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Okay, Okay… not a boat load, but an expedition load. After having a serious conversation about keeping away from long tail items, we stumbled upon a once in a lifetime book haul. We are excitingly going through these books and have found some that will definitely make it all worth it. There are books from the 1800’s that are from the US Congress and Senate, many books about wall street and finance too. I am wondering if anyone out there has some expertise in antique books and would like to share some tips or hints for finding a value. We found a great website vialibri.net and it is pretty good, but some of the books are very unique.
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Having sorted through a few tons of books, I can tell you there’s money in books. Literally. Also ephemera of various sorts, bookplates and inscriptions by authors, marbled endpapers and book dealer’s and bookbinder’s labels. Also words, but oftentimes the words ain’t worth so much. 🙂
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Antique Frog, do you use a specific site to find the value of rare, old books?
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Hi Jay, there’s a website that collates prices across a number of sites- the manager of the thrift bookshop I was a volunteer at encouraged us to use it. I can’t offhand remember the name- I found it a bit clunky, and the manager kept me on book sorting as I was able to identify what was worth valuing, i.e. I was the only person there who actually read books 🙂
He priced high, with the basic fiction paperback at 2 dollars (£1.50), and the rest slightly under whatever the median price on Amazon was. Most charity shops here will sell paperback fiction at 50 pence or three for a pound.
After 6 months as a bookshop (the shop had sold clothes and wedding dresses as well for about 25 years before the change) the shop closed due to the pandemic and didn’t re-open, as higher management decided it wasn’t selling enough.
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Jay, we are not sure who the gentleman was but he had a vast collection of these books. He had a huge basement that was dedicated to antique books, not to mention a large library of newer books. We spent about $850 and probably got one 1000 items. We are going through them to find some diamonds and try to get them listed quickly so we can recoup our money. It was back breaking work carrying it all up the stairs but I think it will be worth it. There are some items that we have no idea what to do with, all of our research came up blank. A few books in particular are from the foreign trade office in france, the us embassy. It seems to be full of ads from a magazine that were given to ambassadors from 1927-1932. They have the most amazing graphics and advertisements. Seems like they were made to give to ambassadors so they could shop in france. The books are HUGE. I will defiantly try to post some pictures so hopefully I can get some help with figuring out what it is.
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You definitely bought a large collection of long tail items! Good news is there is money in old books if you take the time to research, list correctly, and have patience. Antique magazines for ambassadors to France in the 1920s is the definition of long tail! There might only be 10 people on the planet who care about those….but they might pay big money for the rarity.
We’ve dabbled in old books and done well because they are so cheap. But there are scavengers here (MyCottage) who are specialists and only sell books and ephemera. There’s also a guy (Wabash…) who was making thousands of dollars a week selling old magazines from a hoarders house.
Some of those books might even be good to sell illustrated pages from. Advertisements are big business. I hope you love old books 🙂
Where will you store all these books?
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Hi Jay, thanks for the shout out, but actually I sell a variety of stuff, like most scavengers. However, I do have more knowledge about books and paper than some other stuff, and if I were going to specialize, that would probably be my focus. Those “Ambassador magazines” sound great—I suspect you are looking at some serious money right there—might even be best to auction them when the time comes to list. Can’t wait to see photos of some of this stuff.
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Oh, I often look at Amazon and ebay and Worthpoint for pricing, and also Addall.
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And Biblio.com
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Book dealer here. I second using addall.com/used/.   If it’s not listed there then try googling the books. I have found that some older books just aren’t listed for sale anywhere and you’ll have to make up a price.  I groaned where I read that they were in the basement. No fun hauling that many books up a flight of stairs.  I’d list the political stuff first. We’ve been selling lots of those lately.
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Thanks everyone for the info. I will add those websites to my bookmarks. We are trying to figure out the best way to store these books. We have a garage that is dark and stays cool, so that is where we will most likely be storing them. We definitely want to keep them safe, especially the really old ones.
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Long time Comic Book seller over here 🙂 For book/paper storage, dark, cool and dry is very good….humid, warm and sunny is the enemy. Especially the humidity, very bad.
If you unearth any comic books and have questions feel free to message me or email at jsmithbull@yahoo.com
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You could make a list of all the books you want to look up and pay for a month of Worthpoint to research there. I believe it’s $20 a month to get access to the “worthopedia”. I did some freelancing writing for them so I got a year subscription for free and it has come in handy for many items. I may pay for it once my subscription ends if I keep coming across items I can’t find anywhere else. I found a couple items that had sold for way more than I would have listed them for if I didn’t use Worthpoint so if you can do that a few times a year the subscription pays for itself.
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My favourite site for looking up hard to find books is https://www.abebooks.com. They are a booksellers site and have listings from quite a few different sellers. There is seldom a book or publication that I can not find info on there. I also use my Worthpoint account, eBay solds and Amazon, but AbeBooks seems to have better listings for rare and valuable books.
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On abebooks there’s the ability to order the listings from expensive (without shipping) to cheap; that’s useful to avoid the many print-on-demand copies of older books.
There’s a blog called Ten Pound Island; the owner, Greg, specialises in books on shipping, especially whaling. He provides valuable insights into how the rare book trade has changed over the years. I expect you can guess how the market for whaling books has developed.
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Thanks everyone! I have found that there are quite a few of my books that are not to be found on any of the websites I check, so I am just doing my best to put a number that makes sense. So far, in 9 days, we have made more than half of our money back already so hopefully it continues. I appreciate all the help and insight, I really feel like a fish out of water with some of these things. I will soon be sharing on of the items I like the most, hopefully I can get some help with pricing.
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