Why Are Harmful Books So Expensive?

On Monday, Stanford linguist Geoff Nunberg mentioned that the conservative weekly Human Events had ranked Charles Reich's The Greening of America as one of the most harmful books of all time. I was surprised at how many truly rare and highly collectable books were on the list. Does that mean that wealthy book collectors skew liberal or does their intellectual curiosity outweigh their conservative philosophy?

Here's Human Events' top ten list and my estimate of the current market value of the first editions.

#1 Most Harmful Book
Karl Marx and Freidrich Engels' Communist Manifesto.
First edition: Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei Veröffentlicht im Februar 1848. London (yes, London): ...J.E. Burghard, 1848. Sold at Sotheby's on June 2, 2006, for $171,500.

#2. Adolf Hitler's Mein Kampf. Munich: Franz Eher, 1925-27. Two volumes. Currently offered by Ursus Rare Books for $12,500.

#3. Mao Zedong's Quotations from Chairman Mao. [No place given (probably Beijing)]: Central Intelligence Bureau of the Chinese People's Liberation Army, 1964. "After the Bible the most printed text in the world," according to Heritage Book Shop, who asks $18,500 for a first state of the first edition.

#4. Alfred Kinsey's Sexual Behavior in the Human Male (a.k.a. "The Kinsey Report"). Philadelphia: W.B. Saunders, 1948. Readily available for under $200.

#5. John Dewey's Democracy and Education. New York : Macmillan, 1916. First editions are very hard to come by. Low four figures for a copy in a dust jacket. According to Human Events, this book "encouraged the teaching of thinking 'skills' ...and helped nurture the Clinton generation."

#6. Karl Marx's Das kapital. Hamburg, O. Meissner, 1867 - 1894. Published in three volumes, complete sets are tough to find. The last copy of volume one sold at auction went for $44,000 last year. Figure $65,000 for all three.

#7. Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1963. Modern feminist books are still undervalued in the market, so this will set you back perhaps $300.

#8. Auguste Comte's Cours de philosophie positive (a.k.a. Introduction to Positivist Philosophy). Paris, 1830-42. Six volumes. Complete sets run about $2,000. Comte coined the word sociology (the horror!) and placed scientific reasoning ahead of theology.

#9. Freidrich Nietzsche's Jenseits von Gut und Böse [Beyond Good and Evil]. Leipzig, C. G. Naumann, 1886. Bernard Quaritch has one of the 600 first editions bound with another Nietzche book for $5,750.

#10. John Maynard Keynes' General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money. London: MacMillan & Co., Ltd, 1936. The Manhattan Rare Book Company offers this particularly nice copy for $9,500.