Rare Books and Ephemera Sales in March were Tough!
Posted by Richard Gabriel on Fri, Apr 09, 2010 @ 04:20 PM
March 2010 won't go down as one of the stellar months for rare book and ephemera sales online but there were a few good auctions and prices, although not spectacular, were starting to firm up. This sort of lackluster but firming trend is to be expected because as the stock market moves up, unemployment goes down and disposable income comes back, rare book and ephemera buying increases. Ebay auctions have been for the most part, tepid with a few exceptions. I noted one really outstanding offering but then after having bid on the item, Ship of Fools, second edition, I got a notice from ebay, claiming that this auction was in essence, a scam. The word on the book blog pages was that the origin of the book was questionable, i.e., might have been stolen. Also when a seller puts on the 'rules' that the item cannot be returned, hey it makes you wonder. Anything over $1,000 in our shop has an automatic buy back at the price it was sold, why wouldn't we stand behind our listings?
Ebay auctions are always a little dicey from new sellers and generally if they don't have the reputation (positives running in the high 98% or higher and greater than 100 positives), the item is probably not what you expect it to be. We have also noted the derth of 'copies' of old books that are popping up like weeds on ebay, advanced book exchange, amazon and others. This trend is distressing to the rest of us old book and ephemera dealers as its printed on demand and generally the quality of these items is not that great. Generally, someone scans a book then creates a pdf image and sends it to one of the scads of online publishers and then lists it on Advanced Book Exchange or Amazon or ebay. So when you do a search for your favorite title, you get this listing for essentially a photocopy of the book you are looking for...
We have a really sweet little first edition by Robert Boyle listed on ebay and this book has had several inquiries but no bidders to speak of which is puzzling for such a rare book.
Boyle was a prolific writer and an extremely well liked person in London. He did socialize a lot and told everyone about his ideas and many industrialists took his ideas on steam, gases etc. and turned them into significant inventions to power the English Industrial Revolution. If you'd like to look at this book, just click on Boyles' picture! It's a really good time to pick up ephemera and books and there are a lot of good auctions in April. Tod's Farm opens pretty soon up in Rowley, Massachusetts so I'll be going up there and searching for books and ephemera and its the estate auction time! What fun!