Collect what you love – the best book collections reflect the personalities and interests of their owners. With effort and a little luck the hobby can be financially rewarding, but like all investments it’s never a sure bet. Those who reap the greatest rewards are usually those who buy the books they love.
Our books will in all likelihood outlast us, so it’s many collectors’ philosophy that they are paying not for the book itself, but the privilege of preserving it for the next generation.
Condition is one of the most important considerations in book collecting, so buy at the best condition possible within your budget. It’s generally better to have a small collection of superior quality books than a large collection of lower quality. Also make sure that you have a safe place to store your books – they should be kept out of direct sunlight, away from radiators and moisture, and not exposed to swings in temperature.
Pick a specific collecting area. Starting with something as general as “photography books” can be overwhelming. Instead, narrow it down to “photographs of the American West” or “late 20th-century fashion photography”. You can always expand from this as you develop your collection, or stop and start over with an entirely different topic.
Don’t be afraid to be original. It’s exciting to collect in a niche subject area, and you’ll have less competition for material. It can also make your collection more appealing when the time comes to sell or donate.
Look at books. The internet has made it easy to collect from home, but you should still spend as much time as possible viewing books in person. Become a regular at local rare book shops, which can be discovered via the Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association (Britain), the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, and the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers. These organisations also maintain lists of upcoming bookfairs, which are a wonderful way to see books and to make connections with dealers from around the world.
Be extremely cautious about purchasing books from online auction sites, as it can be difficult to return them if there is a mistake in the description. Dealers who are members of the organisations listed above abide by strict professional standards regarding descriptions and return policies.
Familiarise yourself with the reference material in your subject area, particularly the bibliographies, which describe important editions of books and often provide information on their publishing history, scarcity, and historical or literary importance. The Oak Knoll shop in Delaware is a particularly good source for books about books.
Sign up for dealer newsletters, online catalogues, and updates for books matching your interests (click here to sign up for our catalogues). Most of the large auction houses also provide these types of services. Reading catalogues, even if you’re not planning on buying from them, is a great way to educate yourself about the market.
If you’ve been collecting for a little while and find that you really enjoy the hobby, consider taking a course at one of the rare books schools located in Virginia, California and London.
One of the most common misconceptions about books is that misprints and typos make them rare or valuable. Unfortunately, while certain types of errors can contribute to a book’s collectability, these alone will not increase the value of an otherwise inexpensive misprinted books. Consider the following case:
The Sun Also Rises is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Widely considered to be Ernest Hemingway’s best book, it is also the founding text of the “Lost Generation” of writers who came of age during the First World War. This significance, combined with the small number of first editions available today (5,090 copies were printed and few have survived in collectible condition) is what makes it valuable.
First edition of The Sun Also Rises by Ernest Hemingway (1926). BOOK SOLD
So where do misprints and typos come in? In this case, an error on page 181 (“stoppped” instead of “stopped”) appears in only the earliest issue of the book and was quickly corrected by the printer. When accompanied by other signs, such as the correct date, publisher, and binding, it means that these misprinted books were one of the very first to be printed, making it more desirable to collectors.
On the other hand, any inexpensive reprint of the same book might contain a misprint. But if the edition is not particularly interesting or uncommon, and the order in which the book was published is not important, then the misprint is just a nuisance. It isn’t the typo alone that makes a book valuable, it’s what the typo indicates: how early a specific copy was published and how rare it is.
For a small number of very important books such as The Sun Also Rises, misprints can have an impact on value, but in most cases they don’t make a difference. To find out more about first editions, see our posts:
First edition of The Psychology of Everyday Living by Ernest Dichter (1947).
Mid twentieth-century America. In a corporate board room, hazy with tobacco smoke and whiskey fumes, a man pitches innovative new advertising ideas.
Soap isn’t just for mundane hygiene issues, it’s associated with sensuality and should be marketed as sexy and refreshing.
Cigarettes aren’t just commodities, they’re rewards for a job well done, or a break from a stressful work day.
Car makers should promote their brands with convertibles because men associate them with freedom and the fantasy of having a mistress, even if they end up buying a sedan when they take their wife back to the dealership.
Mad Men’s Don Draper.
Don Draper, right? Now in its fifth season, Mad Men has reintroduced the American public to the advertising revolution that led companies away from spots extolling their product’s obvious uses to a new style targeting consumers’ unspoken desires. But the instigator of this movement was not a mysterious and dangerously sexy ad executive like Don Draper. He was a much more interesting figure who forever changed American consumerism.
Ernest Dichter (1907–91).
Ernest Dichter was born in Vienna in 1907 and following a severely impoverished childhood was employed in his uncle’s department store. Working as a window dresser, he became interested in marketing and introduced new American ideas into the shop, such as the use of music to soothe customers.
In 1938, following university training in psychology and informal training in psychoanalysis, he moved to New York with his wife and only $100 to his name. Dichter worked for a time with a traditional market-research firm, but in 1939 he sent a letter to six corporations in which he offered his understanding of psychoanalysis as a way to radically improve their marketing strategies. Four responded, and his first contract was for Ivory Soap. Using in-depth consumer interviews, he learned that when shoppers picked a particular brand,
“it wasn’t exactly the smell or price or look or feel of the soap, but all that and something else besides—that is, the gestalt or ‘personality’ of the soap.
This was a big idea. Dichter understood that every product has an image, even a ‘soul’, and is bought not merely for the purpose it serves but for the values it seems to embody. Our possessions are extensions of our own personalities, which serve as a ‘kind of mirror which reflects our own image’. Dichter’s message to advertisers was: figure out the personality of a product, and you will understand how to market it” (The Economist).
Dichter’s belief in good marketing went beyond creating successful ads; it became a total philosophy. Profoundly affected by the turmoil he had experienced as a young man in Europe, he believed that consumerism was the only bulwark against totalitarianism. The public, he argued, must learn to stop feeling guilty. They must accept and fulfill their unconscious desires, or risk falling under the spell of communism or fascism.
In light of this, he wrote his first book for the general public. The Psychology of Everyday Living (BOOK SOLD), published in 1947, was
“designed as an accessible self-help manual to help Americans ‘accept the morality of the good life’… As America entered the 1950s, the decade of heightened commodity fetishism, Dichter offered consumers moral permission to embrace sex and consumption, and forged a philosophy of corporate hedonism, which he thought would make people immune to dangerous totalitarian ideas” (Cabinet Magazine, issue 44, p. 30).
Chapters such as “The Magic of Soap”, “What Bread Means to You”, “How to Be Happy While Cooking”, and “The Psychology of Buying” purported to solve the problems of everyday life, but largely encouraged a positive attitude to consumption by stressing the good feelings associated with a new purchase or the use of a specific commodity.
The book is extensively illustrated, with images that promote consumerism even more blatantly than the text does. A photograph of a woman applying makeup is captioned “Cosmetics provide psychological therapy”, and another of a man trying on a hat reads, “The right kind of hat gives us dignity”.
In chapter after chapter, Dichter posits that consumer products can help us express our individuality, engage with the world in new ways, or simply provide a self-esteem boost:
The chapter on cigarettes argues that those who try to abstain from smoking are wrong to feel guilty about the habit. Dichter writes that,
“Efforts to reduce the amount of smoking signify a willingness to sacrifice pleasure in order to assuage their feeling of guilt… Guilt feelings may cause harmful physical effects not at all caused by the cigarettes used, which may be extremely mild. Such guilt feelings alone may be the real cause of the injurious consequences”.
One of the photographs used in this chapter has a decidedly sexual subtext:
Automobiles, according to Dichter, aren’t simply for running errands or getting to work. They’re about freedom, personal identity, youthful self-assertion, and, of course, sex.
Probably the best illustration is “What is bought depends on what the woman says”:
Though Dichter faced scrutiny from those who were wary of the corporate hold on Americans’ psyches, criticism only seemed to generate more converts. But his method did have faults, and executives in the early 60s began to feel that his ideas were sometimes too strange to be practical. Like Don Draper dismissing the psychoanalyst in the first episode of Mad Men, the director of a Pepsi campaign fired Dichter when he was told that ice shouldn’t be used in advertisements because it reminded consumers of death. At the the same time, the advent of accessible computing meant that firms were able to return to more scientific methods of researching consumer behaviour. But Dichter remains the most important figure of twentieth-century advertising. Glance at the television or pass a billboard and you’ll recognise that the concepts he pioneered still dominate the advertising that surrounds us.
Duke University’s John W. Hartmann Center for Sales, Advertising, and Marketing History has digitised a huge range of twentieth-century advertising, including both print ads and television commercials. In many cases you can see the difference between pre and post-Dichter advertising strategies.
The Railway Series Pre-Cut Model Engine Book No. 2 – Percy with Clarabel the Coach.
Update (14 May, 2012): Reader Justin A. Olsen has kindly replied to our request for additional information on these models; you can read his comments here. We’re still interested in purchasing the two models we don’t have, Thomas and James, so please contact us if you have any you’re willing to part with.
Can you help? We recently acquired two lovely items from W. Awdry’s The Railway Series. These “Pre-Cut Model Engine Books” each contain a story and the parts and instructions for making two toys out of card. We have Number 2: Percy with Clarabel the Coach and Number 3: Gordon the Big Engine & His Tender (click to enlarge the images):
Percy Pre-Cut Model.
Percy Pre-Cut Model Instructions.
I believe these were produced in the late 1950s, as The Eight Famous Engines, the final story book listed on the back of each volume, was published in 1957. Four different titles in the pre-cut model series are described as being available (with more in production), and we would love to know more about these and possibly locate copies of the other two, Thomas the Tank Engine and James the Red Engine.
Please do get in touch if you know more about these sets and their sales records, and especially if you have copies to sell. You can leave a comment on this post or contact us by email or phone.
Below, a few more photos of the model books. If you have a good printer you could even construct them yourself!
Clarabel Pre-Cut Model.
Percy & Clarabel Story.
The Railway Series Pre-Cut Model Engine Book No.3 – Gordon the Big Engine & His Tender.
Tradition holds that William Shakespeare was born on 23 April, in 1564, though it’s impossible to know the date for sure. What is known is that he was baptised at Holy Trinity, the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon, on the 26th of the month, so was probably born sometime between the 21st and 23rd. The 23rd of April is also recorded as Shakespeare’s date of death in 1616, and it is this untimely event that we have to thank for the preservation and promotion of his works in the First Folio, and ultimately his enshrinement as one of England’s great geniuses.
Shakespeare was only 52 when he, Ben Jonson, and the poet-playwright Michael Drayton “had a merry meeting, and itt seems drank too hard, for Shakespeare died of a feavour there contracted”. As a memorial, his friends and fellow members of The King’s Men, John Heminges and Henry Condell, decided to produce a collected edition of his plays.
Eighteen of Shakespeare’s plays had been published during his lifetime, individually in cheap and probably unauthorised quarto editions, some of which became bestsellers. These often error-riddled editions are described in the First Folio as “stol’n and surreptitious copies”, and some seem to have been reproduced solely from the memories of actors trying to make a little cash on the side. This continued after his death, and in 1619 the publisher Thomas Pavier and printer William Jaggard produced ten quarto plays ostensibly by Shakespeare (though two were not actually his work), and this may have spurred Heminges and Condell to complete their own collected edition and reassert the King’s Men’s authority over the texts.
It wouldn’t be an easy process. Though the King’s Men held the copyrights to many of the plays, it took years to negotiate for others, which remained with the publishers of the quarto editions. Though these publishers did not have what we today would consider intellectual priority over the works, they had been the first to enter them in the Stationer’s Register, which gave them the copyrights. Some even had to be brought in as partners, earning shares of the proceeds of the First Folio based on how many plays they contributed. Willaim Jaggard himself served as the head printer on the project until his death in 1623.
The printing began in early 1622 and took around two years to complete, with the earliest known sale of a First Folio occurring in December 1623. The choice of the imposing folio format was vital to the book’s success, “giving the volume the instant status of a classic: it is a weighty tome, a book for individuals’ libraries, a collection perhaps to be owned rather than read… It was also expensive, probably not less than 15s. a copy and often costing £1 or more”. Prior to this, theatre in England had been considered low-brow, and no collection of plays had been published in such a lavish manner. The First Folio elevated not only Shakespeare’s reputation but that of playwriting in general.
Most importantly, the First Folio included 36 of Shakespeare’s 38 known plays, 18 of which had never before been printed and would probably have been lost to history if not included. And the texts, edited by Shakespeare’s close friends and his fellow writers and actors, are considered the most authoritative of all early printings. Shakespeare’s reputation today rests largely on the publication of the First Folio.
Despite its expense, the book sold well enough that a second edition, the Second Folio, was required in 1632. Published by a syndicate of five firms, copies appear with one of five different imprints depending on which publisher sold them. Our copy, pictured above, has the scarcest imprint, that of the publisher John Smethwick, who owned the rights to four plays: Hamlet, Romeo & Juliet, Love’s Labour’s Lost, and The Taming of the Shrew. Despite the importance of these titles, Smethwick’s small contribution of four plays meant that his share of finished copies was relatively low, and his imprint correspondingly scarce. Also of note–the second Folio contains the first appearance in print of John Milton, who contributed a poem to the Effigies leaf that did not appear in the first edition.
Two more folio editions of Shakespeare’s plays were published by the beginning of the eighteenth century, followed by a number of important editions edited by authors such as Samuel Johnson and Alexander Pope. Today, though, the most highly sought-after editions are still the early folios, with the First Folio becoming one of the most valuable books in the world. Around 750 copies were printed, but only 230 survive, and of those only 40 are complete. Most extant copies are held in libraries, and in the last decade, only three have been sold at auction, all achieving prices in the millions of dollars. As much as we hate to have second-best books here at Peter Harrington, the Second Folio is a second-best we’re glad to have, as it is the earliest edition of Shakespeare that is practicably obtainable on the market.
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