Re: Wondering how rare/valuable some books are?

mbbbh wrote:

>But I'm still at a dead end. There are no rare and/or old book
>appraisers in PA. Perhaps its a lost art? Or they've all moved to the
>west coast........

Appraisal's a bit like beauty and filth and all those kinds of things -
a large chunk of it is in the eye of the beholder.

Over in another thread, someone's asking about a volume of poems by
Tennyson (The Death of Oenone, first trade edition). One seller was
asking $400 for it (though that copy has mysteriously disappeared from
the listing), a few are asking $100 or so, and then the prices slide
down to just $8.99 (very good except for "small tear to front page and
slight foxing"). A copy at $125 has "light foxing to endpapers", but is
"otherwise near fine", and none of the pricier copies is rated higher
than "near-fine", yet there's a copy described as fine listed for under
$15, and another rated as fine by an ABA seller (whose valuation one
can supposedly trust) listed for less than $25.

Within those parameters you could pay what you want for this book.
There is no shortage of copies available, but 19th century poetry just
isn't something very many people want any more. Until and unless that
changes, copies are going to sit there, even fine ones at the price of
a couple of beers, though every so often someone's going to come along
and buy one.

There's a 17th century book I won on eBay for a few hundred dollars a
couple of years ago; the only other copy I've seen listed for sale
since then was priced at $24,000. It's not listed any more, so perhaps
it found a buyer.

If so, that buyer would have had nothing to compare it with, unless he
or she had access to lists of actual sales, and these are getting
harder to obtain even as the informaton highway expands. The internet
tells us what's on offer *now*; it's not very good at telling us what
was on offer a year ago, or five years ago.

So what are these two books worth? What can an appraiser be expected to
say? I'm not saying there are no answers to be had; the remaining
copies of (for example) an early Steinbeck classic are probably in a
fairly well-established pecking order (though even then, expect big
differences between what a respected dealer might ask and what the same
book would fetch on eBay), but many other works are not. The old adage
- that a second- (or third-) hand book is worth no more and no less
than someone is prepared to pay for it has never been truer.

John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com

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