Rare Book Monthly
Articles - January - 2010 Issue
How To Search Worldwide Book Auction Listings Instantly
Results provided from a search for "Twain."
When you go to the Auction Search page, you will also find many other useful features. An Auction Calendar lists upcoming auctions, and displays a complete list of lots and their estimates once available if you prefer to browse listings. Once results are available, you can go back and look at sales prices from auctions concluded during the past two months. A list of Recent Auction Reports provides a summary of results from the past 25 archived auctions, including total sales achieved, sell-through rate, and the top ten prices realized. You can sign up for a free weekly email update of auction results if you like. Trends in Book Auction Prices provides monthly graphed updates of prices and sell-through rates so you can better understand exactly how books are performing in the open market. It's invaluable information to have as you consider placing your own bids.
There are also a couple of extremely useful tools for auction buyers and other book collectors available on a subscription basis. The AED (Americana Exchange Database) contains over 2.2 million bibliographic records, mostly priced auction results for books and related paper. No serious buyer/collector should purchase books without consulting these records first. An updating pricing tool helps convert older sales prices to current value estimates. A separate subscriber service, MatchMaker, provides automated daily searches for material you select at auction as well as at some major book listing sites and eBay. Like the Auction Search, this converts a process of searching that could take hours a day into a time-free automated process. You may sign up for these subscriber services (Visitor or Research memberships for access to the AED alone, Premium membership for access to the AED plus MatchMaker and various other benefits) by clicking here now.
