Really, really tough to say what're the "gems" of my collection.
A brief self-history might be in order here: my parents (and grandfather before them) owned and ran a bookstore for 41 years (and would still if not for Amazon!), so I've always had a love of books. Ironically, because my parents always had access to the books from the store, they themselves never kept books at home. They would read a book, then take it back to the store and sell it as a used book. I...never took to that, but it was a struggle to let my parents keep books. (They're business-people and saw every book I kept home as a sale they could be making.) To this day, they have fewer than six books owned between them; a few chosen keepsakes of the bookstore-that-was.
As a kid, then, I had to justify buying books and
keeping them. But, I managed to justify many, many D&D purchases in the 3e and early 4e days (with a few books and magazines I managed to find from previous eras). Below is a photo of the more pristine members of my collection; not all of them, but the most I could fit in one picture!
Sentimentally, my signed books (novels) by R.A. Salvatore, Ed Greenwood, and Keith Baker are absolute joys. In an era when I believed I would some day become a novelist myself, they patiently explained (as they had no doubt done endlessly before) how they entered the writing business, and what I, as an aspiring author, could do.
As far as usefulness, I have a bag of (probably) 300 or so assorted dice, but as a gift I received a complete set of dice in solid copper; they're weighty, beautiful, and fun to roll. I supplemented it with a (rare?) d3 and a silver quarter (d2). I've used these dice for over a decade, and I love using them still.
For overall boyish wonder, I'd have to go with the two 3e campaign settings. I've spent more happy hours looking at my
Forgotten Realms Campaign Setting and
Eberron Campaign Setting than I would ordinarily admit. They've both beautiful, well-laid out, and endlessly inspiring books.
What a great thread this is
