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Ask HN: Trying to get a copy of a hard-to-get book/pdf

5 points by yesenadam ↗ HN
I'm after RG Collingwood's The First Mate's Log. It's in the Intelex Past Masters series of Philosophy texts, which is available online at (most/many?) universities, but I'm not at one. (It seems individuals can't subscribe to that - I just tried.) It's seemingly not on LibGen/Scihub, or archive.org, Gutenberg, or anywhere online, and it seems paper copies start at >$400 for its 130 pages. The book was published in 1939, reprinted in 1994. How can I get hold of it? Paper or ebook is fine. Any ideas? What/where else should I try? I'm willing to pay, but not >$400! Thank you.

10 comments

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mindcrime
Is it important that you own a copy, or do you just want to read it? If the latter, you might try finding it on Worldcat[1], and see if a library near you holds a copy. Note that university libraries will often "sell" a library card to non-students for a relatively small yearly fee, so you might be able to check it out from a local university even if you don't attend school there. Or the local library (public library or university library) might be able to get it for you via Interlibrary Loan.

[1]: https://www.worldcat.org/title/first-mates-log/oclc/51068497...

yesenadam
Thanks! The idea was to read it aloud to the SO in the mornings! (Yes, she's enthusiastic about the idea hehe) My local uni is Sydney which doesn't have it in book form, just the etext version. But you need a student card to use the library computers. The State Library (a non-borrowing stack library) has it, maybe photocopying it there is the best way. I used to photocopy books a lot in the pre-LibGen/Scihub/archive.org era! I will look into an Interlibrary loan I guess, thanks very much.
__d
If you live in NSW, you can join the City of Sydney Library. And they do inter-library loans, so you could request a copy and they'll dig one up for you.

https://www.cityofsydney.nsw.gov.au/library-information-serv...

yesenadam
Thanks, it appears most Sydney local libraries do inter-library loans, I never tried that. Seems like that will take a month or so though.

p.s. You remind me that I used to frequent the City of Sydney Library at Town Hall 20-25 years ago - they have/had a very large collection of opera scores, and CDs of the operas, which I used trying to find new favourites. That was awesome. :-) I remember Death in Venice, Turn of the Screw, Nixon in China etc etc.