No, you don’t, and that might be mold, too; careful. “I’m cleaning out my aunt’s house and wonder what these are worth.” Hard to say, but your pics are upside-down and I see signs of varmint-nesting. “I did my own research, and they’re going for 2K” on eBay!” Except that’s a fake “Stephen King” who has fake-inscribed his own fake-book to his faked self with a faked signature and misspelled his own name. This Wizard of Oz title, however—it might be a keeper.
Everyone and their sister is selling books on-line, but few “old” books are valuable. “Old,” too, for some novices, means 1941, but for antiquarian dealers it means 1704—or 1201. And few “old” Bibles, hymnals, textbooks or presidential addresses are valuable. Many “old” books offered to me come with broken and torqued spines, soiled covers and missing dust jackets. Some “old” books are heavily “foxed” with the rust-colored spots that result when the organic and iron impurities undergo oxidation of the paper also exposed to humidity and sunlight. Not all “old” books are sullied by foxing, however, and not all nearly new books are unsullied.
So, a book’s age has no direct effect on value. I sell 19th- , 18th- , and even a few 17th-century books that you could buy with a single paycheck. Some newer books, however, will fetch hundreds if not thousands of dollars if signed by an Octavia Butler or a J.D. Salinger.
So, what does make a book valuable? Well, the usual—condition, condition, condition—and then of course its particular content. About the book you found in Aunt Mabel’s attic and now hold in your hand, ask yourself: when it came out, did it fundamentally alter how we think, how we look at things, how we look at ourselves? Take Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, the 1859 true First Edition published in London by John Murray. Magnum Opus Rare Books has one for sale for $275,000. It’s signed by Darwin on a laid-in autograph card and in the third person (!): “with Mr. Darwins compliments" (sans apostrophe). The true First Edition misspells “species" as “speceies.” It joins Copernicus's De revolutionibus (1543) and Newton’s Opticks: or, A Treatise of the Reflexions, Refractions, Inflexions and Colours of Light in the holy trinity of ground-breakers in science, a Bible of sorts. Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957) is another genre-creating Bible, one that expressed especially deep, especially white male disaffectedness with American life. Its first iteration was typed on a roll of paper-towels! Meier and Sons Rare Books of New Canaan, Connecticut, has a First Edition/First Printing copy for sale (along with a signed land deed) for a cool $20,000. Yet another kind of Bible is the so-called Bay Psalm Book, published in 1640, named after the Massachusetts Bay Colony. It was the first book published in the Americas. In 2013 it sold at auction for $14,000,000. One book changes our understanding of Life itself, another, of life in America, and yet another, of another kind of life.
Until next week, if you have any signed Magnas Carta in the attic . . .
Write to me at [email protected]. Find me at http://www.svafinebooks.com.
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