Beyond the Basics Summer 2015 Joel Silver

Collecting Old Books on a Budget

Priced out of the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries? Alternatives exist for frugal collectors.
Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

If you’re looking to collect the seventeenth or eighteenth centuries inexpensively, printed sermons like those featured above can be a good option.

Books, at least the books that collectors usually want, cost money, and sometimes they cost a great deal of money. This becomes apparent to collectors very early in their collecting careers, and coming to grips with the truth of this statement can occupy much of the rest of a collector’s life. While some collectors can afford to buy practically any book that they might want, most are in a very different financial situation. Collecting manuals contain advice about how to deal with this difficulty, but the suggestions almost always involve collecting prospectively rather than retrospectively, that is, collecting relatively low-priced contemporary books, which can be acquired at their issue price or less, and which are likely to increase in interest and value in the future.

Collecting newly issued fiction or non-fiction can certainly be relatively inexpensive, as is selecting another collecting area among the books of the last century or two that isn’t in demand at the moment. But what do you do if your interests really lie in books of the eighteenth century or earlier, and you have a relatively small collecting budget? Modern book collecting guides are of little help, but there are still ways, even in today’s book market, to build a collection. Not all older books are expensive, but many of them are, so the overall idea, as Hall of Famer William H. (“Wee Willie”) Keeler said, is to “Keep your eye on the ball and hit ’em where they ain’t.” Here are a few suggestions to help you get started.

Don’t Worry About Resale

If a collection is being built for personal enjoyment and education rather than for investment or profit, a lot more possibilities open up regarding what can be considered appropriate for purchase. In order to stay in business, a bookseller needs to resell a book for more than its original cost, but collectors aren’t in the book business, and if the collection is for satisfaction and enjoyment rather than financial profit, it’s not necessary to worry about what it might be worth in the future. If you don’t need to think about a book’s potential future sale, or how it can be marketed to someone else someday, then you’re free to follow your own rules, rather than what the manuals might say about what and how to collect.

Learn A New Language

Most books produced before 1801 weren’t written in the English language, and there’s a much better chance of finding lower-priced older books and pamphlets in Latin, German, French, or Italian, rather than in English. Learning enough Latin to enjoy reading or browsing can open up large areas of possible acquisition, since so much, including the works of ancient authors, theological writings, and educational and historical texts, were often printed in Latin. European vernacular languages can sometimes also yield lower-priced books, especially if the books fall into one of the categories described below.

Collecting in a language other than English
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Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Collecting in a language other than English can be economical. This Hebrew Book of Psalms, printed in Cambridge, England, in 1685 is an example.

Latin book by William Camden
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Courtesy of the Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana.

Because part of a later leaf is missing from this seventeenth-century Latin book by William Camden, and there are also some leaves of the index that are lacking, it would be affordable to an unprejudiced collector. 

Be Open to New Subjects

If an older book relates to a heavily collected subject area such as science, Americana, or women’s studies, it’s going to be difficult to build a collection in the field on a small budget. Looking through online listings of lower-priced older books can quickly reveal what is available that’s relatively inexpensive, and you might be persuaded to develop an interest in sermons, legal statutes or cases, or classical texts intended for students.

Be Forgiving About Condition

Collectors in every field know that condition plays an important role in the price of an item, and that pieces in less-than-fine condition can be difficult to sell or trade, since most collectors will reject them. Since so few collectors or institutions want these books, incomplete copies of common works are often priced significantly below their perfect counterparts. If you can regard positively what is still present in a volume, rather than fretting over what has gone missing over the years, your range of potential acquisitions may grow significantly.

Assemble Sets from Odd Volumes

The Internet has given collectors a better-than-ever chance of assembling sets over time by buying individual volumes that have become separated from their companions, and putting together their own sets, mismatched though they might be. While even small parts of an important multi-volume set might still be expensive, lesser works can sometimes be obtained very inexpensively this way, assuming, of course, that the missing volumes actually do appear eventually.

Look for Later Editions

First editions usually sell for a great deal more than do subsequent editions, and these second or later editions can be quite rewarding to read and to collect. There were often a great many textual and other changes made in later editions, and since many of these changes have not yet been recorded by bibliographers, there is always the potential for making interesting discoveries.

Less Is More: Buy Few Books Rather than Many

If none of the suggestions above appeal to you, and you still want to buy fine copies of books by popular authors or those in sought-after fields, then you may want to consider making each book purchase a rare and special occasion. Collectors’ manuals sometimes advise beginning collectors to make their initial purchases in their newly-chosen area the most expensive and difficult-to-find books that they can afford, based on the idea that these are the books that are likeliest to rise to unaffordable levels. This advice is usually hard to follow, because book collectors enjoy acquiring books, and starting with an expensive one means that you may not be able to buy another for quite some time. But if you are able to collect this way, and you spend nearly all your annual book budget on a single item, eventually you’ll have a small but wonderful library, with nothing to explain or apologize for if another collector happens to see your books.

But if you don’t think that this approach can work for you, and you still want to be surrounded by the books that you’ve read about in the memoirs of famous collectors and booksellers, then I can enthusiastically recommend the profession of special collections librarianship.