Babel

Every year when my birthday comes up, family and friends ask me what I want. Every year I give some practical answer that’s all I can think up at the moment. Socks. A new backpack. Something I actually need.

I’ve always felt these gifts lack a sense of occasion.

This year, when people started asking, I remembered a place I visited several years ago during a month I spent in LA.

I was walking down Sunset when I noticed the understated placard for Mystery Pier Books. You can’t really see the storefront from the road. The instructions point you down a dark, narrow alleyway, which felt almost too on the nose for a place with “Mystery” in the name. But when I turned the corner, the alley opened up into a bright little courtyard, and suddenly it felt like I had stepped into somewhere European.

Inside, I was greeted by the owner, who explained that the store was made up entirely of first editions and signed editions. The front section held modern writers. The back was where the classics lived. On the walls were photos of Hollywood people who had visited over the years. Johnny Depp seemed to be a regular, or at least regular enough that I noticed three separate photos of him from what looked like different visits.

The collection must have taken a lifetime to build. They had everything from original Shakespeare plays to signed first editions of J.D. Salinger to movie scripts. It was the kind of place where you started to lower your voice without realizing it.

I asked the owner how he had managed to gather such an impressive collection, and it turned out he’d lived a pretty colorful life and had deep connections in Hollywood. At one point he showed me his copy of Michael Crichton’s The Lost World, signed by the main cast of the film. He had gotten the signatures because he had acted in the movie himself. A toy company had even made an action figure of him, which his son was kind enough to show me.

Until then, I had never really understood collectibles. I didn’t get the appeal of sports memorabilia, Pokémon cards, rare coins, or anything like that. But something clicked for me in that shop. The books felt sacred.

Rare books make for the perfect gift. We form strong emotional connections to books. There’s something fun about having something that is both subjectively and objectively coveted.

I didn’t know much about book collecting, so I started with some simple guidelines. My birthday was coming up soon, which meant I didn’t have time to learn every corner of the hobby. But I knew enough to understand that a signed first-edition, first-printing copy is generally the gold standard. Those are the ones collectors tend to care about most, and the ones most likely to hold or increase their value over time.

The fun part was trying to think about my favorite writers who might still matter decades from now.

I spent some time thinking about what you could even use to make that kind of prediction. Sales numbers. Critical acclaim. Awards. Cultural relevance. For every theory, there are dozens of examples that prove it and dozens that disprove it. In the end, I decided I wanted a young author with both literary credibility and mass appeal, and R. F. Kuang is a writer I’ve long admired who fits the bill.

The next question was which title to choose.

There’s a strong argument that The Poppy War will appreciate the most over time. It was her debut novel, and because of that, it likely had a smaller first printing than her later books. Scarcity matters.

But I chose Babel for two reasons.

First, some first-printing copies of Babel include a special signature page added by the publisher. Some collectors prefer a signature directly on the title page, but for someone like me, who knows very little about authentication, the publisher-bound page gives a stronger sense that the signature is real. The Poppy War doesn’t have that same feature, and I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate signatures on my own.

Second, Babel may end up being Kuang’s defining work. It’s the book where many of her strengths come together most completely: historical research, political argument, fantasy worldbuilding, and emotional tragedy. Sometimes an author’s most important book can become more desirable than their rarest one.

So that’s what I asked for this year: a signed first-edition, first-printing copy of Babel.

It felt like the kind of gift I had been looking for without knowing it. Personal, a little speculative, and connected to a memory I’ve carried around for years.

I archived a version of the listing here.

I’ll be posting updates to this blog as I add more books to my collection.