Counsel From the Antique Bookworm in Me

Fine wine, antique cognac, art and baseball cards apparently have a new bedfellow: antiquarian and rare books, the latest collectible to become a hot investment. After a few high-profile auctions where rare manuscripts fetched hundreds of thousands—in some cases millions—of dollars, book hunting and buying is gaining steam.^[i] Adherents argue a rare book, immune to a supply surge, hedges against recessions while gaining value in the long run. And of course, everyone envisions themselves the next guy or gal to tote a $5 garage sale find to Antiques Roadshow to discover it is worth a small fortune. It all sounds utterly delightful! But book collecting is a hobby, not an investment strategy.

I should know. We all have our habits, and old books are mine. Leather-bound 19^th century volumes of history and literature. Antique Bibles. Old collections of folk song sheet music with strange inscriptions. Old diaries for a slice of life. Mid-century sewing guides. The 1930s’ batch of Modern Library Classics editions of the Western canon. Multiple complete Shakespeares. The Bronte sisters with wood engraved drawings, foil-embossed covers and a slip case. The complete set of leather-bound Thomas Hardy from my beloved grandmother. Century-old bird watching guides with full-color plates. The shelves devoted to cookbooks sag under a load of antique finds that double as historical records of American and European culture. On those shelves, Elizabeth David and Elisabeth Ayrton debate provincial cooking and which one spelled her name correctly.^[ii] In my living room, early editions of Orwell sit with Huxley while Jane Austen’s collected works share a joke with Valley of the Dolls.^[iii] C.S. Lewis and G.K. Chesterton have deep theological conversations. The old Nancy Drews make me a kid again. And the 1972 edition of the Compact Oxford English Dictionary, complete with the original magnifying glass, ensures I will know the meaning and etymology of every word in all of them, except the nonsense editors have seen fit to add since.

Since I was a teenager, I have been unable to pass a used bookstore without going in and coming out with a stack of books. I know the thrill of spending a couple dollars on an old volume, then doing some research to find out it should have cost $50. I have seen values climb on Bookfinder. I have brought moldy tomes back to life and health with a freezer and a brush, ideally adding monetary value in the process. I have found a cookbook personally inscribed by Martin Yan in a Little Free Library (yes, of course I took it) and a coffee table book about infielders signed by Brooks Robinson going for $2. My autographed Tasha Tudor is a prized possession.

And you know what? I am not going to make one red cent from any of this. I am what Anne Fadiman would call a carnal lover of books. I read them. I use them. My cookbooks have splatters, my margins have notes, my dust jackets tear in my backpack when I’m traveling. All of this makes my books lousy investments. Books are carbon-based. They decompose, and excessive handling hastens the process. For a book to hold its value, you must never open it. Even if it is a newer rare book that you bought for an autograph or publishing defect, if you crack the spine or dog-ear a corner, it is all over. “Investing” means buying a book you can never read and must always keep under glass while praying your house doesn’t get robbed or catch fire … or paying for climate-controlled, secure storage.

It is also questionable how much fun you would have pursuing books of actual monetary value. Most of today’s book collecting doesn’t even seem to be about the book itself—its age or subject matter. Rather, it is about who owned the books, who inscribed them, or whether there is a printing error or other glitch that makes them rare.^[iv] Even signed first editions often won’t cut it due to the proliferation of mystery book clubs and the like, which made them less rare than you might think. If you don’t believe me, just look at the difference in autographed Sue Grafton prices as she worked her way through the alphabet. The Agatha Christie and Arthur Conan Doyle works that fetched tens and hundreds of thousands of dollars in September reaped that much because they came from Charlie Watts’ collection. That is not the kind of thing you will find at a garage sale and then have authenticated. It is all caught up in the opaque auction world from the start.

That is another thing and the reason why I plan to make zero dollars from my book collection. To get top dollar for anything, posting it on eBay or Poshmark probably won’t work. Too sketchy, and you won’t attract buyers willing to pay huge sums. You would need to go through formal auction houses and pay to get your works authenticated, both of which eat into the proceeds while adding time and hassle. Like art, books aren’t liquid. (Neither are wine nor cognac in the investment sense, ironically.) Comparable volumes aren’t bought and sold every minute of every day. There are few data points for price discovery. And if you need to sell in a hurry, you won’t get anywhere near what you presume is fair value.

Here, you are probably thinking, I don’t care about all of this because what really matters is that when I am gone, my children and grandchildren will be able to sell everything. And, well, I am here to burst your bubble and impart some harsh but necessary truths. When your children and grandchildren are sifting through the detritus of your life well-lived in order to prep the house for sale, they will very likely be overwhelmed. Maybe they will manage to find and keep the books with sentimental value. The estate sale people follow, pricing the remaining books arbitrarily—generally without researching them—promise to sell anything that looks valuable at auction, and then still probably not get anything resembling the price you have in mind right now. Most of the books likely won’t sell, and your family will have deadlines. Many, maybe even most, of those books are likely to wind up in boxes, take a ride in the back of a pickup truck, and find a new home at the library or Half-Price Books. By the end of this arduous process, having them out of the house will be the real victory to your heirs, and any token compensation will be secondary. I know this because I have been on the grandchild end of it and seen firsthand that all of these antique works of literature did not sell. Yes, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. But that also means one man’s treasure is another man’s trash.

Even stumbling across a book with a tangible connection to the author or someone famous won’t necessarily cut it. It has to be connected to the right person, at the right time. I have co-written a couple of books, and I am under no delusion that the versions I inscribed to friends and family will fetch a premium in 70 years.

So, fellow bookworms, might I suggest simply collecting books without thought to their monetary ascent? Without thought to reselling and what they will be worth one day? Buying things because they are special to you, not because some auction house or trade publication thinks they have potential? Collecting for joy, not speculating? Displaying and reading (and cooking and baking!), rather than worrying about finding and paying for the perfect storage solution? And doing your investing with stocks and bonds (and other securities, as and when it fits your goals and needs)? History shows they will do a fine job of delivering compound growth. No collectible alternatives required.