I was reading an article in a blog about sourcing quality inventory and it got me thinking.  Now, I’d love to try his method of seeing the list of books online, checking out their prices and then putting the bids in or just ordering them and it’s unfortunate that the cost of postage is too prohibitive to make his methods worthwhile for me.  Unless you’re buying in a whole container load of books then it’s just not worth the money and even then you need to know that each book in the container is worth a decent amount of money and only cost you peanuts as it would cost a lot of money to ship a container load of books from USA to Australia; it’s such a long way.  I do have friends who do this but I suspect it’s not for me as yet.
The article did get me thinking about buying books at a real life auction.  I started doing a little research on auction houses in Melbourne and immediately found a rather famous one (well, famous in Melbourne) which moved into an old school in South Yarra a few years ago.  I’m going to digress for a few moments; it’s such a lovely idea to house your auction house in an old school.  It would make it possible to separate your particular lots away from one another and to also have separate offices of a decent size.  I often wonder what type of building would make the best bookshop and I think an old school would do quite nicely.  I like to imagine horror having a room to itself with science fiction, fantasy, children’s picture books, children’s chapter books and all the other genres having a room to themselves.  Wouldn’t it be nice to be given a map of the school with the particular rooms with labels appropriate to their genre?

Anyway, back to the auction house.  They have an auction on tomorrow morning which I’m not going to be able to get to and some of their lots are for shelves or part shelves of books.  The descriptions include: shelf of hard covers includig (sic) biographies; shelf of hard covers including Australiana and so many more.  Then there’s one list for Norman Lindsay The Magic Pudding The Adventures of Bunyip Bluegum Angus & Robertson 1918 First Edition Hard Cover with Dust Jacket for which they expect between $1200 and $1500.  This is a wonderful fantasy book and I’ll have more to say about it on my blog in due course as it relates to books and not bookshops.  It would be possible to pick up some wonderful books at some quite decent prices and then sell them in your bricks and mortar bookshop or your online bookshop.  While I won’t be attending tomorrow’s auction I do intend to visit them on some other occasion with someone under tow to make sure I don’t spend too much money.

[editor's note: Do you have some experience or expertise with buying books at auction? We'd love it if you could share a story or some advice with us.]

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October 9th Auction notes – It’s not the Venom, it’s the Bite
There’s a book auction that we frequent perhaps 10 times a year – typically we go to the uncatalogued sales to pick up lots of material that we don’t have easy access to, usually antiquarian (or at least old). Occasionally though we go to a catalog sale and try our hand at picking up some higher end books. The catalog sales attract an entirely different group of folks – at least half collectors – and they also get quite a number of telephone and faxed bids (which results in many items starting over my max price). This is a reasonably major auction house – the prices are included in American Book Prices Current, so the sale prices do impact prices realized at other auctions as well as at retail.

Unlike uncatalogued sales where one shows up early and evaluates a massive amount of material in a few hours, most prep on catalog sales is done in the weeks leading up to the sale. We’re rank amateurs at both the auction and the antiquarian book trade, but we systematically go through the catalog identifying items that we believe are salable or interesting stock and put cap prices on them. If we systematically ignore this information during the auction, at least it’s there. We use ABE, American Book Prices Current and various bibliographies and other reference materials to come up with our prices. Often, even with that, it’s a bit of a seat of the pants endeavor.

As usual, half the items that we’d targeted looked less than exciting in person and half the items we’d ignored looked great – that’s when you have to proceed with an inspired mix of knowledge, gut feelings and stupidity. Luckily we excel at at least two of those.

So here’s a quick run down of what transpired:

We picked up a nice first English edition of an important book on herpetology – the author claimed that snake venom was harmless and the deadliness of the bite was the transferal of the snake’s anger into its victim. It touched off a firestorm in the snake world in 1669. We paid more than we wanted but slightly less than we were willing to pay – a typical result.

Also:

A nice 1749 2 volume illustrated 4to of Paradise lost.

A beat up but lovely 1725 Works of Josephus with folding plates and maps.

A great bunch of Victorian Erotica (I have this idea that the only unfilled niche in puritan Boston is Erotica).

A number of random items that ‘fell’ to us that may or may not have been good ideas.

Items of interest:

A pair of 1599 Bibles (both pirated versions, from later, one around 1639) went for $1300 – more than double the high estimate.

Kay Neilsen items went well (though a Brother’s Grimm went over estimate – $2400 – and an East of the Sun went under at $2000). Rackham sold well also, including a Peter Pan Portfolio in elephant folio for $3200. I love golden age of illustration stuff so I follow it even if I can’t afford it.

A number of items went to collectors for more than they would have had to pay on ABE which is certainly of interest to those of us wondering what the internet is REALLY doing to prices.

A lovely second edition in folio, rebacked, of Johnson’s Dictionary went for $3600 which seemed like a lot at the time but was, in retrospect, probably a pretty good deal.

A first edition of Thomas Hobbe’s Leviathan, estimated at $1000-$1500 (which we’d begrudgingly decided to spend $1200 on if possible) went for $4600. I’d had this feeling that the political climate around the world would bring Hobbes back, and this may be an early indication. This happens a lot – we spend all this time hemming and hawing about whether it’s reasonable to spend $800 or $900 on something and it goes for $3500. On items you’ve accidentally fallen in love with, it really knocks the wind out of you.

A California rarity, Le Conte’s Joural of Ramblings Through the High Sierras of California, went well over estimate at $7500.

A first of Walt Whitman’s Franklin Evans; or the Inebriate, a temperance novel, went for $2200. It was published in 1842, 13 years before Leaves of Grass.

Large numbers of lots of singles and pairs of firsts by John Mcphee and Eudora Welty went very well – much more interest in these than I expected.

Overall it was an interesting auction – we usually only attend catalog sales like these, where there is a broad selection of good material without any specialized trove that brings in the collectors who we can’t bid with. The dichotomy between auction prices and the internet is interesting and much of it is counter intuitive, so I’d urge anyone interested to subscribe to a local auctioneers catalog and check out some previews, even if you’re not interested in bidding. If you take some notes, you can learn a lot from the prices realized when it comes in the mail, and it’s always a gas to look at books you can’t afford.

A signed proof of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls is headed for auction in November at Swann. It has a signed dedication to Martha Gellhorn, Hemingway’s fiancee and is signed to his friend and longtime employee Toby Otto Bruce, as well as being, apparently, the first signed proof of one of his novels ever to surface. Why then, is Swann projecting a price of $75,000 -$125,000?

A signed and inscribed (to his physician) copy of The Sun Also Rises, from the famed Maurice Neville collection, went for $366,400 in 2004. An inscribed first of Three Stories and Ten Poems from the same collection went for $150,000, Old Man and the Sea $140,000 and In Our Time, $280,000. These did have the luxury of being together and from a famed collection, but they were also just ordinary first editions, exciting inscriptions notwithstanding.

Now, auction houses do dearly love items to go over estimate (the above Sun Also Rises was estimated at $80,000 – $120,000) but you’d think they’d at least try to get closer to the mark. Wouldn’t one of the underbidders from the Neville auction like to scoop up this far scarcer item for the bargain price of, say, $300,000? It may just go to show that Hemingway (as we revealed in a previous post) is down on his luck these days, passed over for the red hot William Faulkner.

The other possibility – if it really does sell in that range – is that advance proofs really are going down the tubes. There was a time, not long ago, when any serious collector of modern firsts had to have the proof copy of the book along with the first trade edition. Important dealers like Ken Lopez still often market them together, but it seems like the proof business has been suffering a slow death for years. Part of it, no doubt, is the carpet bomb approach that major publishing houses perform when marketing a new book, but it also seems to speak to a certain lack of conviction or a lost thoroughness in today’s collector. That said, as proofs pile up around the store, it’s hard not to view them with a certain studied disdain – could anything this common, anything treated with such offhandedness by their publisher, be worth collecting?

It’s up in the air, but I’ll continue to quietly sock away the good ones in my boxes of marinating fiction firsts, waiting for the day of their resurgence. Remember, it’s often the initial lack of popularity that causes books to be discarded and end up impossibly scarce down the road.