used in the trade and enumerates how to identify first editions/printings of the books listed, which encompass a large selection of collectible books in both fiction and non-fiction.
We cannot stress enough how important it is to understand that the physical condition of a book—how worn or, hopefully, unworn it is—has a large impact on its value. In real estate, it may be “location, location, location”; in book collecting it is “condition, condition, condition.” In fact, most dealers in collectible books do not handle rare books per se; they handle scarce books. However, very fine copies of scarce books border on being rare. These fine copies command high prices because they are sought after by knowledgeable collectors and libraries aware of the true scarcity of such material. We are certainly not particularly knowledgeable about the market for rare items in fields such as coins or stamps, but we know that if an individual wanted five very fine examples of a certain scarce or rare book title, it might take years to locate them. And this is not just true for books costing hundreds or thousands of dollars; it is equally true for books costing less.
In putting together this list of scarce and rare collected books, we have attempted to make the contents as complete and accurate as possible. Our comments or perceptions on book collecting are, of course, our own. We have tried to make our work bibliographically correct, so that a user can identify and price a book-in-hand.
The book values listed herein are a snap-shot of this moment in time. They are values that may or may not hold up over the coming years. But we believe the bibliographic information for identifying the first editions of the titles listed is of equal or even greater importance than the values, and we hope you will use this work for years to come.
Errors and omissions are normal in such projects, and correspondence about them is always appreciated.
INTRODUCTION
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 21st 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