My Uncle, a garage sale/auction junkie, is forever asking me to look up books on the net for him (which I don’t mind) so i was thinking a book collectiong guide would be a nice xmas pressie for him. Anyone have any suggestions on a good one? Thanks.
I find the books on collecting to be next to useless. There are just too many books to deal with, so you get selections: just literary first editions, or first books by authors, or whatever. You never get the full range of titles or editions or paperbacks or collector’s editions.
Does your uncle have a specialty that he sticks to? There are some specialist guides that are useful, if hard to find.
For example, if he goes to garage sales then a paperback price guide might be better than a standard first editions guide.
Paperback Prices and Checklist has 40,000 entries, mostly of collectibles though the early sixties. That’s twice as many entries as you’ll get in a normal rare book guide.
Could you provide more info on your uncle’s interests? The book world is pretty big and it would help to narrow the search.
Or you could just teach him how to use the internet. 
Oh wow I never thought of it as being so expansive. He tends to go for 1st editions of hardcover books anywhere from 1850-1960-ish but also books that just have recognizable titles. He doesn’t tend to pick up paperbacks, he seems to think they aren’t worth much. He is a massive record buff and buys and sells hundreds of dollars of records a month for a profit but just doesn’t quite seem to understand what to look for in books.
And I would looove to teach him the net but he has no pc and doesn’t have the patience to go to the library and look stuff up. Too bad cause I know he’d get a kick out of music review sites and stuff.
OK, here are two on the basics, both relatively recent. Remember that these books date really, really fast.
The Official Price Guide to Collecting Books, 4th Edition.
Collected Books: The Guide to Values 2002.
The first book is less expensive, but still perhaps may be more useful because the second one does a lot on rareties only found in auction houses.
This pocket guide is not the same thing, but it’s useful for having when you stumble across a 1920 book from Doubleday, Page and you can’t remember whether they started putting the words First Edition on the back of the title page that year or later. (Later, 1922.) I’ve had one for years, and always carry it with me to bookstores.
Pocket Guide to the Identification of First Editions
None of these is completist, but they should give him a running start.
Thank you!!