What is the value of my book?

Book values are ethereal; they can fluctuate like any other piece of art. When the book market is hot for a particular author, genre of writing or a series of modern first, signed editions that have been authenticated (signatures) and there are more than one buyer bidding for the items, then prices can soar.

Scarcity also drives the market. But a book being scarce does not necessarily make it exceedingly valuable. The best way to judge the value of a book is to do your own research, at least as much as possible. The links that will be helpful and the associations that help foster the true pricing as well as the selling and buying of rare books or just books that are out of print in general are listed below:

·         The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association of America was founded in 1949 to promote interest in rare and antiquarian books and book collecting, and to foster collegial relations. We strive to maintain the highest standards in the trade. All members agree to abide by the ABAA's Code of Ethics. While our members sell, buy, and appraise books and printed matter, our staff can assist you with finding a bookseller and with other trade-related matters.  https://www.abaa.org/about-abaa

·         ILAB - History of the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers Amor Librorum Nos Unit. Today the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers unites 22 national associations under one roof. Some of them had already been established when the League was founded in 1947/1948. Five of them were the driving forces: the antiquarian booksellers of Great Britain, France, Denmark, Sweden and The Netherlands. 1906 was the year in which the oldest organization of its kind was established in Great Britain: the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association (ABA). The French Syndicat National de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne (SLAM) was created in 1914, followed by Den Danske Antikvarboghandlerforening (ABF) in 1920. Economic crisis and radical political changes also affected the book market; rare booksellers realized that it could be an advantage to be organized. In 1935 the Nederlandsche Vereeniging van Antiquaren (NVvA) was established in Amsterdam. A year later the Swedish rare book dealers set up the Svenska Antikvariatföreningen (SVAF), then the Swiss booksellers founded the Vereinigung der Buchantiquare und Kupferstichhändler in der Schweiz (VEBUKU) in 1939. During the Second World War the Finnish Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association (SAY) was created in 1941, led for a long time by Erik Olsoni, whereas Jørgen W. Cappelen (Cappelens Antikvariat) and others established the Norsk Antikvarbokhandlerforening (NABF) in April 1942. Outside Europe the Brazilian booksellers were the first to form a national association: Walter Geyerhahn, his brother Stefan Geyerhahn and Erich Eichner, the proprietors of the famous "Livraria Editora KOSMOS", founded the Associação Brasileira de Livreiros Antiquários (ABLA) in Rio de Janeiro in 1945. And in Belgium the Chambre Professionelle Belge de la Librairie Ancienne et Moderne (CLAM) or Belgische Beroepskamer van Antiquaren (BBA) was founded in 1946. Accesses to all the regional associations are through the main web page of ILAB a great resource for buying and possibly selling your books to dealers.  https://www.ilab.org/eng/ilab/Why_ILAB.html

·         AbeBooks is an online marketplace for books. Millions of brand new books, used books, rare books, and out-of-print books are offered for sale through the AbeBooks websites from thousands of booksellers around the world.  Readers can find bestsellers, collectors can find rare books, students can find new and used textbooks, and treasure hunters can find long-lost books. AbeBooks Inc. is a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. AbeBooks, an online bookselling pioneer, was acquired in December 2008 and remains a stand-alone operation with headquarters in Victoria, British Columbia, Canada, and a European office in Dusseldorf, Germany.  Our mission is to help people find and buy any book from any bookseller and our business stretches around the world with six international sites - AbeBooks.com, AbeBooks.co.uk, AbeBooks.de, AbeBooks.fr, AbeBooks.it, IberLibro.com, and ZVAB.com, a worldwide marketplace for German rare books. Founded in 1995 by two couples from Victoria, AbeBooks.com went live in 1996 and immediately began to transform the world’s used book business by making hard-to-find books easy to locate and purchase.  In 2002, the New York Times described the company as “an actual Internet success story.” By 2003, the United Nations acclaimed AbeBooks as one of the world’s leading ecommerce companies at its World Summit. The unique inventory of books for sale from booksellers includes the world’s finest antiquarian books dating back to the 15th century, countless out-of-print gems, millions of signed books, millions of used copies, a vast selection of college textbooks and new books too. AbeBooks remains a company with a passion for books. Booksellers love AbeBooks for helping them to sell books to buyers around the globe – 24 hours a day, 365 days a year.  Buyers love AbeBooks for helping them to find and purchase books from the vast online inventory. The AbeBooks blog, Reading Copy, is a valuable daily source of company and book-related news. https://www.abebooks.com/?cm_sp=TopNav-_-static-_-Logo

·         Biblio was created for the love of books, and a desire to give local bookstores global reach. We understand the feeling of discovering a literary treasure because we’ve shared in the quest. Biblio is dedicated to helping you find the book or bookseller you seek.  FOR BIBLIOPHILES. We believe a book that has been owned, read and cherished only adds to its value and enriches its history. Our customers aren’t looking for just a common product; they’re searching for a genuine experience that harkens back to the touch and smells of an old bookshop from a former time. They find this experience in Biblio’s vast book collection, which is individually cultivated by our independent sellers. Find a Bookshop | Specialist booksellers FOR LITERACY. Biblio is privileged to be part of a global community of book lovers, and we’re committed to fostering its growth. We invite you to join in our sustainability practices and to support BiblioWorks, a 501c(3) non-profit we created in 2005, to provide books to communities in need. About BiblioWorks and our Social Responsibility. http://www.biblio.com/pages/why_shop_biblio.html

There are multiple other sites that you can go to and learn how to explore the potential value of your books and what the collection of books might be worth. Until you have found out, it is best to avoid selling books at a yard or estate sale. There are also bookdealers within your local area that can be of help. Some offer appraisal services and there are also some very good auction houses that specialize in rare books and if the works are properly described, they will take a book on consignment.

Chances are that if your relative that has left the books, papers and other ephemera, may have been known to bookdealers and other book collectors, so it would be wise to see if you can locate the purchase documentation, that helps establish the provenance or the trace of a book or a book collection.

Once you have learned a bit about how the process works, don’t panic. Learning how to catalog a book so that another bookdealer will have a description of the book and its condition will all be found on the web. There are also many books about books and about collecting, selling, auctioning and building a library. Additional information can also be found at the library associations. You can register for free and search libraries around the world for your book. This link is the one I often use when searching for some idea of how scarce a book might be. http://www.worldcat.org/

Richard Gabriel- Calix Books  http://store.calixbooks.com/

Book Sizes and Collation

Information that book collectors should have readily at their fingertips are the sizes of books and their designation in annotation. Here might be a helpful table that can be cut and pasted or printed (a jpg file) and stored whenever anyone runs across a books description or a reference of a book that perhaps you as a book collector are thinking about buying.

It is important to remember; that when measuring a book, it is not the book jacket or the book cover that you measure or the binding but the actual page! A habit that many binders had, when asked to rebind a book, was to trim down a book for a new binding, cutting or trimming the page sizes. This reduces the size of the pages, sometimes considerably. In older books, you can look at what is called the pagination or the page count, that a printer will put at the bottom of the page that has a series of letters and numbers, usually according to the alphabet but over the centuries some unique page pagination or signatures were used to tell the printer, which page follows which previous page. Many bookbinders had workers who may have been great craftsman but could have been illiterate and also following a simple and repeatable pattern of binding pages reduced errors in the binding of a book.

Another designation was the ‘last word repeat’ this is a technique where the printer would print the last word of the sentence at the bottom of the page again and it would be the first word on the following page. Both designations; the alphabet/numerical/symbol designation and the repeat word designation describes the collation or the page counting of a book. Let’s be clear, there are two numbers to a page, verso and recto so a single page could have the number 1 and the number 2 on the opposite side of the page but in pagination it is only counted as one page.

Some further explanation is needed of why books are designated by name as folio, 4to, 8vo etc. These descriptions are how many times a single sheet of paper is folded after printing. A folio is a single sheet of paper in the case of a standard folio, which is approximately 24 by 30 inches and is printed on both sides with print equally distributed, top to bottom and side to side. The printer would set the type for one side in a folio sheet with two areas that were the text. They would then print 500 or 1,000 sheets on a single side, wait for the ink to dry, change the type, turn over the sheet and print the next two pages and this would be repeated over and over again until the book was completely printed. The unfolded sheets were then sent to the bookbinder who would fold the sheets in half, line up the paginations or the last word repeat, sew along the spine, add boards, leather etc. completing the binding of the book. The books would then be sent to the Booksellers or to the subscribers of the book, if it were sold in advance. Publishers were in the minority and in order to protect their printing, authors would often engage themselves completely in the printing, binding, subscription and distribution of their books. Once a book was printed, copies were often made within a very short period of time by other printers as there was NO COPYRIGHT protection until the end of the 19^th century (Mark Twain often lamented about the unscrupulous behavior of printers and publishers, he likened them to Politicians, neither represented an honorable trade). It was a cut-throat business filled with many unscrupulous characters. In England, booksellers were considered nearly as low as actors and prostitutes in London society. The King considered them as seditious, unruly and needed to be controlled. Booksellers often became publishers and printers often became booksellers and publishers. Good bookbinders were looked upon as ‘craftsmen’. Embellishing a book not only meant creating color within the book but giving it a character when holding it and opening it. The more money you could spend on binding a book, the higher your social status within society. But back to printing.

Printing production becomes a little more complicated as we move down the size designations of a book printer and the book binder. A 4to has four folds of a single sheet of paper and the printing must be done so when the single sheet of paper is folded, all the pages are in the SAME DIRECTION after the page bottoms are ‘cut’ by the binder or in some cases, the owner or buyer of the book. A good way to understand how this works is to take a single sheet of paper and fold it so that there are four sheets and study it. Try to imagine the single sheet laid out on a single bed and the print type being laid out so that upon printing and folding, it all comes together including the reverse side of the sheet. As we move up the designations, 8vo, and 16mo and up to 64mo, the complications of printing, binding and font size all play a role in how a book looks; feels and reads. We complicate all of this by throwing in engravings, flourishes, and many other signatures at the top and bottom of pages and we can see the character of books emerging as unique works of art, printed in limited editions, lost or destroyed over time and the surviving specimens have a variety of differences that all go into the description of a book. Understanding how a book is put together, its binding and its collation are critical to understanding the value, scarcity and character of a book that you are purchasing either for resale or for your collection.

It will be hard to imagine that a digital image of a book will one day have any value to a collector. Books have always had a character, developed through the paper it was printed on, the type of ink used and the font, the pagination, the embellishments and the book binding. Equally important was the size. Some very small books have a remarkable character to them and large books such as an atlas folio or for that matter a regular folio with wide margins and a period binding are equally enchanting in much different and powerful ways; they equally compel you to marvel at their beauty and strength.

You are reading this text of Calibri font developed by Microsoft in 2003 versus my usual is New Times Roman, developed in 1931 by the Times (London).

Thanks for reading: Calix Books; Richard Gabriel

Calix Books