Читать книгу Collected Books: The Guide to Identification and Values - Allen OSB Ahearn - Страница 3

This is the fourth edition of Collected Books. We initiated this series in 1991 as a continuation of Van Allen Bradley’s highly regarded Handbook of Values series. It was revised and updated in 1998 and 2002.

We’ve been around the book trade for over half a century. We started as collectors in the 1950s, issued a few catalogs every year in the 1960s and early 1970s (under the name Allen Ahearn-First Editions), and opened the Quill & Brush as a book and art store in 1976. We self-published the Book of First Books, a price guide to authors’ first books. We updated that first-book guide in 1978, 1983, and 1986. In 1989, 1995, and 2000, Putnam published expanded editions as Book Collecting: A Comprehensive Guide.

Nick Basbanes, in his book A Gentle Madness, called the 60 years before the 1929 market crash the Golden Age of book collecting, when the building of great libraries became an emblem of wisdom and accomplishment. Book collecting was in, and prices were sky-high. The stock market crash, followed by the Depression and World War II, left a large time period in this century when it appears book collecting, at least for the general public, was dormant. Interest stayed low until the 1950s when our economy started to get on its feet, and we had the great stocking-of-the-libraries which went through the 1960s. We are told, a bookseller could go to huge bookstores in major cities with a libraries’ wants list and spend days accumulating books on the list, then go back to shop or home, mark them up, mail them to the institution, and go look for more.

By the 1970s, when we became more involved in the trade, not only were the great stocking-of-the-libraries days over, but most of the large stores were gone. Locally, Lowdermilks, in Washington, D.C., closed at the end of the 1960s, and there was no successor. Smaller shops moved into the area but, as in most cities, there was no longer a large central establishment.

Book prices in the 1970s and 1980s certainly increased, but in compiling our price guides for authors’ first books from 1975 through 2000, we noted a remarkable difference from the 1929 crash: there was a marked increase in both prices and interest in book collecting starting in 1987, after the stock market downturn—the opposite of the 1929 reaction. We’ll leave it to others to explain why, but the prices of first books, which include many high spots (books considered classics or rarities), started increasing dramatically. By perhaps 25 to 50 percent a year in 1988. While preparing the guides in 1978 and 1983, we saw a normal inflation adjustment for the period. In the 1986 edition, the prices remained just about flat from the 1983 edition, with very few exceptions. And during 1986 and 1987, the market stayed flat. But in 1988 prices for high spots started escalating. It’s not that other prices didn’t increase also, just not at the same rate. For instance, our estimate for a fine copy of the first edition of J. D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye in dust jacket was $100 in 1978, $500 in 1986 and $7,500 in 2000; and it is $15,000 now (although pristine copies will go for more—see the preface).

In our early days of bookselling, before the advent of the internet, catalogs were the primary means of selling to far-flung clientele. Book fairs, which are a good way for booksellers to meet new collectors, existed but the number per year was relatively small. During the 1970s and 1980s, the number of fairs increased, so that by the end of the century, there were book fairs a few times a week versus a few times a month. But fairs seem to be following the trend of printed catalogs—the overall numbers are down for both. The impact of the internet has been swift and far-reaching.

The slow evolution of the book trade over the past four or five decades did little to prepare us for the changes after 2000. The internet has drastically and irrevocably changed the way we sell books and the way collectors purchase books. Books that previously took years to track down can often be located in an instant using the internet. At the beginning of 1998, Advance Book Exchange (www.abe.com) had 1,500 “dealers” or subscribers online, listing a total of approximately 4,000,000 out-of-print books. Presently they have 140,000,000 books online. (For more on this subject, see our section “Sources for Books.”)

With so many books online, the net has become a good resource for comparative pricing. However, it has its drawbacks. The points necessary to identify first printings and first states or issues are not always available online and, in many cases, there is incorrect or misleading information. So, in addition to its value as a price guide, there is a strong justification for the use of this work by those interested in buying or selling scarce and rare first editions who want to be assured their offerings or purchases are bibliographically correct.

Our sense is that the internet may not continue to be as useful a price guide as it has been because comparable copies of collectible books may not be for sale so readily in future years. Already, we find, in looking for certain titles, that where there were 50 copies online a year ago, with probably 10 of these being in collectible condition, now there may be only 10 copies and none in collectible condition. So, a search online for comparable, or similar, copies to one in-hand may not prove to be as fruitful as in the past. And, as condition is so important a factor in determining price, with a fine copy in-hand does it really help to know there are 5 low-priced copies in poor condition online? Not really.

As mentioned above, the prices for highly collectible first editions rose rapidly in the 1990’s and continued to rise through the first decade of the 21^st century (although perhaps not at the same rate). But rapidly escalating prices on highly prized titles is only a small part of the overall trend seen in the collected books market. The advent of internet search engines, with ABE.com in the forefront, has revealed the true availability or scarcity of individual titles. Books we thought were relatively scarce a few years ago, we find are actually readily available on the net. The result has been that the retail prices for those books which might have been in the $50 to $150 range have dropped into the $10 to $50 range. Conversely, the titles we always knew were very scarce, if not rare, either are not on the web or, when they do turn up, are priced increasingly higher.

In regard to our thoughts on the impact of the internet on the prices of titles in this volume, we feel most of the books herein are relatively scarce or highly collectible, and therefore the prices on these titles have held or increased. In general, our sense is that the non-fiction did better than the fiction over the last decade or so. Much of the Americana, particularly the western Americana, showed strong increases, as did books on travel and exploration, economics and finance. Children’s books included in the book did very well, although there aren’t a great number of them. Books on books have held their prices which is normal, as they haven’t shown much growth in prices over the years. In literature, prices for many of the literary authors from the last 20 or 30 years went down in value, most likely as a result of the internet revealing the abundance of copies relative to the buyers available. On the other hand, books published before 1950 held up well; and many genres, such as mysteries, detective, and science fiction have shown very good increases in values. A mixed bag, but as we all know this market is driven by supply and demand, as are most markets, and the internet has given everyone a much more accurate picture of the true supply (whereas before we were all making educated guesses).

Please take a moment to look at the information on the endpapers. We believe this book will prove useful by providing estimated values for a selection of collected books based on the condition guidelines on the endpapers. We have based the estimates herein on prices of current copies offered for sale or prices realized at recent auctions. But many of the books have not appeared at auction for years, or on the internet, or in dealers’ catalogs. In these cases, we made estimates based on our years in the trade of buying and selling books and by consulting with the many helpful contacts we have made over the years. (See the Acknowledgement section.)

We believe the vast majority of the information in this book is accurate, particularly the bibliographical information, which is based on the books in our reference library (see Selected Bibliography of Works Consulted for a list). We strongly encourage correspondence on errors or confusing entries. We believe the prices are representative of current retail prices, but with 20,000 or so entries it would be unlikely to get them all right. So consult other sources as well before making a final decision on buying or pricing an expensive book.

As mentioned before, we used our own experience buying and selling, and auction, internet and catalog prices, or projections from these prices, to estimate our prices. But remember that a price guide such as this may under-price scarce or rare books, and these truly scarce titles may be priced far above our estimates when they finally appear on the market. The latter is reasonable, because the estimates on the scarce books have been based on very few or, in some cases, very old appearances at auction or in catalogs.

Have fun and enjoy the chase. There are still a lot of good books and good people out there to meet.