Antique Collecting: Vintage Books at Garage Sales

"Let’s talk a little bit about books. There is so much to learn so we just want to hit the highlights because if you are scrounging around and you are looking for books I just want to tell you basically what to look for, because there is so many out there, but I have found very valuable books at garage sales, believe it or not. This book is not a valuable book, but this book is an example of the type of book that you will find at a garage sale. It is called Wild Grape and this particular book is nothing special because the spine shows damage, that book collector’s want perfection so books, everything has to do with condition. If you take a look at the side of this book you can see that there is serious browning so even if this were a more valuable book. The condition that it is in would really deprecate the value, you have corner tears in here. The types of books that are valuable are well worth looking into and studying and you might want to go to eBay for this and start checking out your books because there is a lot of books from the seventies that are first editions like in Cold Blood, if they have the dust jackets. Now if this book happened to have the dust jacket it would be worth more and I am pretty sure it did have a dust jacket, most books did. Other books that you want to find are the really, really older books that have the golden outer pages here and the books that have phenomenal illustrations in them. There are some older ones, there are plates that are absolutely beautiful, books of historical significance, they are highly collectible. You know what else is really valuable? The early readers, even from the fifties, the Dick and Jane, sixties, Dick and Jane readers in good condition, those are very valuable. They are highly collectible and they are worth possibly hundreds of dollars based on the condition so start looking into books because those are something that is still out there that you can find."