language, but what if the title is "mth" (the initials of the artist whose ink drawings provide the content of the book)? It seems like the only information on the form that I could truly provide would be the title, the dimensions, the pagination, and a summary. I'm sure there are ways around this - under publication data you specify "personal handbinding" or some other agreed-upon term, and list the "publication date" as the date when you finished it, but it still seems weak.

Yes, sounds about right. The only thing that's required for a manually-added book is a title; I'd add you as author and put Editor as your role (it's the small field right after the Author field, on the same line), then in the Other Authors section put the artist's name and put the role Illustrator. Publication data would be something like "personal handbinding" or "self-published", and the date would be when you finished it. You could put in a language - your normal language, perhaps? - as the original and primary languages - or leave those fields blank, if there's no language (no text) in the book. Certainly no ISBN; you could probably figure out a DDC number, by looking for similar art books and applying that number, or looking at the MDS categories and picking one (http://www.librarything.com/mds/0) and drilling down as you feel appropriate.

There are a lot of books and book-like objects that don't have all the info - consider what actually gets filled out when you add a book through the Add Books page. There's often no language or physical dimensions info, authors may be wrong, Other Authors may be skipped...Don't worry about filling out every field, fill out what you want to know about the book.