Book market

“ The bibliophile must judge for himself as best he may, what books indicate by their nature and celebrity a permanent value and what books command excessive prices for the moment simply because of inflated interest and demand. Conditions governing market value change in large, general movements, often affecting whole classes of books. As an example, one may note the comparatively high prices paid a century or more ago for early editions of the Greek and Latin classics, while treasures of early English literature sold for a few shillings ”

“ In the last analysis pretty much everything, including poetry, is merchandise, and every important book sooner or later turns up in the auction rooms. The dozen or fifty men present represent the bookbuyers of the world—you are buying against them. When you sell a book at auction the whole world is your market. This refers, of course, only to important sales. At other times books are frequently disposed of at much less than their real value. These sales it pays the book-collector to attend, personally, if he can ”

“ We have, too, the volumes of every kind and quality with which a crowd of publishers congests the book market: novels, poems, books of travel, science, political economy, religion, sport. Who could enumerate all the kinds of books which are published nowadays? ”

“ The growth of book-collecting in the United States has had a most potent influence, and large purchases made for many years in England have drained off a large number of books, low priced as well as high priced, which will never return to this country. Another cause is the increase of public libraries in Great Britain, and when books are bought for these libraries they are permanently removed from the open market, as they are not when sold to an individual, because his library will most probably eventually come to the hammer. ”

“ Many colleges and seminaries are being built up, thereby offering a still better market for the sale of school books. It would be well for those going into the business to ascertain, before doing so, what books are used in the literary institutions of the place. Some booksellers are so mean as to sell old-fashioned, out-of-date school books to country merchants, thereby clearing their own stock, and imposing their unsalable goods on others. No doubt, many established book merchants would be willing to trust, to such as they have confidence in, a stock of books to be sold on commission. ”

“ There are volumes which, if they do not from their character or price suit one of a circle of half-a-dozen collectors, with whose means and wants the whole trade is generally familiar, are exceedingly likely to suit nobody outside the public libraries at public library prices. So much is this the case, that many booksellers do not think it worth their while to [168] publish catalogues, and content themselves with reporting to the most probable purchaser fresh acquisitions. With certain very special and costly rarities two often make a market. ”

“ Some day the fashion will change, and books hitherto neglected will suddenly take their place and increase many times in value. Such books should be bought while they are cheap, and they doubtless would be if there was such a thing as a literary barometer capable of forecasting the state of the market ”

“ A new type of bookseller has developed during the last twenty-five years—a man who combines part of the knowledge of the antiquarian of yore with the qualities the modern collector and book buyer will request from his agent. Books and literary property have become commercial values equal to stocks which are listed upon the stock exchange; subject to{115} corners created by shrewd buyers and holders, to fluctuations caused by selling en masse. The successful rare-book dealer of today must operate with his wares like a stock broker. ”

“ Buying books by actual inspection at the book-shops is even more fascinating employment than buying them through catalogues. You thus come upon the most unexpected volumes unawares. You open the covers, scan the title-pages, get a glimpse of the plates, and flit from book to book, like a bee gathering honey for its hive. It is a good way to recruit your library economically, to run through the stock of a book-dealer systematically—neglecting no shelf, but selecting throughout the whole stock, and laying aside what you think you may want. ”

“ The object of the Sale dinner was to induce the great distributing houses and the retail booksellers to speculate, and buy an increased supply of books on special terms. Speculation has now almost ceased in consequence of the enormous number of books published, which makes it difficult for a bookseller to keep a large stock of any single work, and renders the life of a new book so precarious that the demand for it may at any moment come to a sudden stop. ”

“ Sellers of books must always exist, but it is possible [Pg 61] to drive out of the trade those who do it the most honour. We see what has occurred in the new book trade, and there can be little doubt that the book-buyer loses much more than he gains by the present system of discount. When the bookseller could obtain sufficient profit by the sale of new books to keep his shop open, it was worth his while to take some trouble in finding the book required ”

“ In the mean while the circulating libraries, both in London and the provinces, are supporting a higher literature of fiction than those of the past generation; and they find also that there are other volumes almost as attractive as the last new novel. They are doing the same work as the book-clubs. Both these modes of co-operation have had the effect of making the demand for a book that is at once solid and attractive more certain than the old demand by individual purchasers. The certainty of the demand necessarily produces a gradual reduction of price. ”

“ It is quite possible to conceive such a final extension of this principle that the retail trade in books may end in a great monopoly:—nay, instead of seeing the imprimatur of the Row or of Albermarle Street upon a book, the great recommendation hereafter may be ‘Euston Square,’ ‘Paddington,’ ‘The Nine Elms,’ or even ‘Shoreditch.’ Whatever may be the effect to the present race of booksellers of this change in their business—it is probable that this new mart for books will raise the profits of authors. ”

“ They meet the eye on every railway stall and in every stationer's window, glittering in green and crimson. But we also sometimes hear of large stocks of unsaleable ventures, and of consequent evil-fortune, in spite of one or two profitable undertakings. We have great confidence in the largest sale of the cheapest edition of an attractive book by an author of reputation; but we have no confidence in the large individual sale of a great number of such distinct books, each jostling the other in the race for popularity. ”

“ Another reason for the decline in the trade may be in the fact that comparatively few booksellers are men of taste in letters, men who read, or keep the run of new publications. If a retail grocer knew no more of his business than many booksellers know of theirs, he would certainly fail. It is a pity on all accounts that the book-trade is in this condition. A bookseller in any community, if he is a man of literary culture, and has a love of books and knowledge of them, can do a great deal for the cultivation of the public taste. ”

“ But it is here that one comes across books 'in the original boards uncut,' and, if expense be no object to you, you may often raise such purchases to a higher class.
Books in Class Five are the outcasts of the book-world, being those decrepit volumes which stack the bookstalls and barrows in the larger towns. They are the weedings of auction sales and shops, books that are not worth cataloguing by the dealer. Like human beings they have drifted through life with all its vicissitudes, knowing many masters and earning the gratitude of none. ”

“ The arts are being bereft of their purpose through a horrifying operation known as “the communications industry,” an industry geared for junk eaters.
Publishing is “bigger” and more profitable today than ever before, largely because of the mushrooming of educational institutions and the consequent demand for textbooks. Wall Street has gone into publishing; there is money in it. But the money is in mass distribution—through the schools, through the book clubs. It is little wonder that the individual, personal bookseller is an anachronism, lost sight of by the publishers themselves. ”

“ There are many thousands of people who have most imperfect and valueless books, mostly on theology, or some controversial abominations, and these people spend days wasting their own and booksellers' time in seeking to sell at prices which their own imagination alone has determined is right. Distrust the advertisements of large paper editions. Very few of them are worth purchasing, and very few, indeed, increase in value. Fight against the first-edition craze, which is the maddest craze that ever affected book collecting. ”

“ Remembering a bibliopole's sincere care in gathering his treasures, the taste and tenderness he spends upon them, the actual individuality of the owner of which they partake, and which they proclaim with startling fidelity so long as they are together, an auctioneer's sale of a private library seems one of the cruelest things in the daily annals of a city. Yet if not transferred, in numbers or in the mass, to some benign shelter, the darlings of bygone hours are sure to be launched friendless on the rough chances of trade. A second-hand book is verily-91- a pitiful thing. ”

“ Some persons appear to be under the impression that whatever a book fetches at a public sale must be its true value, and that, as the encounter is open and public, too much is not likely to be paid by the buyer; but this is a great mistake, and prices are often realized at a good sale which are greatly in advance of those at which the same books are standing unsold in second-hand booksellers' shops. ”

“ Indeed, the high esteem in which they have come to be regarded offers a productive field for a few crafty publishers to ply their wily designs in. The audacity of these schemers carries them to such incredible measures that they sometimes buy sheet-stock from reputable publishing houses, change the name of the edition, and deliberately manufacture new titles [84] on which they print the name of some book club or society. These counterfeits are sold to the unsuspecting book-buyer, who often imagines he has landed a prize. ”

“ Hardly a year passes but every book of first-rate importance and interest is knocked down to the highest bidder. No doubt there are still old libraries where, buried in dust and cobwebs, the folios and quartos lie undisturbed; but to turn the pages or examine the index of Book Prices Current is to have a vision before your eyes of whole regiments of books passing and repassing across the stage amidst the loud cries of auctioneers and the bidding of booksellers.
In the auction-mart taste is pretty steady. The old favourites hold their own. Every now and again an immortal joins their ranks. ”

“ The most startling innovation he made in the trade of bookselling, and the one which led to the largest amount of opposition on the part of his fellow-tradesmen, was in regard to the way of dealing with what are called “remainders.” When a bookseller found a book did not sell well, it was his custom to put what remained into a private sale, “where only booksellers were admitted, and of them only such as were invited by having a catalogue sent them. ”

“ All three of the books are sold at the same retail price,—two dollars. And on all three I was allowed but seven and a half per cent. That is, while all goes smoothly, a thinness of one hundred and fifty-one pages is of no account. It neither makes the price of a book less to the buyer, nor the pay of a book greater to the author. But when ripples begin to rise, a thinness of ninety-eight pages makes the buyer's price less by fifty cents, and the author's pay greater by one-fourth. Thinness, thou art a jewel! ”

“ T.B. PETERSON & BROTHERS take pleasure in calling the attention of the entire Reading Community, as well as of all their Customers, and every Bookseller, News Agent, and Book Buyer, as well as of the entire Book Trade everywhere, to the fact that they are now publishing a large number of cloth and paper-covered Books, in very attractive style, including a series of 25 cent, 50 cent, 75 cent, $1.00, $1.50, $1.75, and $2.00 Books, in new style covers and bindings making them large books for the money, and bringing them before the Reading Public by liberal advertising. ”

“ The results in France and England are equally encouraging, and it is believed that as soon as the American system is fully understood, and as soon as enough books are included under the net-price system, so that a bookseller can once more make a living on the sale of books, many of the old-time booksellers will again put in a stock of books and help to re-establish the book trade in America. ”

“ A man may buy up a roomful of furniture, taking the books of necessity; or a houseful, and with the mass of goods and chattels perhaps hundreds of volumes which are not thought good enough to be disposed of separately, and are therefore cleared out at a nominal figure, and retailed anywhere and everywhere as circumstance and opportunity suggest. Are these dealers, brokers, and what not, booksellers? Heaven save the mark, no! not in a specific sense; but they sell books, notwithstanding, and their shops are, in very truth, recognised hunting-grounds of the Metropolis. ”

“ The rest of the trade are content to take their refuse, with which, and the fresh scum of the press, they furnish one side of a shop, which serves for the sign of a bookseller, rather than a real one; but, instead of selling, dealing as factors, and procure what the country divines and gentry send for; of whom each hath his book factor, and, when wanting any thing, writes to his bookseller, and pays his bill. ”