As for individual copies of books, I could have been interested in them, too, in a living sense. The first edition of a work would have been more precious to me than the others, but by that I would have meant the edition in which I had read it for the first time. I would look for the original editions, by which I mean those from which I had received an original impression of the book. Because subsequent impressions are not original. In the case of novels, I would collect old-fashioned bindings, the ones from the period when I read my first novels and which so often would have heard Papa
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