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Ask HN: What is the most obscure book you own?

1 points by Kovah ↗ HN
Just had an interesting conversation about book collecting this weekend: we asked each other which of their books is so obscure or rare that it's unlikely anybody else you know owns a copy.

For me, it's a printed copy of von Neumans "First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC", the groundwork for modern computer architecture. Bought it from Kronecker Wallis, a tiny Spanish publisher.

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spottedmarley
The Kybalion by Three Initiates

Almost nobody has it but that's kinda part of how it's supposed to be.

k310
I have a bunch of first edition magazines. Too many to list here. Collecting was easy. I was in bookstores, and figured that any first edition was worth the nominal price.

If anyone's interested,

https://rentry.co/23pbcaef

sejje
I own a book by Joseph Altsheler, The Forest Runners. I believe it was published in the 1930s. It's written for boys.

My dad owns a rare Buddy Hall biography called Rags to Rifleman. Buddy Hall is one of the greatest pool players ever to live.

thorin
Not really obscure, but I have a copy of a couple of Indian printed (pirate!) copies of books I bought in a bookshop in Kathmandu:

The Tibetan Book of the Dead

The Ascent of Rum Doodle

My Dad has a lot of old late 1800s early 1900 books including a huge 2 volume dictionary, which is actually more of an encyclopaedia. It has topic sections like "How to defend yourself from savages" or "How to dig your own coal mine" etc.

davidsojevic
It'll either be my copy of "The Late Medieval Balkans: A Critical Survey from the Late Twelfth Century to the Ottoman Conquest" or my copy of "Mommy, Why Is There a Server in the House?"
keiferski
These probably aren't super obscure outside of central/Eastern Europe, but: I have a bunch of Soviet-era guides to different countries in the former Eastern Bloc, written in local languages. So for example, a travel guide to Yugoslavia written in Polish.

My favorite one is an East German guide to useful trade-oriented words in eight different languages. Basically it's a bunch of columns with words like "consumer goods" or "deck cargo" in German, English, Czech, Russian, etc. The introduction especially has some interesting lines like:

"This book is mainly intended for business with capitalist countries."

gradschool
The Five Gospels, by Robert Funk and the Jesus Seminar, the original 1993 hardbound print edition [1]. It has the full annotated texts of the four canonical gospels and the gospel of Thomas in the best available modern English translations, with each passage color coded based on a vote by the reviewers about how close to the original sources they think it is.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jesus_Seminar

mysterypie
I used to have a copy of "Lincos: Design of a Language for Cosmic Intercourse", by Hans Freudenthal, 1960[1].

The book is literally a series of messages you can transmit by radio to an alien intelligence somewhere else in the universe so you can establish a language in common with them. It starts off by teaching numbers: ., .., ..., i.e., sending 1 pulse, 2 pulses, 3 pulses, and so on, teaches numbers to an extraterrestrial being. From this it creates arithmetic (".. pause ... longer-pause .....", means 2+3=5), and then creates abbreviations for symbols, and goes on the build up a lot of mathematics, and then the concept of time, and basic physics, and even very abstract ideas like "good" and "bad", though I've forgotten how it managed to encode that (but I recall it seemed plausible at the time I read the book).

The book is impossible to find now. I'd love to get a PDF version of it.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lincos_language

JoeAltmaier
The History of Johnson County Iowa, 966 pages. I've read it cover to cover more than once. Well, not the extensive roster of Civil War records of all residents who served, fully 30% of the total pages, but the rest.

A wonderful insightful look into 1882 thoughts about what constituted history. The human interest stories are the best - how the names of local townships were selected, the storms and railroad schemes, fights and murders.

bboreham
I have a copy of The Bell System Technical Journal July-August 1978 (third printing, 1982). This contains "The UNIX Time-Sharing System" by Ritchie and Thompson, plus about 10 other papers about UNIX.

I barely know anyone who would understand why I treasure it, let alone own a copy.

https://archive.org/details/bstj57-6-1905