WANT TO START BUYING AND SELLING RARE BOOKS ?

i wanted to talk about today how do you get into the rare book business now that's different than the used book business which has a completely separate business model this is more specialized so this video is really for people who are unemployed who have literary interests or maybe you want to start a profitable sideline now i don't want this video to be like one of those annoying ads earn a thousand dollars a week at home reading books and uh drinking wine even though that's probably what it is and certainly i know booksellers who earn a six-figure income buying and selling rare books uh but it is a question of how do you get into the field uh there was a clearer path uh in prior years you would probably work or apprentice for a bookseller and after several years building up your knowledge your cataloging skills your bibliographical expertise you would be ready to jump from the nest into your own business that is a sort of lost world unfortunately there are just not many opportunities not a lot of surviving bookstores that can accommodate interns and employees anymore with that said on the positive side because of e-commerce today the barriers of entry for buying and selling where books are lower than ever and that is a big plus because it certainly increases the type of material that's purchased and sold and collected as well as the improves the diversity uh in in our field uh so this video i'll probably break into two parts uh first i'll discuss a few books some examples of the type of material i would buy if i was starting out in the rare book business and sure enough they are modest books things i bought well in the low hundreds of dollars and in the second part very briefly we'll touch upon some places where you can start selling that material and voila you are a rare book seller so let's talk about some of the books now when you're looking for books to purchase and i also do have a video on where you can find rare books which i'll throw on at the end here but this is more about the type of material you want to purchase now you are really looking for books that are both rare and interesting now what do we mean by rarity well when i purchase a book first i check on some of the bibliographical sites i recommend if you are starting out to look on worldcat.org which is open for the public and checking how many institutional copies exist of the books and also you might want to check some of the general commerce sites like via libri.net to make sure that there are not 50 copies of the book you want to buy already being offered on the on the internet and stuck under every pillow in brooklyn and the second thing is you want to buy material that is interesting now sometimes an interesting book is not obvious from the get-go you have to make it interesting by placing it in its proper historical context but you will get better with that over time but you want to spot those opportunities where you have the ability to place it in its larger context and add value to the book let's start off with this little tract on steel making it's actually called a synoptical view of the qualities and adaptations of the sundry kinds of steel and it's published in new york in 1831. now why the hell would a little tract on steel uh be of interest to anybody uh well that's my job to make it interesting this book is a sort of sales prospectus put out by nailer and co of sheffield england they were major steel manufacturer and they exported a lot of steel to the united states and set up a network of offices in philadelphia and boston etc and steel at least to me speaks to the uh great industrialization of america it's a social and economic advancement uh now in the 1830s that was before uh the discovery invention of the bessemer steel process in the 1850s which uh along with interchangeable parts really led to the second industrial revolution but this was pretty early on in that revolution and certainly uh nailer and co actually worked with bessemer later on so it really has an economic uh importance uh this particular track in addition to its interest to people in the steel industry the second part of it is it's general physical presentation it is a simple track bound in wraps of the period in you know attractive marbled paper and it just presents very nicely my favorite part of it is the folding lithographic plate in the beginning now you'd want to look for illustrated books illustrated books do sell especially with social media and catalogs people love illustrations this particular one shows the steel works and it's printed by the pendleton company in new york the pendleton brothers were some of the earliest american lithographers william pendleton in boston along with his brother john who eventually went down to new york and they had some very important lithographers work with them who built their own businesses over the years such as nathaniel courier of korean ives and what i love about american lithography is it's part of the legacy of the visual depiction of our country in development without those lithographers without curry and ives prince we would certainly be much poorer in how we envisioned people lived and worked in the 19th century so a very interesting plate and to boot it's on some rather unusual yellow paper which is immediately uh attractive to the eye so i feel like i can transform this simple uh tract which is indeed rare because i did check those uh sites into uh something that really speaks to the social economic development of america in the 19th century so a good book to buy to find and sell when you were definitely when you were starting out uh secondly another fun and modest book here is a salesman sample book these are extremely popular and sell very quickly it's sort of filled with all sorts of letterheads and decals and business forms and various samples this was put out by kaiser and blair a printing company out of cincinnati they were early on to work in a direct sales model with a lot of companies so really like a mini amazon of their day they sold to 000 customers it says here what i like about this book is again it speaks to the business history and social economic development of america it was printed in 1935 so you're talking about the depths of the great depression the social security was created in 1935 the works progress administration uh there was a little bit of an uptick of economic activity that year before i think in 1937 when we fell back again but if you wanted to talk about companies that were helping businesses and sustaining entrepreneurship kaiser and blair would be a fine example the second thing is the imagery you get a lot of this late art deco graphic art which is extremely collectible and it is just filled with incredibly fun samples here we have uh selected a couple a uh uh for beer here a coaster of the vigar tavern the ladies entrance uh we have uh cute little uh novelty stickers for the cars which uh discourage uh hitchhiking um and a whole host of other printing samples um like uh bruce's rose hair glow could use some of that so a very fun piece of advertising and business history and this is the type of material sometimes you can find rather inexpensively on a lot of sites like ebay or at flea markets and pick them up and they do very well when you sell them third piece here is i picked a funny little piece of ephemera ephemera like papers are an extremely hot and popular part of the market they tend to also be quite rare a lot of this material was discarded it's rather flimsy so you've got the rarity down you just have to find things that are interesting this is on the city of auroraville which is the largest surviving utopian experimental city in the world uh it is uh outside of ponderbury off the bengal in india and it was conceived in the 1960s uh as during the hippie period as a sort of um marxist socialist type society with a little anarchy thrown in um the woman who founded it uh her name was mira alessi and um i think that's correct meera alfassa i got that wrong you're alfasa and she was a also known as the mother and she was uh interestingly a woman a french woman of jewish sephardic descent who moved to india uh and got involved in building this utopian uh society it's funny that you know i read somewhere online that there is a biography of her that's actually 13 volumes long so she is probably a runner up uh next to sir winston churchill as having one of the longest biographies ever written about a single person um the city still exists today although i don't think like most places it's lived up to the full ideals of its founding but these papers are the original like prospectus describing the city i guess encouraging people to move there from around the world so i sort of like utopian literature i like the hippie period uh and i find it particularly interesting that this french jewish woman created uh this uh rather remarkable social experiment in india which still survives so again this is the type of thing that is can be found uh you know quite inexpensively somewhere online or at a flea market or at a house sale and you can tell a very interesting a story about it and i bet there's i haven't checked this one but i bet there's almost no surviving copies of these uh you know charming little publications finally uh let's take this book here i would talk about this is a collected book of chap books now chat books were a type of popular street literature that had a long history from the 16th through the 19th century this is towards the end of that period because these look from about the 1830s or so these were very flimsy publications they were often printed on cheap paper they were usually discarded shortly after being read or passed around and consequently they can be very rare and collectible today uh and there were many produced sometimes you find them bound in volumes like this uh and they have a long history uh you know whether they were uh penny dreadfuls eventually or they became dime novel type of literature the reason there's probably even the full arc into modern comic books for this type of popular literature they have a lot of charm and if you just look at some of these titles here uh a full account of the dreadful explosion of walls and colieri and 101 human beings uh perished or the great fight at gateshead uh between cumberland hodge and brimstone harry uh it looks like uh this guy is fighting a couple of devils on the woodcuts they're often illustrated with these charming woodcuts and like i said these are quite collectible they're both interesting and rare and again these are the type of things i think you can find at modest prices if you look hard enough for them and they tell an interesting story so i'd encourage you to start out looking for these type of books i don't expect you know to start buying sign jack kerouacs or 15th century books at auction and easily making profits on them you have to find these interesting materials and you know catalog them to excite other people about them so those are a few examples of books you might look for now where would you sell material like this today well i think if you're starting out you'd probably want to establish a few venues to sell first of all of course get a shopify site very inexpensive and you can do a beautiful site illustrating your material uh second you want to probably list on etsy uh you know unlike shopify where you really have to promote your site for people to find you etsy brings a lot of customers to you and it's not a traditional venue for selling rare books but it's starting to be innovative and attracting uh you know clientele and it's very easy to use and of course the granddaddy of them all for selling used material ebay and that is a great place to of course buy and sell and when you start getting this material you start listing it you really want to use social media effectively and of course one of the best places today in the rare book world is instagram where you know if you are a new book seller and establish an account and start putting up interesting material not only for sale but discussing it you will meet collectors and librarians that interact with a lot of people and you will draw a lot of traffic to your various websites and you will start selling material and making interesting connections so those are some very simple low barrier places to start selling rare books you know as you build up you know your expertise and you buy some interesting material you may want to set aside some of the more interesting material towards putting together a first e-list or a first mini catalog and once you do that you know if you email me i'll certainly give you some pointers there are definitely some virtual fares such as the getman virtual fares uh which are extraordinarily fun and easy to list act as well as some uh you know library sites where you can post you know your catalog or electronic list to and start interacting with special collections librarians and if you get to that point and you are serious about pursuing the rare book business please reach out to me i'm certainly happy to give you any tips i can on how to enter the field i want to encourage people to get in it's good for the whole book market of course so i have a self-interest in my own preservation as a bookseller and i hope you've enjoyed this video and will tune in for you know more videos about the rare book business

Channel: Adam Weinberger Rare Book Buyer

Views: 18,624

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Id: f_S-zxadD2g

Length: 17min 57sec (1077 seconds)

Published: Mon Dec 28 2020