At Rare Book Hub this is a refrain we hear frequently as collectors in their 70s and 80s, struggle to make decisions about what to do with their books. These are decisions they have put off for far too long.
For advice we turned to Scott Brown, aka “Downtown Brown,” a veteran dealer in Portland, OR who came recommended to us as the man with a plan, backed up with the knowledge and experience. Brown, 58, has worked in some aspect of the antiquarian trade since 1992, issued his first catalog in 1995, and is a self described “generalist,” who specializes in “whatever I bought most recently.”
Back in the day when running Eureka Books in Eureka, CA (he has since sold his interest and moved to Portland) he was known as “the only dealer who would make house calls.” As a result it wasn’t long before he was getting calls from farther and farther away. “Once you’ve bought a few things over the phone you know what to expect,” he explained. “The expense of buying big collections is the labor. It’s like gold mining, the claims are free, but you’ve still got to dig the hole.” Since then he has handled many private libraries and is perhaps best known as the dealer who took all of the nearly 100,000 books that remained after the 2012 Bonham’s auction of Peter Howard’s famous Serendipity Bookstore in Berkeley.
What follows are edited excerpts from Brown’s own blog: Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade, interspersed with a few comments from a recent phone conversation. Links to the full texts are at the end of this piece.
“You don’t have to be a dealer for very long,” Brown wrote, “before you’ll hear a collector lament that they need to sell their books before they die. Better booksellers than I probably hear that and start thinking, “What can I buy?” I always think, “You are about to make a mistake you’ll regret, maybe for the rest of your life.
“People don’t actually say that they need to sell their books before they die. Selling and dying are concepts collectors find too painful to contemplate. We use euphemisms like I need to do something with my books before I’m gone. Or the more jaded among us might offer, ’I have to do something before my wife/husband/kids sell my books for two dollars a piece at a garage sale.’
Next comes the explanation: ‘I don’t want the books to be a burden.’
If you are having these thoughts or plan to in the future, rest assured that garage sales where valuable books are sold for a few bucks each rarely happen.
What often happens is much worse.
Your books are unlikely to be sold for pennies on the dollar, because while collectors think they rarely talk about their books at family gatherings, our relatives think that we talk about little else.
The glazed-eye look we’ve all seen on our in-laws’ faces mask the fact that our relatives are actually listening to what we say about books some of the time. They’ve likely picked up the term first edition and the idea that first editions are VERY VALUABLE.
After a collector dies, heirs seldom dump books. Far more often,heirs worry and fret for months and even years about what the collector would want them to do. I’ve seen families paralyzed by book collections, unable to relocate or downsize from houses that are now too big. They spend endless hours looking up books on the Internet for fear of selling expensive books for too little and imagining the screams of their collector from beyond the grave.
Just as many people retire from working and find themselves out of sorts with not much to do, collectors who deliberately stop collecting can find a hole in their life that’s hard to fill. That’s why my initial reaction when people tell me they are going to start selling their books is to ask if they are sure there isn’t another way.
This may seem like a cautionary tale with a moral that you should sell your collection before you’re gone. It isn’t.
Book collecting, more than many hobbies, does offer the possibility of a financial return, and your family is willing to make a reasonable effort to find homes for your books. It’s what we do for each other. Your job as a collector is to make sure the process is not a burden, and you can do that with a bit of advance preparation.
Before anything else, if you haven’t already done so, make a will. I’m always surprised by how many people don’t do any estate planning. Hardly anyone enjoys contemplating their mortality, but it’s much easier to do when you are healthy and the prospect of dying seems far off. If you don’t, your heirs will be stuck navigating the complex legal system governing inheritance and ultimately a government official (typically a judge) will decide what happens.
When you’ve finished your will, write up a short list of instructions for what your family should do with your books.
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Which dealers, auction houses, and fellow collectors should your heirs call?
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What should they do with everything that is left?
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And last, and most important, if your loved ones follow your instructions you need to absolve them of any guilty feelings that they didn’t do enough.
These steps probably won’t get your heirs the biggest return on your investment. Only you, who know the books best, can do that. Your family members don’t understand how to describe condition or how to determine points of issue or how to know which dealers they can rely upon. It is unreasonable and unfair for you to place the burden of figuring it all out on them.
Some collectors who worry that their first editions will be sold too cheaply hope to alert their heirs to the value of the books by writing a price inside. Penciling $12,000 on the endpaper of a $1,200 book doesn’t help anyone. Your heirs won’t know who to trust, you or the bookseller trying to buy the book for $500.
It’s important to keep in mind that the people you suggest be called to buy your books might not want them, and they almost certainly won’t want all of them. That’s why it’s essential to include instructions for what to do with what’s left.
Here’s the list of instructions I’ve put with my will:
What to Do with the Books If I Die Unexpectedly
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Call a Portland, Oregon [note: or wherever you live], ABAA dealer. The ABAA website has a member search if you can’t think of someone to call. Ask the dealer if they can arrange for an auction house to take material on consignment (the auction house should give the referring dealer a commission). If the dealer offers and the terms are agreeable to you, feel free to let them take books on consignment with the expectation that the payout will be larger but slower, probably spread out over years.
[NB: Since I am a bookseller, I know all the ABAA dealers in Portland; collectors may be better served by listing a few specific dealers, preferably people you buy from and who are younger than you are.]
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Whatever the auction house or dealer doesn’t want can be sold by sealed bid. Ask the ABAA dealer you are working with to arrange it in exchange for 20% of the sale price. If they want to do extra work, they can do it by bookcase/fixture. Otherwise one bid for everything is fine. Alternatively, engage a local estate auctioneer.
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Once the books are gone, fixtures can be sold by putting a price on them or taking bids.
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Don’t worry about whether you are getting the best price - if you do the above, it will be an adequate result.
The most monetary value is typically in a few items - not the whole collection
In another blog Brown had quite a bit to say about collecting for investment: “My revised thinking,” he wrote, “was brought on by Nate Silver’s book, On the Edge, which is a look at how people who analyze probability and risk-taking are changing the economy and society.
“For many years,” Brown continued, “I have been aware that whenever I purchase a collection, a few books end up accounting for most of my sales. If I buy 10 books, the top three make the majority of the money. If I acquire a collection of 1,000 books, the top 50 will generate nearly half of my sales.
Most book dealers know this intuitively, even if they’ve never looked at their sales systematically. Antiquarian booksellers talk about “getting out” of deals after selling a few books (recouping their initial investment) or in a few months after a deal is done. The rest is “gravy.”
(Gravy is a bad analogy. What is often called gravy is really the meal itself. Once a bookseller’s investment has been paid back, the gravy, or gross profits in accounting terms, go to paying the bookseller, rent, and every other expense. Only when all of that is taken care of is there any gravy)
Collectors see it differently
While booksellers tend to view collections through the prism of their best books, in Brown’s experience collectors rarely do. Collectors tend to focus on the bulk of their library, feeling an attachment to nearly every volume. “This is the heart of collecting, and I think it should be this way. But that emotional attachment to books has little to do with collecting with an eye for investment, if that’s what a collector wants to do.
The market value of any collection comes down to a small number of key books, not from adding up hundreds or thousands of modest sales of more common or less-sought-after titles. Venture capitalists, who gain a professional advantage from not caring too much about the companies that fail or “just” become regular profitable businesses, make their returns the same way. They look at their big winners and don’t care much about the rest.
This trend is clearly visible in the economics of single-owner sales, or auctions devoted to the books belonging to one person (while not the perfect data set, there isn’t a better one where the numbers are both public and reliable).
Just for kicks, I went through 90 days of RareBookHub’s Recent Reported Auction Results, (subscription to RBH required) a tool for browsing entire auctions and not just individual lot results .
I looked at auctions from June to August 2024, and found seven single-owner sales to examine. I didn’t cherry-pick to produce favorable results, but I also didn’t consider every possible auction.
Generally speaking, half of the total sales from single-owner auctions often come from the best 5% to 10% of the items sold—the highspots of each collection.
The single-owner sale that got the most attention during my research window was the William A. Strutz collection at Heritage (June 27, 2024). Strutz assembled the sort of library that any literate person would recognize. It was mostly household-name first editions, like Frankenstein in the original boards and inscribed copies of The Great Gatsby and The Hobbit. The 226 lots put under the hammer made an impressive $5.7 million. Yet the top 17 items (7.5% of the lots) contributed more than 50% of the auction total. Seventeen books for nearly $3 million.
The Strutz sale might be a bit misleading because it was just the first of several sales planned from his library.
So I looked at Ricky Jay’s sale at Potter and Potter on August 17. Jay (who died in 2018) was a great magician, a beloved character actor, and a major collector of books and ephemera related to magic and sideshow acts.”
According to Brown, “Magic is not a widely collected subject, but those who do collect in the field are very committed. The P&P sale did just over $400,000.
However, to show that highspots work even in specialized fields like magic, I looked at all four sales from the Jay estate, beginning with Sotheby’s in 2021 and continuing at Potter and Potter in 2023 and 2024.
Jay’s collection, consisting of 1892 lots, sold for $6.1 million (do you believe in magic now?) The top 6.5% of the items (123 lots) accounted for 46.5% of the total, a concentration of highspots similar to the smaller-scale, greatest-hits-focused Strutz sale.
The top-10% principle also basically held for Mike Glad’s massive collection of animation (Heritage, August 16–19), which grossed $4 million over nearly 1600 lots. Half of that total came from 189 pieces (11.8% of the total).
Even library collections seem to work this way. Grant Zahajko sold off books from the defunct Birmingham-Southern College (July 31–August 1, 2024). The 984 sold lots were all ex-library books. The sale achieved $475,000. Half of that came from just 34 items (3.4% of the total).
You don’t need massive collections for the principle to work. On July 2, Sotheby’s put a number of early manuscripts on the block. The Ernst Boehlen library sold just 47 lots, mostly at least 500 years old, for £790,560 ($1 million). More than half came from the four best items.
Another million-dollar library sold recently also makes my case, the Arthur Lyons collection of science and medicine books (Bonhams, June 25 and 28, 2024) sold 246 lots. Half of the value came from the top 13 (5.3%).
The Ricky Jay collection was substantial, but I wanted an even bigger example. At random, because he came up in conversation recently, I picked the William Reese Collection. Bill was a giant among booksellers and a prodigious collector.
Christie’s sold his library of rare Americana and Herman Melville first editions over four sales in 2022 for more than $19 million. The top 30 lots (5.2% of the total) accounted for half the results.
A colleague of mine warned that looking at single-owner sales could be misleading because they generate a lot of attention and probably get more bidders than the typical book auction.
Fortunately, there was a smaller single-owner sale in my summer auction sample.
Purcell Auctioneers offered the books of the Irish historian Frank Meehan (1926–2012) on July 17. Half of the $74,000 total came from the top 90 lots (15.6%) out of 577 sold. A quarter of the total came from 23 items. The Meehan books are a bit of an outlier, but they were also more of a private academic library than a first-edition book collection.
The results of this informal look at single-owner sales offers, I think, several lessons for collectors, particularly those who are concerned with how much their collection will bring when it sells.
First, as the small Meehan sale suggests, accumulating is probably less effective than collecting when it comes to building value.
Second, there are highspots in every field and niche of books. It is possible to have a multi-million-dollar collection of magic or animation art, two areas that the majority of dealers and collectors rarely think about. And it was possible for Ricky Jay to have just over 100 magic-related items worth $3 million. Something similar will be true of most collecting niches.
Third, you need to acquire really good material in your field. When collecting, keep in mind that your best chance to see a solid return on your collection is not for all of your books to go up in value but for a group of them to go WAY UP in value. Spend at least some portion of your collecting budget with that in mind.
Someone long ago—I have forgotten who—gave me really good collecting advice, which I ignored.
“Buy the most expensive books first,” he said. Inexpensive books (i.e., common books) are likely to remain common, at least for the foreseeable future. Rare books only get rarer. Copies are lost or damaged or they go to libraries. The number in private circulation tends to decline over time. Saving all your collecting money for an entire year to buy one really good book is probably a better investment strategy than waiting 20 years until you have more money to buy key highspots that have become even more expensive.
The problem with this advice is that it’s not much fun.
When you start collecting, everything is new and exciting. Most people with even a $100 per month budget would rather buy a bunch of less expensive items than one $1,200 piece at the end of the year.
Collecting with investment in mind always runs up against the fact that optimizing for return often isn’t as enjoyable as collecting items because you like and want them.
Another hard lesson about collecting is that the people you will have to sell your books to are likely going to be from a different generation with different interests than you. If you are planning to sell your books in, say, 30 years, your target market is now in their twenties. They’re kids. Who knows what they are doing on TikTok? But whatever it is may well shape their collecting in the future.
The key may be to think more like a venture capitalist. Venture capitalists don’t know which company is going to be the next big thing, they only know that if they place enough bets some of them are likely to really pay off.
VCs don’t just write checks to anyone who asks, however. They carefully vet companies and try to pick the most promising ones. In book collecting terms, they don’t buy just any copy of David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, they look for the best one they can afford. And they might add Donna Tartt’s The Secret History or Percival Everett’s Erasure to hedge their bets about authors from the 1990s who will be popular in the future.
Dispatches from the Rare Book Trade are periodic essays on rare books, bookselling, and book collecting by Scott Brown, aka Downtown Brown. Find the the full articles quoted here and many more them all at downtownbrown.substack.com
We have quoted at length from several of his recent articles on what to do with your book collections as you age and why the chances are good that the majority of the value of whatever you own and whatever subject or genre you collect are concentrated in a very small number of items.
Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books, ABAA, IOBA
Open by Appointment in NW Portland, OR
Mailing address:
25 NW 23rd Pl., Ste. 6-148
Portland, OR 97210
(503) 719-5200
