Researching the Value of Rare Books

Video Transcript

"Hi. I'm Erik Bosse. I'm with the Aldredge Bookstore. I'd like to talk about price guides of bibliographies. It used to be that when a book dealer would get a new book in to his or her shop, the first thing the dealer would do would turn to a price guide to see if this book is really valuable enough to put all the time and research necessary to make sure that it is indeed that rare and collectible book that the price guide might indicate. Now, price guides come in two basic types. The first is a coalition of information from dozens or hundreds of book dealers across this country or world wide that put out mail order catalogs. Complete with all sorts of useful information. Title, author, date of publication, edition, condition. And of course most importantly price. And this can basically let you know could this book be this rare, collectible, desirable book that I need to look at a little bit closer. The other type of price guide out there is auction listings. There is a few publishers that collect information from all of the major auction houses. The ones that deal in books. And so you can look at these books and you can see what rare collectible books actually sold for on a particular year. And it gives you an idea of, again, another indication of whether the book that you're looking at actually might have some sort of desirability, collectability. It might be this rare book that, again, that demands closer scrutiny and more research. Getting to the point of research we can talk about bibliographies. A bibliography is simply a book that talks about books. There are very broad bibliographies. We have one here that is a bibliography of science fiction and fantasy books. And it actually is a little bit more specific because I think it only takes books in this genre up to 1948. When the first edition was published. We've got bibliographies on books just about Texas history. We've got bibliographies on specific publishers. And of course there's a whole slew of bibliographies on books about just specific authors. The great thing is that most of this archain information that used to be available to the book dealers through these obscure price guides and bibliographies are now available to almost anybody, on the Internet."