Bibliophilia, taken as a separate pursuit from the mere love of reading, which it may accompany, is concerned with all aspects of books; not just their contents. Much study is given among bibliophiles to the materials and construction of books, and publishing history also plays a great part; serious book collectors pore over every detail with relish, from subject to publisher to editor to writer to illustrator. What the illustrator was accustomed to eat for breakfast is considered a significant detail, among the more hardened cases. And then, there are the endless questions related to any particular copy of a book: is it a pristine one, still looking absolutely new, in a fresh, glossy, clean wrapper entirely free of even the slightest little tear, despite its great age, and inscribed by the author to his favorite niece (who happens to be the model for the heroine of the story contained in its thick, creamy pages??) Or is it an agreeably raggedy-looking old thing, published by the book club a century later--and to use bibliophile's jargon, "spine ends bumped,with chipped corners, cocked, hinges cracked and some foxing?" To those of us who have always collected books in order to read them, the two really are scarcely worth telling apart, so long as they contain the same words in the same order. To a book collector, however, the difference is as vast as that between the Hope Diamond and some icky thing the cat dragged in.