As a side note before I begin - this was a really spectacular week, and not just because four different people brought us cookies. It was a great week for conversations, a week of discussing the ideas of the liberal arts, the important trends in recent writing, the book industry from several angles. Thank you very much to all those who participated in these conversations. These are the experiences that motivate us and help us to learn more to share with our other patrons.
All right. Let's return to the topic of collectors' books.
First, you should know - whether you are a serious collector or whether you have stumbled upon a collection you'd like to sell - that the collectors' market is very, very bearish right now. That means that if you're in the market to buy, now is a good time, and if you're in the market to sell, now is not a good time. If you do buy, you need to be informed about what you're buying and for whom - the best investment right now is something that you will enjoy having, because the future of the market is very much up in the air, or something you plan to give as a nice present to another person - or you need to be prepared to wait. And wait. And wait.
Urban folklore has been telling people that items from the childhoods of the baby boom generation are valuable. This is as true as most urban folklore, which is to say, only sometimes sort of. For about a year, I had a strong turnaround in yellow-spined Nancy Drews and blue-spined Hardy Boys from the 1950's-70's. That market has been saturated temporarily, which means I can't offer as much money as I was offering for such books. Which in turn means I've got some very frustrated people who are unhappy that their Nancy Drews and Hardy Boys aren't worth a bundle of quick cash now.
Folks, this is a market. Values go up and down depending on supply and demand. I purchase and sell at the most reasonable prices I can, but if I have eight copies of The Red Barn Mystery and haven't sold one in six months, I'm just not going to pay much for a ninth copy. If I were a monster corporation with vast warehouses and even vaster cash flow, I could maybe stock up on Red Barn Mysteries, if I thought they made a good long-term risk. But I'm not and I can't and I don't.
There are some collectors' books in which I am still and always interested, and some in which I will never be interested again. Here are some to note:
1. Beautifully illustrated children's books. If they are more than sixty years old and in near-perfect condition, they may have collectors' value. If they are less than sixty years old, or if they are worn in the way that children's books usually are, they are not collectors' items, they're just books.
2. Old mass-market paperbacks. For a while, there was a strong collectors' market in mystery and science fiction paperbacks from about 1940-1970. This market is currently in bearsville. It is remotely possible that it might go bullish again, but here's the thing about old paperbacks: they were printed on highly acidic paper and bound with cheap glue, which means that if you actually opened them after 1970, they are no longer collectibles. They are old paperbacks with brown, brittle pages and cracks in the binding glue. Unless they happen to be the only printing of a certain short story or novel by a later-famous author or are perennial favorites with kitschily lurid cover art, they don't have value at all, let alone as collectors' items.
3. Collectors' Editions. There's a sad joke in this industry that is sad because it is about 97% true: If it has the words "collector's edition" printed anywhere on it, it will never be collectible. It might be nice because it has good illustrations or was printed on better-quality paper, but that just means that it might survive in competition with younger copies of the same book. On incredibly rare occasions, a collector's printing actually does have value; one example would be the Heritage Press editions of Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer, which were illustrated by Norman Rockwell, which makes these two books double-whammy Americana. The Heritage Press editions of almost everything else are just nice copies of books.
4. Signed firsts. There's a trick to signed first editions. The trick is this: the first edition has to have been a small print run; the author has to have signed the book before the author became a household name (at least among literati households); and the author does now have to be a household name. A signed copy of a motivational book is just another copy of a soon-to-be-outdated book. A signed first of a famous author's ninth novel is, given the industry's current insistence that authors run round the country signing books, common and therefore not collectible (though if you're the last one with a copy in nice shape a hundred years from now and the author is still popular, you might get collector's money for it). A signed first of James Oliver Curwood's first novel is, unless you can find the one person in America who might consider writing a cultural studies paper on a very outdated bunch of novels by a nearly forgotten author, a paperweight.
5. On the time frames of collectibility: A first edition of Harry Potter and the (First Three Books) - and mind that the British editions came before the American ones, so purists will want the British ones - simply aren't going to go up in value as collectors' items for a generation or more, if they ever do at all, given the enormous print runs involved. In fact, it is safe for the amateur collector to assume that if a book was first published during the lifetime of the average book dealer, the first edition probably isn't collectible yet. There is one exception to this rule, which is that if the first edition was printed during the early childhoods of a really, really nostalgic generation (and it's true that the Boomers are often nostalgic), it might - might - be collectible now. But only now. Once the Boomers begin retiring and trying to live off whatever retirement savings they've got after the market crash and the Social Security freeze, many will try to sell their old books, the market will be flooded, and there won't be enough demand to keep the prices high because so many of the childhood books of the Boomers aren't popular with subsequent generations. It's brutally sad, but it's true.
This all sounds very gloomy and doomy. Of course some collections still have value. For example, a really good collection of well-chosen, authoritative, scholarly medieval history books is and will remain valuable as long as people still think about history. A collection of first books by subsequently important authors will turn valuable if kept well for a generation or two (out of sunlight, temperature fluctuations, humidity, and smoke). Books over a century old that are still important now do have value if they are still in readable and attractive condition. I'm just suggesting that you probably shouldn't expect to get double your money back on a complete set of Goosebumps books, that things made to be collectible generally don't end up being worth a lot of money, and that selecting what you want based on your taste for your enjoyment is just a better way to think about book ownership anyway.
Collectors' markets are markets. They fluctuate. A good book, however, is still good as long as you keep rereading it, and that holds a value - not necessarily a financial one, but still a real one - for the rest of your life. If you're going to play the markets, do research, understand the trends, keep an eye on sales prices, make sure what you've got is in excellent condition, and choose your reselling methods based on how much time you want to put in and how much money you want to get back. If you're going to build a personal library, decide what you like, change your mind when you feel like it, and enjoy what you've got while you've got it.
Yes, I'm biased. There are a lot of reasons to collect, and in the end, though I routinely circulate my collection to other people, I am essentially a collector too, and what I collect is stuff I think my patrons will appreciate. I don't get a lot of calls for pristine Little Golden Books. I doubt very much that anyone does in this general economic slump we're in. I do get a lot of requests for cheap paperback copies of The Catcher in the Rye, which is why I actually pay as much for nice copies of Catcher as I do for blue-spine Hardy Boys. And to be entirely honest, I like the Catcher readers better than the collection sellers, because there is one thing you can count on about me as a market for books: I think of money as what has to keep moving so that I can do what matters to me, which is to spend time with book lovers.
And as anyone who sells anything will tell you, it's a good idea to know your market. So. Now you know.
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