Trends in Modern Book Collecting

Collecting modern first editions essentially began in the late 1920s and early 30s, as the Depression hit and the bottom fell out of the rare book market or, more correctly, the top end of the rare book market collapsed almost entirely. There was one particular auction in the late 20s at which the values of the books didn't even come close to approaching the values they'd realized only a few years earlier, and throughout the 30s there were virtually no significant auctions of extremely valuable rare books. The implication of this was twofold: it meant that the tried-and-true "valuable" rare books of the past -- which had largely been borrowed from British book collecting traditions going back into the 19th century -- no longer seemed so reliable. And it opened up the possibility for collectors to decide, based on their own interests and tastes, that such modern writers as Hemingway, Faulkner, Fitzgerald and Conrad -- who were all except Conrad still alive at the time -- were legimitately "collectible." Their prices weren't very high, but they show up regularly in first edition and auction catalogues from the 30s. The first bibliography of Hemingway was published in 1931, only eight years after his first publication; Hemingway may have been the first "hyper-modern" author to be seriously collected.

In actuality, it was another specific chain of events, in 1978, that triggered what we now call "hyper-modern" book collecting. Like the change precipitated by the 1929 stock market crash and the ensuing Depression, this change originated far from the world of rare books. An obscure tax ruling in a case involving a power tool supply company -- Thor Power Tool -- dictated that businesses that depreciated their inventory for tax purposes had to actually offer the depreciated goods for sale at the reduced prices or lose their tax writeoffs. For book publishers -- who had traditionally depreciated the value of their unsold inventory based on future sales projections -- this meant they either had to offer their books for sale at reduced value or get rid of them altogether. There was no way for them to survive selling the books for even less than they had been priced when they were new, and they dumped huge amounts of books into the remainder market and began the process whereby the life cycle of a book is now one year or less -- at which point remaining copies are sold off for pennies on the dollar to the discounters or the authors, or pulped altogether.

The significance of these changes for book collecting was, in the 1930s, that there was a whole new, young generation of writers who were now collectible and, in the 1970s, that now there were suddenly books that were legitimately scarce only a year or two after their publication. In the past, if a book didn't sell well, it would stay in the publisher's warehouse for years, sometimes decades, and in the 1970s you could buy books published in the 50s directly from their publishers, most of them still in the first editions. Now, after the Thor Power Tool ruling, this would no longer happen. So a new generation of book dealers stepped in to fill the void the publishers had left, and began offering first editions of recently published, but now unavailable, books for the cost of a new book, or only slightly more. They essentially became the repositories of what the publisher used to call "the backlist" -- those books that were not new, not hot, but still of interest and deserving to be made available.

Some of the authors writing these books later came to a prominence that far exceeded anything they had achieved earlier, and suddenly their early books were in great demand but were no longer available from the publishers. First editions of these books began commanding higher and higher prices, as the small supply could not match the demand until the book's price rose so high that some of the demand slacked off. And after a few years of that, there came to be a certain amount of speculation, as people tried to pick which books would be the ones that would be in demand, and buy them while they were still available. Now there's even a "tip sheet" for collecting hyper-modern books called Bookline, and one for collecting hyper-modern mysteries, published in the San Francisco Bay Area, and giving information about upcoming book tours, "pick hits" of the new books being published, reviews, and occasional but ongoing tracking of the titles they've picked in the past.

I mention hyper-modern collecting for two reasons: because it's become an important element of the trade in modern first editions (although, like "high spot collecting," it doesn't dominate the market nearly as much as some critics of the modern book trade suggest), and also because the speculative edge to that market, which drove prices of such books as A is for Alibi into the four-figure range, was an indirect contributor to the rise in prices of more solidly established modern high spots.

The growth of hyper-modern book collecting has parallels to the growth of modern book collecting in general that took place in the Thirties. And the collecting of modern high spots has its parallels to the traditional approach to book collecting that took place in England and America prior to the Great Depression and is still prevalent in large segments of the antiquarian book trade: in both cases, there exists a general consensus about which are the "books worth collecting." In a market that is strictly driven by supply and demand -- with a product that is scarce to begin with and, by definition, is getting scarcer as time passes -- the prices of rare books will continue to rise, as long as the demand holds steady or increases. In general, the supply is not going to increase.

There is a caveat that should be introduced here, however, which bears on the recent dramatic price increases for certain modern titles. As the supply dwindled and the demand held steady or increased, the prices of desirable high spots naturally went up. At certain price levels, though, the supply of these books would actually increase, because collectors who had bought copies years earlier at much lower prices, and had thus taken them out of the market at that time, were tempted to cash in their profits on the books that were not central to their own personal collections but were now worth considerably more than they had paid for them originally. Typically, the books that have been in private collections are in better shape than the average book that turns up in a dealer's shop, and so these books would enter the market at the upper end of the current price range. The result, which we saw over and over again through the 1980s and 90s, was that there were more fine copies of The Catcher in the Rye on the market when the price reached $3000 than there had been when it was $400. Similarly, when On the Road hit $2000 nearly all the copies that showed up were nicer than any of the ones that had been available when the book sold in the $500-$750 range. In effect, the natural supply had dried up, but the higher prices began to bring a select group of books back into the marketplace, ones that were in general in better condition and therefore were usually priced higher than before.

(cont. >>)

Copyright © 1999 by Ken Lopez