Trends in Modern Book Collecting

Today's market in collectible modern books is large and diverse -- two essential characteristics of a healthy market. There is great interest in high spots; there is a large segment of the market devoted to "genre fiction", with mysteries dominating but numerous other genres well-represented -- science fiction and fantasy, Westerns, even such an obscure area as Vietnam war fiction. There is an extremely active portion of the market devoted to collecting hyper-modern first editions, both mainstream literature and mysteries. There is substantial -- and seemingly increasing -- interest in various ethnic literatures: African-American, Chicano, Native American, Latin American and more. Some of the areas that were previously deemed marginal or even "cult-ish" have now become mainstream: Beat writers; the counterculture of the 1960s. There is ongoing interest in modern poetry and there is increasing interest in such varied areas as, on the one hand, artists' books and elaborate art bindings and, on the other hand, such primitive contructions as the xerox books of New York's Lower East Side in the 1970s and on. Overall, it can hardly be thought that the market in modern first editions is exclusively, or even mainly, devoted to pursuing a handful of high spots. And, in that sense, I think that both booksellers and collectors can take heart: there is enough diversity in this market that there is little that any one group of collectors -- or booksellers, for that matter -- can do to skew the market too dramatically, and this bodes well for all collecting in the future, and for booksellers willing to explore the areas that do emerge as significant portions of the market, but which may be ill-defined right now.

And, in that sense, I think that both booksellers and collectors can take heart: there is enough diversity in this market that there is little that any one group of collectors -- or booksellers, for that matter -- can do to skew the market too dramatically, and this bodes well for all collecting in the future, and for booksellers willing to explore the areas that do emerge as significant portions of the market, but which may be ill-defined right now.

These somewhat scattered observations don't answer all the questions posed above, but they do perhaps point toward some of the answers. That there are more people collecting high spots today than a generation ago is probably because there are more collectors today and the consensus about which are the "great books" has firmed up over time, rather than because the book trade has "dumbed down." The consensus on today's "great books" is not inherently different than the consensus was in earlier times about what were the great books in other eras. That there seem to be fewer "completists" may be because some of them are currently collecting outside of the view of the mainstream rare book trade, because collecting in such a manner has always been a somewhat solitary pursuit, and because the larger book market means that those collectors comprise a smaller percentage of the market today than they did in the past. That high spots have gotten more expensive is indisputable, but it's not mysterious: demand has stayed steady or increased, supply has dwindled, and the new supply that comes into the market as the prices rise tends to consist books of higher-than-average quality (i.e., previously hand-picked for private collections), which bolsters the current price levels and helps contribute to their upward escalation. The price levels books have recently reached will probably be sustained for the most part, but the rate of increase will likely slow considerably.

Since no article on books or book collecting can be published today (or written, for that matter) without mentioning the internet, I'll point out that the internet has, to a large extent, laid waste to the traditional "food chain" that existed in the used, out-of-print and rare book markets in the past, and this effect will likely increase in coming years. Its effect as a "leveling" force on prices will tend to inhibit exceedingly rapid price increases of the type we have seen in recent years but, in the meantime, it is contributing to substantial confusion when one can go on the internet and find copies of The Catcher in the Rye, all in comparable condition, for $4000 or $6500 or $7000. "Why is there such a big variance? Can any of these prices be trusted? What's the book actually worth?" are questions I've been asked innumerable times. The answer, I think, is that we are witnessing a significant transition in the book world and this is a process that is underway, not yet completed. The "food chain" that existed for decades in the used, rare and out-of-print world consisted of "scouts" and part-time booksellers who scoured the far reaches of the land for saleable books, which they would then sell to established dealers, who in turn, if they didn't have a ready market for exactly that kind of book in their own business, would sell to specialist dealers who presumably did have a market for them. At each point on the chain, the individuals involved recognized that they had to price the books attractively enough for their customer, the next link in the chain, to be able to buy them, mark them up for a profit, and still price them reasonably enough to sell to a willing customer -- who could generally be presumed to have some sense of what the book "should" sell for. With the advent of internet bookselling, we are seeing books offered by scouts, by small local general bookstores, by part-time hobbyist booksellers and by specialist dealers all intermingled. Everyone has access to the same market now, but the residue of the price structures of the "food chain" still exist. Scouts, or non-specialist dealers, will for the time being still tend to price their offerings the way they did in the past, because historically they haven't had direct access to the retail market for these books and they have no experience -- yet -- to convince them that it's actually there and also because their costs are lower: because the price structure of the food chain dictated that at each "lower" rung, one's costs be kept low enough that one could afford to sell the book at a wholesale price and still make money, the former sources for rare books -- the scouts, general bookstores, and part-time booksellers -- have a competitive advantage over their former customers, the specialist dealers who, being at the "top" of the food chain, have almost always paid the most for their books. So, during this transitional period -- which will probably last for a couple more years, at least, as an increasing percentage of the book-buying public gains access to the internet -- all sorts of price "discrepancies" are likely to appear in cyberspace. Over time, though, the really rare books will ascend to whatever price the market will support and those dealers who continue to deal in them, on the internet and elsewhere, will likely again arrive at prices that reflect a more general consensus regarding value than is currently the case. At the same time, the prices of the middle range of books -- moderately scarce but more likely than not to turn up in some dealers' stocks at any given time -- will tend to level off or even drop. Because of the internet, more books are more widely available than ever before and, overall, this should be a good thing for collectors and booksellers alike but for the moment, in this transitional period, it means that in many cases the supply outstrips the demand and, while this is a great boon to collectors, it means that many dealers are holding stock that is no longer as rare as it appeared previously, in a less information-rich market. The market pressures on these kinds of books will tend to force prices downward, at least for a while. This is one of the reasons that so few dealers' catalogs bother with secondary appearances of collectible authors anymore. When one's customers' access to books was limited to the catalogs they were sent by rare book dealers and the bookstores they managed to visit in their spare time, it made sense to offer books that, while not uncommon, were still scarce enough to be unlikely to turn up in any given shop. Now, however, with the stock of thousands of used bookstores available to one's customers with a few keystrokes, it makes more sense to leave those books where they are and let the customers find them than to buy them, raise the price and list them in a catalog. As I mentioned earlier, for the most collectible authors, the information about what books to look for is not the hard part; if your customer has a Hemingway bibliography, he can get on the internet and look for Best American Short Stories 1923. There is no longer a reason for a rare book dealer to sell such a book, which is not particularly rare.

Whether buying high spots or filling in an author collection or spotting the next hot hyper-modern title, books collections can be built that are good "investments" overall, but if return-on-one's-dollar is the primary criterion, there are probably better investments than books. Books, like the art that decorates one's walls, also provide another kind of "profit," more difficult to quantify, in terms of how much they enrich one's life and experience. And this should be factored in when addressing the question of "is it worth it?" when applied to any individual purchase because, finally, all collections are personal: what value a collection has is not just its dollars-and-cents worth, but its personal meaning as part of the larger process of one's life. If this seems obvious, that's good: it should be, and this most fundamental fact, the sine qua non of book collecting, should not get lost or obscured by the many questions that can arise in the course of developing or evaluating one's collection.

Copyright © 1999 by Ken Lopez