In 1827, a young poet published a collection of poems called “Tamerlane.”
At the time, 50 copies were printed and the author’s real name was not used – credit was given only to “A Bostonian.”
Today, Edgar Allan Poe’s “Tamerlane,” a thin, papery pamphlet containing ten poems, can be worth as much as $800,000. Kenneth Gloss, the second-generation owner of Brattle Books in Boston and a PBS Antiques Roadshow appraiser, used this example in his discussion about the value of books when he came to town recently as part of the Duxbury Rural and Historical Society’s Sarah Wingate Taylor lecture series.
Gloss has been in the book business since 1973 when he began working with his father who started Brattle Books in 1949. His knowledge of old and used books is vast and the stories and anecdotes he offered to a packed audience at the Society’s archives at the Wright building were both informative and entertaining.
Gloss explained how there are many factors that go into making a book valuable. Some of them are surprising: age can be and cannot be one of them.
Books began to be printed in the 1400s, so any piece of material from that era is valuable, said Gloss. The first book, the Guttenberg Bible published in 1456, is incredibly valuable – half of it sold for $5.5 million and on average, a page can be worth between $50,000 to $100,000.
However, old family Bibles are rarely valuable, he said. In the 15 years that he has been appraising books on Antiques Roadshow, Gloss said that he and his fellow appraisers usually see around 80 Bibles in a day – so many in fact, that they started a friendly betting pool trying to see who would come closest to guessing the number of Bibles that they would see in a weekend. For the most part, the value of Bibles are to the families who have handed them down over the generations, said Gloss, although their inscriptions listing the genealogy of families might be important to local historical societies.
Within all the factors that decide whether or not a book is a valuable one, there are also many variables. It can get complicated.
A lot of what makes a book prized is the subject matter. A book from the 1500s may be very old but it may not be valuable, Gloss said, whereas a first edition of the first Harry Potter book published in London in 1997 can sell for $30,000 to $40,000.
“The real value of books is the knowledge in them,” Gloss said. Most treasured books have to be historically or scientifically significant or be important literature.
Probably the most important feature in a book’s value is its condition. Books in good condition with nearly perfect dust jackets that are interesting reading material are valuable because people want them.
“For a lot of collectors, it’s the prestige of saying ‘I’ve got the best, the most wonderful. I have what you don’t have,’” he explained. “Collectors want a book as close to original as possible.”
Is a book signed by its author more valuable than an unsigned one?
That depends, said Gloss. For an author like J.D. Salinger who wrote “The Catcher in the Rye,” the answer is yes because he rarely signed books, but for a book by someone like local celebrity author Edward Rose Snow, the answer is no. Gloss told the story of how Snow came into a book store one time and looked for his books. When he found them he said: “Ah, a rare unsigned copy!” and then he took out a pen and signed it.
However, “if it’s signed by someone famous, it could add hundreds or thousands of dollars to the value,” Gloss said.
For books, there is no real difference between a first edition and a first printing.
“The terms can be used interchangeably in most cases,” he said, adding that often the publishers notice a mistake or spelling error in the first 100 copies and then they might make a first edition, second printing that has a correction.
But just because a book is a first edition, doesn’t automatically give it value.
“It has to be a first printing of something somebody wants,” he said. Gloss believes that people should collect books because they are interested in them and the knowledge in them – not just for value. “A lot of the fun of collecting is learning about something,” he said. “It’s that knowledge and understanding, that’s what makes things interesting. Not everything has to be high priced to be fun.”
Gloss explained that when he does talk about value of a book, he is talking about the retail price – not what a person would get for the book if he or she sold it to a dealer.
“If you’re selling a book, you’d get one-third or two-thirds of that price,” he said. After he ended his discussion, the storied book dealer took time to give verbal appraisals to members of the audience who brought books. Pretty much all the books shown to him had very limited value – either they we worth nothing or between $10 to $50 – mostly because of their condition but also because they were not rare or unusual. One lucky person’s book appraised between $400 to $500. It was Ernest Hemingway’s “For Whom the Bell Tolls” with a dust jacket in good condition.
In his appraisals, Gloss added the caveat that “everything I say is subjective. If you’re not sure, get a second or third or fourth opinion.”
He concluded by saying that he welcomes calls to his store from people with questions about their books: “I’d rather have 100 people call then to have the 101st person throw away a Tamerlane,” he said.