Book Collecting Time Machine

Ian Kahn at Lux Mentis, turned me on to a great series of books in his blog (which has started to lapse - Get back to it Ian!).

[Disclosure: Lux Mentis is one of our fine advertisers, but neither that nor his comments about Fine Books ("It is, by far, the best book/trade journal on the market and arguably the best that has seen print") influenced this post.]

The American Book Mart in Chicago, which called itself "The largest company of its kind in America," published four editions of the Illustrated Price Catalog of Old Books Wanted between 1935 and 1938. They offer terrific insight into what book collecting was like seventy years ago. I went out and bought a set of the books on Abebooks and used them as props during a talk on book-collecting fashions that I gave at the recent gathering of the Fellowship of American Bibliophillic Societies (FABS).

Click on the picture of the open book (on the continuation page) to see what they were paying for Hemingway in 1938. If you buy a copy of one of these books, you'll also see want lists for authors like William Gilmore Simms and Edward Arlington Robinson who aren't much collected anymore. How times change!

One of the fashions I talked about was the tremendous interest collectors have in dust jackets. For books published since about 1900, most of their value is in the jacket, and while that seems to be a well-established part of the hobby, it didn't really take hold until after the Second World War.

Here's what I said in my talk (pictured are Bob Jackson, me, Don Miller, and Meade Emory. Terry Belanger was there, too, but he was at the podium during the Q&A. Thanks to Holly Pulsifer for the picture).

To suggest how long the current fashion for dust jackets took to develop, consider the guidebooks published by the American Book Mart in Chicago which list the books they wanted to buy and how much they were willing to pay for them. It’s fascinating to look at what was sought after at that time. They were very generously offering $5,000 for Edgar Allan Poe’s first book, Tamerlane, and Shakespeare’s first folio.

A note at the back, underlined in bold, described the “Importance of Binding: Our prices are for books in their original bindings. Even though the original binding may be a cheap paper or cardboard cover, a book in that binding is nearly always more valuable than one which has been rebound, even in an expensive leather binding.”

A surprising number of modern authors made the list—the 1930s version of hypermoderns—Eugene O’Neill, James Joyce ($3.50 for Ulysses), Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises with stoppped misspelled on page 181, $1.50), and even $1 for Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931). Yet the term dust jacket does not appear anywhere in any edition of these price guides. In 1936, they just weren’t anything to bother with.

And that's why finding pre-1940s books in jackets is so hard.

[Note: The 1935 edition was called Comprehensive Price List of Old Books; it and the 1936 and 1937 editions of the Illustrated Price Catalog of Old Books Wanted are in wrappers. The 1938 edition, which seems to have been the last, is a small-format hardcover.]

Comments

[Ian]

Urgh. I know...I am back...and groveling. Much has happened...nearly all good. I am posting again and shall stay active indefinitely.

very best,
ijk