dibdin collectors

i am looking to find others that collect thomas frognall dibdin

Since you posted this a month ago without a reply, I doubt many people even know of him and the bibliomania. Do you only collect his work?

I'll say I'd certainly like to collect Dibdin but his works - at least decent copies - tend to be a bit, eh, beyond my means. I have a beaten-up first edition of his "Library Companion" that I'll have rebound someday, but haven't gotten much beyond that. Probably I'll buy a reprint of Bibliomania at some point when one crosses my path.

I'm mainly posting to add a touchstone for Thomas Frognall Dibdin, which may help to attract further comment. Also, jbd1, I sympathize. Dibdin's works are fairly high-priced, especially Bibliomania, or Book Madness. I recently worked in a rare book library that had several very nice early editions of some Dibdin works, but the equivalent editions for sale are all far out of my reach, unfortunately... Even the recent reprints tend to be expensive.

Just in case this might be of use to someone: I've recently found several of Dibdin's works freely available on Google Books, including Bibliomania, or Book-madness, his tours of Scotland and France/Germany, and the 2nd edition of the Introduction to the Knowledge of Rare and Valuable Editions of the Greek and Latin Classics (or vol. 2 only of the 4th edition).

Unfortunately the scans are not always of reliable quality and at least one, I've noticed, is missing a page. But while worse than either originals or facsimiles, they are better than nothing, and if one is sufficiently afflicted with the Dibdinmania, they might provide some small succour for a short time.

There are also a couple of text files online at Project Gutenberg and the Online Books Page, but alas, no Bibliomania.

Bibliomania is available from www.bn.com for about $15 in paperback and $40 in hardback.

I too fall into "Would if I Could". Another source of better digital copies is at archive.org. Full color, includes covers, front and back matter, unlike GoogleBooks.