By Bruce McKinney
Books are sold in many places: in book stores, through book sellers on line, through auctions and dispersals. Collectable book buying has been for several centuries a matter of luck and cunning that has favored the highly educated and those with elephantine memories. It has always been like gold mining. You had to find the vein. Few people had the knowledge, fewer still the luck. Everyone believes the great material is out there but there has been no easy way to find it. Better organized dealers and collectors have been using online selling sites for most of a decade. But the only “cash” market for most collectors has been auctions and they are limited in the types of material they sell. For the much broader market of sellers there is eBay.
For decades there has been no easy way to dispose of books accumulated over a collecting career. They have been acquired from dealers and second-hand shops, at library fairs, auctions, rummage sales and flea markets and over time become collections. They are the reminders of summer trips across the mid-west and free afternoons in the dust bins of New York’s used book shops. Their common thread is often only apparent to the collector who bought because they looked interesting, were cheap, might make a gift (but were rarely given away) or occasionally actually had a solid connection to a “collecting” theme In many cases, these accumulations became, in time, collections – disparate and constructed with uncertain glue – but nevertheless collections. Pretty bindings, 19th century fiction, signed copies, all of them interesting debris. And they have never been easy to re-sell. Buying the right material at the right price was difficult: selling it for its fair valuation almost impossible.
eBay
eBay
