User:MagicKey

Status: logging in at least every couple days, unless noted. [Online again on 2016-03-20 after 3 months off.]

Experience: newbie; my first submission was 2014-09-28.

Bio: Youthful collecting--of baseball cards, coins, stamps, rocks, Marvel comics--faded with adolescence. I loved Brave New World and 1984, and they permanently tilted my taste in fiction toward SF. With college graduation, collecting resumed, mostly SF 1st US paperback printings bought at used book sales. (I take Canadian & UK too, but just don’t see them often.) However most books went unread, because I had workaholic tendencies. Now retired, I read more, and with more focus.

Biblio: I needed a list of what I had. Without it, I bought books already owned. I wanted to know about name and title variants, otherwise I might buy the same work. (Yes, sometimes I bought duplicates by design for possible trade later.) What else did the author write? When? Was it a fix-up, an expansion, abridged, or part of a series? Did it win an award? What about artists? I had been using the best literary guide, the online Science Fiction Encyclopedia (SFE3), to organize my books, and there stumbled upon the ISFDB, the best bibliographic guide. For over a year I shamelessly exploited the ISFDB while giving nothing back.

Because paperbacks were the most common books bought, and because I buy used, more than 99% of mine already are listed in the ISFDB, and over 90% already are Primary Verified. I can still contribute, typically older books less often owned, less popular authors, recent books that no one has done yet, and/or books farther away from core genre SF. For the near future, my work will be from books-in-hand.

Resources: I have the original Clute/Nicholls and a cd-rom, though I haven’t looked at them since SFE3 went live, and I have the Clute/Grant, though I rarely look at it since I prefer SF to fantasy. Frequently I consult this: The Official Price Guide Paperbacks First Edition (February 1991) by Jon Warren. It tried to list all U.S. and Canadian paperbacks (including digests but excluding tp) published to 1959; for SF only, coverage runs as late as early 1970s, depending on publisher.