Finds book at second hand shop > good book. Let’s get it. Get home to find the book already on my shelf.

My ebooks folder is backed up, so you might say all of them

I’d have to look, but I’m pretty sure I have 3 sets of the Lord of the Rings?

🤔

Used to be 4, I had a set of crappy paperbacks and wanted something nicer, so I bought the “Millennium Edition”:

Which LOOKS great, but the paper is EVEN WORSE than the crappy paperbacks.

For years I looked around for the red hardback edition which was out of print. One would pop up every now and then, but would be damaged or written in or something.

https://ebay.io/m/FgPQa9

Finally scored a clean copy of that, donated the crappy paperbacks to my little free library, kept the Millennium Edition because it is so very, very, pretty.

And then they came out with an illustrated edition with Tolkien’s own illustrations…

Fine.

I have no multiple copies, I’ve stopped collecting physical books and almost exclusively use my e- reader. Storing books is so space consuming I just can’t justify it anymore. The only hardcopies I own at this point are gifts from other people that I held on to for that reason.

Ulysses. One copy in English, three copies in my native language. It has been historically translated by three different people, and the versions vary wildly from one another (and in one case, even from the source). It’s been one of the Joys (haha, get it?) of re-reading it so many times.

• Watership Down (I have a hardback large print that is for display purposes only and then I have the copy that I have taken to the beach many times, it is one of my beach reads).
• The Harry Potter Books. I have a set that I have reread many times and then a box set that that has a picture the runs across all the spines.
• Many different sets of The Lord of The Rings with one additional copy of The Two Towers. I borrowed it from a friend in college and never returned it. I have kept it on the off chance I remember to give it back
• The Stand, I have the Abridged and Unabridged versions. (Not sure if that counts)

If you are including Graphic Novels

• I have the original V For Vendetta editions and a combined version that I got to let my kid read.
• Same with The Dark Knight Returns and Electra Assassin.

I have multiple copies of Cloud Atlas because I let it out not expecting to get it back but people returned it.

Also you should read Cloud Atlas.

I have two copies of Stephen King’s IT in hardcover. The first one is missing an entire signature around page 900 or so. I wrote to the publisher and they sent me a new one with all the pages.

I have three copies of I Kill Giants, because every time they release a new edition I buy it again.

It’s a really, really good book.

I think only two now:

• The Hobbit - one large, illustrated edition but also my original paperback version, which I am loath to let go
• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy - both my wife and I are very fond of our individual copies.

I do have two versions of Plato’s Symposium, but one is in a volume along with the Karma Sutra, and another is with a couple of other Socratic dialogues, so not really the same book as such.

I have a one book edition of The Lord of the Rings I bought over 20 years ago. Reading it can be uncomfortable for my hands, being a fairly hefty book and not the easiest to hold. To remedy this, I bought another edition that’s divided into three books and also includes The Hobbit, just so it’d be easier for me to read. But because I’m a sentimental dumbass, I still occasionally pick up the older edition I’ve read many times, because I have affection for it. I love the green cover with a nice painting of Gandalf. Other than that, I don’t think I have any book with multiple copies.

I have multiple copies of several books by Jack Vance, including Tales of the Dying Earth, Araminta Station, and a few of the Demon Princes and Planet of Adventure series. Old school SF is cool

I have two copies of So You Want to Be a Wizard by Diane Duane, which is the original version, not the first edition, but the first one I could get ahold of, and then a tenth anniversary edition just because I liked the art on the dust jacket.

I have hyperlexia, and decent eidetic memory, so it’s difficult for me to reread a book. If I forget that I’ve read a book and I start reading it, I make it to about page 3 and I remember the entire story and I’m like, okay, I can’t read this anymore.

But, so you want to be a wizard by Diane Duane is the first book I’ve ever been able to read more than once. I’m actually due for a reread. It’s been about three years. I’ve probably read it 10 or 15 times.

It is an amazing book and there’s still new things I’m discovering about it after all of this time, which is gobsmacking for a story written for pre-teens.

It also does not hurt that Diane Duane is on blue sky, and she’s actually a person whom I ideologically agree with, which makes me feel good.

The only other stories that I’ve ever been able to read more than once are the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant the Unbeliever, the First and second Trilogy, but that’s only because those stories are so grammatically dense and so large that even with my pretty good memory, it’s hard for me to remember everything that has happened in them.

I didn’t care for the final quadrilogy. I did read it to its completion, but it didn’t have the same gravitas as the first two trilogies.

But I have multiple copies of the first book of the series in the Chronicles of Thomas Covenant because one is the first copy I ever bought, the second one is a signed first edition, and the third one is one that matches the rest of the books in the series as far as the sizing so that it looks good on a shelf.

House of Leaves

I have multiple copies of Love at Goon Park which is a biography of Harry Harlow. I use it in seminars and it’s out of print. Also I keep extra copies of books I frequently lend - On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt, Cynefin by Dave Snowden and friends, The Peter Principle by Laurence J. Peters, and The Toyota Way by Thomas Liker.