I really need to use the library more, textbooks are just so cripplingly expensive, and since the topics they deal with usually aren’t all that central to my research, I wouldn’t look at them very often anyway. I just have a little bit of a “book fetish”; I like to own books.
Here’s the book I would like to look at now: “Graphical Enumeration”, by Frank Harary and Edgar M. Palmer. It’s the most expensive book I’ve come across so far: At $295, it costs more than a dollar a page.
The worst pricey book experience I’ve had was due to the Rice course RELI 101: The professor decided to change books the semester I took it, so I couldn’t buy a used book. The new book was a special-print book that didn’t even have an ISBN. I think it cost about $120, I had no real interest in it, and because of the way it was written — it as an epistemology without any interpretation — I didn’t understand it at all. At the end of the semester, the prof decided the experiment had failed so he switched back to the old book, so I couldn’t even sell my copy.
