Excluding textbooks for classes, I bought this for ~$300 (several several years ago as a special treat)

Most of my collection is thrifted/bought from garage sales (for a quarter to a dollar usually) but I do have a handful of nicer ones.

I'm curious what piqued your interest in this book. Was it an engaging read?

My most expensive is probably Dindal's Soil Biology Guide (1990), which cost around $300 as well. The print quality is pathetically bad given the price I paid, the spine came off only a few months after buying. Wiley Blackwell 🤢

I bought a hustler from my friends older brother for $50 in high school.

I spent like $100 on C++ books. Still got them, somewhere.

I just spent $60 on a book that will probably cost me about $150 to get rebound.

Its John Dillon's "The Middle Platonist's" and its been really fascinating to read it as part of my desire to be educated on the history of Platonism and its eventual turn into a religion.

Its inspired me to start now a couple modern Plato clubs and I want to give my personal copy the love it deserves as the reprint is ass lol.

Here's a pic of it

The red copy is the library copy I was working out of when I first started Justin Sledges middle platonism seminar. The blue is The modern reprint and the page usage is atrocious lol. I can't wait to get it rebound and cut down normally

$200+ on a textbook (many years ago, even) which netted me $25 when I sold it back to the college. What a racket.

I have a large box of technical books. C, C++, Java, Linux admin, UNIX, etc. My local bookstore no longer takes them. What do I do with them? Book burning party? :-/

I bought the Compact Oxford English Dictionary (the one with micrographic text) as a gift for a friend who was a linguistics major. It was also around $300.

A little over $100, for this book.

I think about $125 usd for a biochem textbook

$300 book should come with a warranty

I bought the complete Calvin and Hobbs collection when it first came out in 2005 for $150

I'd be really curious to know myself. Outside of college textbooks, I don't think I've spent more than 100 on any given book. Probably not even 80.

I can think of some art books that may have run me up into 40-70, like the Yoshitaka Amano book with FF work. Or the NES Ultimate guide from Contri. The Brawl in the Family comics in print probably cost over 100 actually, but then that's also 3 books.

I can think of a couple I've had eyes on that are pricey tho. The Art of Computer Programming from Knuth isn't rare, but a set would certainly be a nice, and costly, symbol of rigor I wish I had. Best Before (Newman) or English editions of Florent Gorges's Nintendo history books seem uncommon enough to be expensive.

$30

Edit: No, wait. That's a lie. I had some expensive text books at university, but that doesn't really count.

X-Men #4 (1st appearance of Quicksilver and Scarlet Witch) ran me something like $4,000? I forget exactly.

https://gocollect.com/comic/x-men-4

£120 on a pristine copy of The Biographical History of Electricity and Magnetism.

Mine are helping hold up a shelf somewhere.

I spent about 4k on leather bound books for authors Brandon Sanderson and Robert Jordan

Not one book necessarily but I've spent a solid number of bills on a shelf's worth of Headstamp Publishing books.

Not that much. Probably around $30-40USD at an anime con for a manga, not including the secondary one I got that kinda doubled the price.

Otherwise, for books plural, not me, but I am sure the Christmas gift boxset of a manga series I got probably around $100+USD would be the most expensive books I've seen purchased. College textbooks excluded.

I spent $120 $282 on the paperback set of WoT and that is also my most expensive "single" book purchase.

Edit: Nope I lied. I spent $120 on the ebook set, the paperbacks were more expensive.

That's a great deal imo. I've already hunted down first editions for each book, but I found them all at thrift shops so I really lucked out too.

Personally spent? Around $15? Definitely between 10-15.

Most expensive book I have? Probably around $40-50 brand new.

I don't see any reason to buy expensive sets.

This is mine too!

Ancient books aren't supposed to be engaging

Excluding textbooks and technical manuals.

$300 for an OED dictionary. $60 for an illustrated book of poetry as a gift.

Depends on definition of book. I have bought (and read!) the Encyclopedia Britannica. Was 7000DM, about 3500 dollar plus 40 years of inflation.

Tolkien was my reason. Well, would have been if my mom hadn't bought me the beautiful integral edition of LOTR with the Alan Lee drawings. It retails for 300€+.

Personally I've dropped 100 bucks for two graphic novels (it was "Les Cités Obscures", I just fucking love Schuiten's drawings). My mom completed the set for my next Christmas + bday.

This made me realize I'm lucky to have a mother who loves books so much. If there's a nice book I just know I will get it as a gift eventually 😄

30$, only because it was the mtg books that came from the box, cards,,,etc. i only did it until i cant justify buying it anymore, since i dont play mtg after hs.

loadbearing book.

35€ on feefal's art book and I think 30€ for Al Pacino's biography, translated, as a gift for my mom.
Most books I buy are old and generally cheaper.

The modern reprint must be the special Fermat edition.

I had to buy this giant Economics textbook, only for the teacher to create video lessons per chapter about which parts from it can be scrapped. Over three quarters ended up scrapped.

A racket indeed.

Yeah my encyclopaedia eorzea books were like £35 each iirc and the art book I have was similar. But in terms of normal books I don't think I've spent more than like £15 ( brand new stormlight books so chunky hardback)

I think the most expensive book I ever purchased I believe is The Art of Berserk for around a $100 due to tax and customs sinc eI ordered it from Japan. Also the book is put of print which makes it expensive. I do have manga boxsets, but these are multiple books so I don't think they account. So my most expensive books are art books.

Early 00's I bought Dante's Divine Comedy in full size, parchment paper, stitched volumes, with paper covers. It's the most luxury print/pulp look I've ever stumbled upon. The three books set me back by €60 then. Adjusting for inflation, I'd risk they be priced at around €100 today.

Im looking at World Book sets on ebay. Brand new, they go for around a grand. So im looking at ebay for older sets, they run a couple hundred it seems. Gonna get a set for the house for my kid to use.

My husband got me the Game of Thrones book series a couple years ago, I dont think theyre cheap, but most books I have cost less than $20.

I bought a signed leather bound edition of Ender's Game for $220 in 2001. I sold it in 2019 for $1500. I also have all but one of Donald Grant editions of Stephen King's Dark Tower books (the one I'm missing cost $600 in 2001 and is likely many thousands now) for roughly $100 each back in the early 2000s. Most are worth a few hundred now. I have a lot of old Stephen King first editions that are worth a few hundred each.

I was gifted a first edition The Pearl by Steinbeck that is worth $3000 now. It was a special gift from my mom, so I'll never sell that. I also know whatever she did pay back then would have been a lot for her, so it's even more special.

It’s a set of commentaries on The Book of Documents/尚书, an ancient compilation of the histories of early Chinese dynasties. That text is very laconic and low on detail, but this book adds a lot of interesting stories in its “interpretation” of what Confucius (supposedly) wrote.

I have an interest in historiography, especially Chinese, and relatively few ancient Chinese texts are available in English translation (especially if you give a shit about accuracy, don’t get me started on the I-Ching…)

It's amazing how rich and ancient China's literary history is. I should make more of an effort to get into Chinese writing, all I've read is Shi Naian's Water Margin which was great fun. Maybe Confucius' Analects would be a good place to start with the really old stuff.

About £40 importing a copy of Relativity Visualised. I absolutely love it.

Then I spent about $90 getting a copy of the Red Wheelbarrow Mr Robot book. Im a huge fan of the series.

$300 for the art book from Control

Worth it

I got Brandon Sanderson's Way of Kings leather-bounds, which were definitely the most I've spent on a book, but my second place is more interesting.

I found a copy of a book called, Our Lost Explorers: the Jeannette Arctic Expedition, at a local used bookstore. Got it for $50, but I've seen it listed for way more online in similar condition.
It's the collected accounts of the crew of a ship lost in the Arctic, as well as everyone that went to look for them, and how the survivors eventually made it home (on foot). It was released in 1882, like, as it was all happening, the book is illustrated, and the cover is hand painted. My copy originally belonged to a school

The Analects is pretty approachable, although there can be variation in translation. I’ve been reading portions of it through a Classical Chinese primer and you have to make quite a few decisions when you translate it into English. One of the weird things is that nouns can act as verbs, so something like “father father, son son” means “a father acting as a father, a son acting as a son.”

The big thing is to be very wary of any translations of Daoist thought or the I-Ching. I would only trust academic translations. Daoism tends to attract cranks who understand it as a hippie thing, when it is more complicated than that.

My most expensive book purchases are probably in the $100-$150 range, and those would be various ecology or biology reference books. Maybe something like Lichens of North America