In which I am a lucky snotball...
Where I live, we have a Steam and Gas Engine Show every Labor Day. This year, there was a flea-market as well. I went towards the end of the show and was just looking around. One of the stalls that was starting to pack up had a few piles of some older looking books. I've recently gotten into collecting old book and magazines, so I asked the man what he was selling them for. He said he'd been selling them for a dollar, but he didn't want to re-pack and haul them off, so he'd let them go for a quarter. Before I could so much as say "Thanks" he changed his mind and said I could have as many of them as I wanted for free (there were a lot of them there, they obviously weren't selling). So I grabbed a bunch of the older ones. One of them was a copy of "Uncle Tom's Cabin". There was no copyright date printed inside, but someone had written on the inside title page (to the best I can make out, anyway) "To my dear little Clement with love from Paulina. Dec. 25, 1918".
I was floored. The oldest book I own is from 1938. So I ended up thanking the man about three times before I finally left. I have no idea how much a book of it's age and condition would be worth money-wise, but I've now held in my hands a book that is nearly one hundred years old, and that feels pretty special to me. Like a piece of history.
I hope to bring it to the local Historical Preservation Society to see if they can tell me anything. I hope there's a way to restore the binding, which is loose.
Otherwise it's in good condition from what I can tell. Admittedly, I'm hardly an expert.