Evaluating Condition of Rare Books

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Erik Bosse. We're going to talk about condition. This is a really important component to what a book is worth. Is the condition the book's in. At the top of the tier is FINE. And this concerns books whether their a year old, a hundred years old. If they look about as tight and bright and clean and unblemished as one would expect they would have looked at the day that they were printed. If they have dust jackets you want to see them without any tear, any nick, any problems at all. The next step down would be VERY GOOD. Now, very good can be, if you've got an older book, something that might be a little dull. Perhaps if you've got some gold leaf lettering that maybe it's just not as bright as you might expect. There might be some slight bumping on the edge of the books, in the corners. Maybe a little bit of discoloration on the paper. But everything else, it's in good shape, it's square, it's tight. This is a fairly broad range. A book that is very good might show it's age somewhat but there's nothing, no major damage, nothing missing from it. It's been common in the rare book business to refer to a book as GOOD that may be not what a lot of people think is good. Good can often mean something with maybe a little bit of flaw. Perhaps some book repair could help. Such as a little bit of a torn spine. We can also see examples of books with some physical defects. The caulked binding on this book. Heavily bumped corners. Some of the cloth missing from the spine here. But everything else about the book intact. It's not, the binding is still fairly tight, that still would fall more or less under the category. The next step down. A book could be called FAIR. And this is a very sad example of a book with a lot of damage to it. Even on the front cover and even here missing a little bit of a page. If these damages are well explained in the description of the book there are still people that might want to buy it. It could be a book that was never reprinted and they might want it for the information in here. Perhaps they have a collection of every other book by this author except this one that might be very difficult to get and they want it to fill their collection. And hopefully one day in the future they can find a better copy. So there are legitimate reasons for people to buy books that are in lesser condition. So when it comes down to a question of value on a book condition is of very high importance."