I don't wish to pour cold water on the good intentions of this or any other books supplement presently advising its readers on which of the many masterpieces published this year might make the best presents this Christmas, but here's a small piece of advice to my loved ones: I'm never that pleased, on either a snowy Yule morn, or for that matter a candlelit Chanukah night, when I pick up the wrapped-up rectangle and know instantly that yes, it's a book. I do of course love books. But - uniquely perhaps in this day and age - I tend to express that love by actually going out and buying the ones I want. Like: as soon as they come out? So really, all a book means to me is: you wanted to spend less than £14.99.

There is a way round this, if you really do want to give a book to me or any other book-lover this Christmas, which is: ignore all the advice about which new books to get, and instead, get an old one. By which I mean, a first edition. That way I won't know how much you've spent on it, and might be quite excited about its value for at least as long as it takes me to search for the title on AbeBooks.

I went through a short period about two years ago of being obsessed with first editions. I come from a collecting background: my dad collects Dinky Toys and my mum throughout her life has collected, first, children books, then golfing memorabilia (please don't ask), and now old Jewish ladies. When I was 13, mainly because they conjured up a world very different from my own, I liked Billy Bunter books, and ended up owning so many that there was an article about me in The Young Observer, in which I came across, without doubt, as a precocious twat. The end line, after the question “Do you like any other sort of books?”, was “Presently, I'm rather captivated by James Bond.” I know: sometimes I still wake at night screaming those words.

But, despite this horror, I do occasionally get bitten by the book-collecting bug again. When I got into first editions, I did something almost equally 13-year-old and stupid, which is become convinced that the whole antiquarian book trade had missed the fact that you could get them on eBay. This led to me buying, on eBay, very excitedly, a first edition of Jack Kerouac's On the Road for £250. I was excited because I had discovered on the web that, elsewhere, at Christie's in New York for example, a first edition of On the Road sells for around $5,000. When it arrived, however, I discovered that what I'd bought - not mentioned by the seller - was a first edition, second printing of On the Road: which is worth around £250.

Undeterred, I went on to buy, for reasons that now escape me, a first edition of The Water Babies by Charles Kingsley, and East Coker, one of T.S. Eliot's Four Quartets. Both of them now sit on my shelves - The Water Babies just among my books but East Coker on a little stand from which it often falls off - a little sadly, as I then completely lost interest in the whole first edition thing.

I say completely lost interest: what I mean is I realised I had no knack for bargains. I still like the idea of owning the odd first edition, and still sometimes buy them. Although I'm not sure why, rarity aside, we so prize the idea of the first, the original, text. After all: the more valuable one of them is, the less likely you are to be read it, at least without snooker referee's gloves on.

But while I was briefly in the market, Rick Gekoski, the former Booker judge and bookseller, showed me a copy of a first edition of Lolita that Nabakov had given as a present to Graham Greene and in which, on the inner flap, Nabakov had written a short message adorned with a butterfly. Looking at it made the goosepimples rise on my flesh. I'm not sure anything else but a book could contain such a microcosmically expressive thing: and somehow, for that to work, it matters that the book is a first edition.

The lesson I've learnt, I think, is that if you do fancy collecting books, best to forget about speculating, and just to think of a first edition as a kind of totem. Just get the ones, in other words, by the writers you actually love, and keep them. If I can ever be bothered, I may eventually sell On The Road, or The Water Babies, or East Coker; I shall never sell my signed first edition of The Reluctant Vampire by Eric Morecambe. Gift-wise, this means you have to find out which author the giftee loves first and foremost, and if it is Jeffrey Archer, accept it, even though a first edition of An Enormous Potboiler About A Big Clever Important Man A Bit Like Me (or whatever his titles are) may not be the best literary investment. Oh: if anyone out there wishes to buy me a first edition, I'm a big fan of both Nabakov and Graham Greene. Only $264,000 the last time it was auctioned.

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