Trends in Modern Book Collecting

Again, I've got a bias here: I'm a bookseller. When books are worth "a lot" of money, that's probably good for me. So my answer should perhaps be taken with as much salt as one needs. That being said, I would answer, unequivocally, "yes." In my estimation, the price structure for collectible books is remarkably low, compared to many other fields of collectibles. It's dangerous, and often misleading, to compare apples and oranges and say, for example, that the price of one of the most significant postwar novels -- and one of the scarcest to find signed -- is, even at $35,000, less than the price of a second-tier watercolor by an artist you wouldn't have heard of unless you were already deeply involved with collecting art. But it's more or less true. Prices of literary materials, even unique items such as manuscripts, seldom approach even the bottom rung of the price structure for collectible art or antiques, largely because printed literary materials are viewed as "one of many" rather than as "unique." But the fact is that a literary manuscript is unique; so, for that matter, is an inscribed copy of a book, especially a particularly good association copy. By what measure should such items be viewed as being less valuable, or more commonplace, than a work of art? This is not a complaint, just a fact. But it sheds light on the question of whether a book is "worth" a given price; if one translates the question over into another field, it's easier to point out that "worth" is at least partly subjective and also partly due to market forces that are beyond an individual's control. Is a Van Gogh "worth" $53 million? Is a Kerouac "worth" $35,000? The answer, ultimately, is no more complicated than, "Yes, if someone buys it at that price." But should they buy it? Again, the answer depends on what they want to do with it. Buying anything for $53 million, or $35,000, is a risky venture if the goal is solely to hold it until it appreciates and then sell it for more. If the goal is something else, it could make perfect sense.

So buying high spots, or any collectible book, has an element of risk to it that cannot be denied. Historical trends notwithstanding, the direction that any particular book takes is ultimately unpredictable. Still, there are guidelines and, more importantly, there are other criteria to consider than simply return-on-investment. A book collection is a distinctly personal artifact. That many collectors want the same few books is really just another way of saying that many collectors want every book they buy to be a significant one, and to some extent they will tend to pursue the same group of acknowledged "great books" that other collectors pursue. This happened with the classics and with early travel and exploration books, and it is happening with literary first editions now. For some collectors, though, there is another kind of "profit" to be gleaned from collecting books, which has to do with the creation of a collection that enlarges the body of knowledge available about a particular author's life and work. This is a profit that may not translate into strict dollars and cents, but is nonetheless real.

Carl Petersen, who assembled one of the great Faulkner collections of all time and sold it a few years back for nearly a half million dollars, might have earned more on his investment if he had taken every dollar spent on a Faulkner item over the course of his 50 years of collecting and put it toward IBM stock. But in the process of assembling his collection, Petersen expanded the knowledge of Faulkner's writings so dramatically that the catalog of his collection is still one of the best Faulkner bibliographies there is. And we should probably take it on faith that he got an enormous amount of satisfaction out of the pursuit, not just the results. This kind of profit is more difficult to quantify, perhaps, than dollars and cents but is nonetheless real.

So where have all the latter-day Carl Petersens gone? Is this a style of collecting that has passed for good? It does seem as though fewer and fewer of the collectors on my mailing list are so immersed in their collecting areas that I am constantly learning from them. Rather it seems increasingly true that I am passing along information that is already well-established about writers whose works are already well-documented. While I don't have an "explanation" for this, a number of thoughts occur to me that might bear on the subject. First, the writers of a generation or two ago are now quite thoroughly documented. Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Fitzgerald, and others all have extensive published bibliographies, which could give collectors a checklist to use but more likely provide a daunting obstacle to the notion that any additional, useful information about them can be generated by one's personal collection. Not only is acquiring the magazines of the 20s and 30s more difficult than it was 50 or 60 years ago, there is not so much to be gained by doing it, in terms of a contribution to scholarly study: they're already known. The Carl Petersens of today would more likely be working on Stewart O'Nan's bibliography, or Rick Moody's, than William Faulkner's. And perhaps they are.

Another factor to take into account here is that, in general, our culture is much more media-saturated than it was a generation ago or more. Nowadays, if you collect Robert Stone completely, you not only have to collect the Robert Stone interviews that appear in magazines all over the country -- including all those small, regional publications that will interview him when he goes on an author tour promoting a new book -- you also have to glean the ephemeral "writings" that appear on the internet, and never show up in printed form unless you print them on your own printer. Again, the task looks fairly daunting. And, in a computer age where more information is indexed than ever before, the scholarly upside for such efforts is less than it was in the past. Most of what your collection will eventually reveal about an author's writings could probably be turned up in a couple of hours on a computer terminal.

Still another factor that may help shape this impression is that the Carl Petersens of today may well be collecting work in a field that for now falls largely outside of mainstream book collecting -- for example, the "graphic novels" by writer-artists that currently occupy a marginal place in our literary culture. The groundwork for future study of these books may be being laid right now, but taking place outside of our view. The "zines" of today could be the equivalent of Ed Sanders' landmark literary magazine of the early 1960s, Fuck You! A Magazine of the Arts, early issues of which provide practically a who's who of the significant postwar American writers associated with the Beat movement and the 1960s counterculture. Anyone collecting the 'zine writers right now would be essentially invisible to the mainstream rare book world, just as collectors of Sanders, Ginsberg, Snyder and McClure were invisible to the rare book world of 30 years ago.

Finally, after all these speculations about why there may be fewer "completists" today than there were in the past, I would be willing to bet that there are, actually, virtually the same number of people attempting to assemble bibliographically significant collections today as there were a generation ago, or perhaps even more, but because the overall book market has grown, they comprise a smaller percentage of it. Some of the areas of growth in the book market over the past 20 years, such as hyper-modern collecting, may have attracted new collectors to a pursuit quite different than that of building a bibliographically significant collection. But collecting of any sort will still have more similarities than differences. There's the "thrill of the hunt" and, when successful, there's the satisfaction of filling in a "slot" in one's imagined collection -- that is, bringing into reality one more piece of the idea behind the collection, that which gives it its focus and makes it a collection rather than merely an accumulation. The book trade today probably offers a wider range of avenues to pursue, and satisfactions to be had, than it did a generation ago, and is thus appealing to collectors with a wider range of tastes, temperaments and ambitions than was true in the past.

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Copyright © 1999 by Ken Lopez