Robert Carter's The Collectors

When I was in 6th grade, I would spend a lot of time at a friend's house after school before my mom could get off work and pick me up. At some point, this friend showed me a book someone had given her as a gift, which she hadn't read yet and wasn't too sure about. The book was called The Collectors, by Robert Carter, and she asked if I would read it first and give her my opinion on it.

The book is about a group of bugs - roaches, essentially, though they never name themselves such. It's all from their point of view, scavenging for food from a nearby house and leaving on a journey across town to find some sort of device which is supposed to help them. While I didn't think it was the best thing I'd ever read, it was an interesting story and I liked the odd look on the world that it took. My friend wasn't much impressed with the bugs' point of view, and I'm not sure if she ever read it after I gave it back to her.

A few years later, I found myself thinking about some parts of the story that were most memorable. At one point, the band of heroes gets trapped in a greenhouse, and seeing how they reacted to it was different from what I had expected for a group of roaches. I did some research online, though at the time I could only remember the title and not the authors name, and eventually found the book selling for quite a bit at an out-of-print online bookstore. I wanted to read the book again, but I couldn't afford to pay more than ten dollars for the book.

Recently, however, I've been thinking about the book again. I like to collect all the books that I read, which explains why I have a wall full of books but means I'm speningd a lot of money on things I'll only read one time, and since this was was memorable enough for me to still be thinking of it, even now, despite how strange the story was, I'd like to get it. A quick Google search brought me to an Amazon page where the book is listed as new and selling for less than $5. Amazon itself isn't selling it, they're just working as the middleman, which tells me that I'm right about the book being out of print, and that some people don't find it worth selling for a large sum of money like other, more famous out-of-print books.

I'm not yet sure if I'll get it, because I'm not sure if it's worth it to buy an old book that wasn't good enough to stay in print, but it's a small price to pay for a piece of childhood nostalgia.