HOW TO VALUE OLD & RARE BOOKS - SECRETS FROM A RARE BOOK DEALER

hi I'm Adam Weinberger a rare book dealer and today I'm going to show you some secrets of the trade of how to value an old book so I think it's very helpful to begin with an instructive example this is a book from the 18th century it's in its original marbled boards you can see it's quite dry on the spine and it's missing a little bit on top the edges of the paper are uncut which is generally quite desirable and the book itself is the constitution of England it's published in London in 1775 so already I'm thinking it's close to the 1776 miraculous year in America and it's got an interesting book plate and some inscriptions we'll get back to so let's go see how we start looking up the value of the book so generally dealers will immediately hone in on a few things like the rarity the completeness the desirability of a book and one of the best sites that's really transformed the rare book market in recent years is a site called rare book hub it's a subscriber site but it gives actual records of copies that have sold usually at auction sometimes from old dealer catalogues but it's incredibly comprehensive and they keep adding to it all the time and almost every deal or an auction house that I know uses it to see the prices of previous copies as a subscriber you can go into the site here and we'll just type the book the constitution of England in London 1775 Constitution England London 1775 I have not looked up the book yet or done any things is the first time and we're gonna search here and we can see right away we're gonna just check the author here's a Jean Louie Delon it's the exact same author and you can click through and see what copies have sold for and then we want to compare the addition and the general condition of the book so this is one of the records the constitution of England doesn't give too much it says the bindings beginning to separate it's got some issues condition issues but generally it looks complete and it's astounding oh my god this is something terrible about the state of the antiquarian book market in 2014 this book was offered at auction for two to $300 $200 in estimated price it actually sold for only twenty three dollars and fifty cents that is heartbreaking just to think you could buy a book at auction from 1775 on the Constitution for twenty-something dollars let's not take that as a singular record we can see some others here and I'm gonna narrow it down by also putting in the author here and that seems to be the only copy in the records right now that I see here there seems to be a lot of them that's all but actually as a single book that's the only one of the records it doesn't mean that it's extraordinarily rare or anything like that it may be too low value these days to make a lot of auctions which tend to want a finer and finer material so that's one way we can look up prices of books that have sold at auction there are some other very good sites online these are general retail sites there's one called via libri which is one that I like to use because it's a like a meta search engine and very comprehensive and again I will just type in Constitution England 1775 and Loan and we'll see if there's any price at books that are available online better bring sell sold and I'll just check the spelling on that of course I made a mistake they always have to spell things correctly if you want accurate results so it's again did I make another mistake Constitution looks like it's England's not inbound of course and here we go and here are some copies of the book itself there is an earlier edition so we don't have the first edition of it here is a copy of it online being sold by colleague and London and excellent colleague Peter Harrington books and I'm gonna click through to see their exact Edition so here is their copy it's being offered for sale for nine hundred and ninety six dollars and that is the exact issue first edition in English of a Swiss English political theorist his loans favorable assessment to the liberties latent in the British constitution so we're not going to get into the history of the book or its importance in law or anything like that in this video this is strictly for learning some of the sites to give a quick valuation of the book you can also click through here it says there's thirty use copies I don't know how accurate that is and I will price order them to see if we can find some other copies being sold there's a 1792 edition for seven hundred thirty one dollars there is another copy of our book the 1775 offered for five hundred and fifty one dollars and we can scroll all the way down to see if there's any other 1775 ones there's a dublin issue from the exact same year two hundred and sixty dollars and we continue down so again it takes some exploration it actually click through to another site called aber books which is another good retail site but again I would like to use via libri because it's a more comprehensive database and includes a lot of other databases under its umbrella here is a 1789 Edition slightly later for a hundred fifty dollars so there are lots of copies it appears to be a frequently reprinted book um so not rare in the market which explains its rather low prices at auction where it got practically nothing and copies you know starting in the low hundreds of dollars up to nine hundred dollars online but again we want to match the exact Edition and everything like that after we get a sense of their auction and retail prices on some of these sites we can also look up some of the books rarity on sites to see how widely held it is institutionally and things like that a site that a lot of dealers use is OCLC or firstsearch but there isn't a relatively equivalent site that's more widely available for public use and that is WorldCat there are some errors in the database but it's pretty comprehensive in terms of the number of copies that are held by institutions and here we can type in a constitution again loma 1775 and let's just search and there were some dublin editions and things like that but here we go and you can click through and it's showing very quickly on the left here without clicking through all the individual databases that there is at least sixteen copies of both the Dublin and London editions in libraries so it's a relatively easy to find a copy of this in the library so we have a sense of value now from the auction databases like where book hub we've looked on via libri and we also have looked on worldcat.org and we see that it is not particularly rare in institutions so that gives a sense of the price now the other thing we want to do here is look more thoroughly at this particular copy just to make sure there's nothing special about this copy which could raise the value because inspecting an individual copies particularly important so I'm going to shift back over here to the book plate and the inscription I love this book plate it's a nice late 18th century early 19th century book plate of two chained monkeys in armorial book plate here one of the first thing one of the first things one of the important things we have to do also is we have to check what we call the provenance of a book who owned it is there any evidence of ownership and is that ownership important in telling the story of the book because booksellers today want to tell stories about their books and interesting stories about particular copies whether they were owned to inscribed by somebody certainly raised the value of the book so I always check the book plates here very carefully it's very easy to type in a particular name it's an a' calligraphic an st. andrew st. john of let's--oh and we're just gonna do a quick Wikipedia search of that and that pops right up st. Andrew st. john 14th Bauer and John st. John of Bledsoe and it says right here he was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1780 until 1806 when he inherited a peerage so that's quite fun we have a copy that belonged to an English politician who was sitting in the House of Commons during the period even when you know the Revolutionary War when America wrote the Constitution so it's interesting that it's a nice book on the constitution of England itself now getting to the inscription which is very important to study closely here and it's what makes this particular copy quite fascinating is as I'm reading it through here first of all it's dated 1776 here but what is particularly unusual and interesting is it seems to be a list of people who have had the book and passed it on and read it so almost like a lending library sort of thing but this is not a library copy it was a personal copy belonging to that Member of Parliament and what's of what's particularly unusual now as I go through it is it's actually a list of women who have borrowed the copy I don't see a single man on this list here it says November the first cent I can read it quickly sent to mrs. Heather son and then mrs. Stevenson received the book on November 5th and then she sent it to Miss manly on November 19th and Miss manly sent the book to lady Robeson on December 2nd lady Robinson and the lady Robinson sent it to Lady John Day and the list goes on and on here of nothing but a list of women who have read the book relented even lended to their quarterly meetings it says and mrs. man so Sarah that is particularly unusual actually that is not something I've ever even seen in a book a list of women readers in the 18th century and particularly lovely in the year 1776 who have borrowed a book on the Constitution to read of course and to educate themselves and probably with all of the events going on in the international stage and in America that was a particular interest to them and in the book trade today you know books associated with women things that tell a story about women and reading in the period of particularly interesting and sought-after so this is quite a special copy now that I look at it and it deserves some further study so I'm going to say right off the bat that this is not a book that's probably and the lower end of the range of prices we saw in the couple hundred dollar range or something like that because it has some very unique aspects to it that again tell a story about the book so we're not just selling the book itself which is rather common in commerce and institutionally but if I can write this up in an interesting way to you know highlight the readership and women's circles in the period and maybe we'll investigate some more of the names of those books I could you know do research that could raise the value you know closer towards the eight hundred thousand dollar range I don't know at this moment but something on that order perhaps so that is the story of the Constitution of England and some of the websites where you can start to look up books so thank you again for tuning in to learn some of the techniques we used to value old books I hope it was helpful of course I understand how complex it can be to value an old book as well as a larger collection and naturally there are many subtle things that are in old books which can significantly change the value and may not be obvious to a novice so it's always good to check with an expert you can easily contact a local member in his specialty of the ABAA of which I remember that is the antiquarian book sellers Association of America it's one of the premier organizations of rare book dealers and my colleagues are very friendly and often very happy to help additionally you're more than welcome to reach out to me I do my best to offer free evaluations by picture through photos by by text or by email and naturally you're free to call me all of that information is at the end or look me up on my website and thank you so much subscribe I'll put up more videos about the antiquarian book trade you know researching appraising old books and some adventurous finds so thank you so much you

Channel: Adam Weinberger Rare Book Buyer

Views: 37,481

Keywords: Rare Book dealer, how to value books, how to value rare book, value old books, value antique books, appraise books, appraise rare books, buying rare books, selling rare books, what is my book worth, antique books, unique books, expensive books, pawn stars, adam pawn stars, rebecca pawn stars, pawn stars books, antique road show, book lady pawn stars, guy books pawn stars, old books pawn stars, antique road show books, book appraiser, book auctions

Id: 9m-jU1KVq6c

Length: 15min 46sec (946 seconds)

Published: Fri Nov 01 2019