Do books really sell for these incredible prices? Sure they’re listed for that much, but does anyone really buy them?
Here’s an example–Lord of Light (Zelazny) for $10,000! First edition in fine condition, and signed by Roger, sure, but…ten grand?!?
I can see a book from the middle ages going for that sort of money, that’s museum stuff, but Lord of Light? One of my favorites by one of my favorite authors, but even if I was worth millions I wouldn’t be spending that sort of money on a freakin’ book!
Lord of Light has a history. IIRC, something went wrong with the first edition making it scarce. So a signed version of that particular edition is even more scarce.
Signed Harry Potter first editions cost far more than $10,000. You can find any number of popular novels by popular authors that go into five figures. They are far more costly than many famous classic books by authors you’re forced to read in school. (Check the Bauman Books ads on the back page of every New York Times Book Review.) A signed first edition Chandler or Hammett or Tolkien would dwarf Zelazny.
Why? Because collectors care about having a copy of Zelazny and they don’t care about having a first edition of Ethan Frome or something similar. Zelazny means something to them. Classic literature is only what you were forced to read in school. Just because it’s old and somebody taught it doesn’t give it any value at all.
And just because you wouldn’t spend your money that way means similarly nothing. You probably spend money on a dozen or a hundred things I wouldn’t. That’s what makes it an interesting world.
I have first edition hardcovers of most of William Gibson’s novels, which aren’t too expensive, except for his first, Neuromancer, which won all the awards. First edition version of that is hideously expensive, so I recently picked up the 20th anniversary edition in hardcover for a mere $60. Sheesh.
Technically, the first edition of Neuromancer was the Ace Specials paperback in 1983. (Which I do have signed.) There is a British hardcover first that is about $2000 signed and Phantasia Press printed 375 copies of a signed special edition that runs $600 to $1000. SF is filled with oddities like this. A number of other Nebula winners originally appeared in paperback as well.
Don’t overlook the fact that for most of those recent expensive books it’s a situation where that book is extremely rare as a first edition. It might be a first book by an author who became wildly popular or a small press edition that got picked up by a major publisher. If demand outstrips supply by a factor of about ten thousand then you’re going to see prices like that.
I asked over at Shocklines, and here’s what Bob Booth said:
“Biggest deal I’ve ever heard of? A book dealer/collector (who shall remain anonymous) outbid Brown University for a Lovecraft item. It was Lovecraft’s copy of a Clark Ashton Smith small print run book. It was inscribed to Lovecraft by Smith and had his hand written corrections. Price was somewhere around $15000. Don’t know if he bought it for himself or as a dealer.”
:eek:
Neuromancer was mentioned there too. One poster sold his Gollancz first edition for $1,000.
That’s why I don’t collect books. One day you’re flush and you buy something special – then something happens and you have to let it go. Even when you make a profit, it has to hurt. The most I ever spent for a book was that coffin-boxed edition of The Stand, $175. I think the asking price is $1,200 now.
The most I ever spent on books was a set of the first three novels in Douglas Adams’ Hitchhiker trilogy which were signed by him. They weren’t even first editions, but they were nice leather-bound limited editions, and the autograph is the only reason I shelled out a few hundred bucks for 'em.
During his last reading for Making Money, I took my first edition copies of The light Fantastic and Colour of Money to have Pterry sign them. He did a double take, and said, “Wow, first editions, they will bring a pretty penny on ebay.”
I looked at him and said, “Oh, no sir. I don’t seel books. That would be… erm, wrong.”
He just laughed and said he knew several british bookstore owners who had the same philosophy.
I’m not sure what they sell for these days, and I can’t find a reference with a quick Google, but a complete set of the original Strand magazines containing the illustrated Sherlock Holmes stories is… not cheap. Not cheap at all. Obviously because they’re magazines - ephemera, essentially. Magazines with detective stories in them. Who’d have thought at the time?
Yup, I’m planning to have him sign a few copies of something when I’m at the Con. Then I’ll have to sell them to support my Discworld collection habit.
As long as we’re talking Discworld for a moment, would anyone expect the Unseen Library editions to be worth much in the future? The first ones are going for $300 a pop in some circumstances, but the later ones can still be had for $20 or so each. Would one expect–if one were clever about these things–that the later ones would also become scarce and valuable?
Before I say anything else: anything that is sold as “collectable” isn’t.
That out of the way I suspect they might. The general rule is the first one shows the most demand but also the most orders. As the run continues both demand and supply drop until there’s a cross over point. Jingo might have one tenth the orders that The Light Fantastic does and ten years from now people will be able to find those early books without much effort but the later ones are next to impossible to acquire.
It’s never a good idea to bet on that kind of thing as investment since for every special edition that is ultrarare and in demand a few years later there’s three that couldn’t sell their initial run let alone the used copies.
A few of us, like Exapno, have a long history of book collecting. I had to curtail my Bibliomania (which is the name of a great book by a man named Basbanes about the condition) when I changed jobs. But yeah, they can go for a lot - I sold a few books to fund some work on our kitchen; fortunately they’d all gone up in value.
I can’t recall the Zelazny particulars simply because I never tried to dig into Zelazny; I would’ve gotten Nine Princes in Amber, but never really got around to it. Exapno’s right about Neuromancer - but in addition to books just coming out first in hardcover *or *softcover, sometimes it’s both. Classic example is Snow Crash, which came out in both, with of course the soft covers far out-numbering the hardcovers, which now sell for a much bigger premium (I got a signed one back in the day). Same with David Foster Wallace’s first book The Broom of the System; he just died and the hardcover first edition of that book is spiking hard.
In terms of wackiness and value, try Dune. It was published by Chilton - yes, the car repair manual publisher (gosh, think Herbert was having trouble getting published?). But Chilton wasn’t a fiction publisher and didn’t have the same established rules to declaring what edition it was. Much collecting-scholarship wackiness ensued - folks went back and forth and lots of books were thought to be first but weren’t. Finally, I think it was sci-fi book collector and dealer LW Curry - an irascible dude but considered the last word in this type of thing - who confirmed what a true first needed to have in it. On the back flap of the dust jacket, underneath the Publisher’s name on the imprint, there must be 4 - count 'em 4 - cities listed. You got only 2? Take thousands of dollars off the value.
It is indeed a sickness. And why yes, I did end up with a 2-city Dune that I had to work out a return agreement with the guy I bought it from so I could go after a true first - why do you ask?
Considering that most of it had been published to great success in magazines a few years earlier (including a Hugo nomination despite the fact that the published novel would later win) I doubt it. I suspect that Chilton was trying to expand into fiction publishing.
I don’t have the research in front of me, and a quick Wiki check was no help, but I could swear that I heard from some knowledgeable dealer that Herbert was having trouble - it might’ve had something to do with wanting to publish it his way, but I can’t be sure about that…
