Determining the Value of an Old Book

[mage_apprentice]

Recently I picked up an old book that the college library I go to was just giving away for free (obviously trying to get rid of books they no longer have a demand for). Lucky for me, I came across a book I think might have some value to it. The problem is, I don't have a lot of information about how to determine monetary value of a book nor does

Comments

[influencethis]

You might want to ask library_mofo, whatwasthatone, or whatwasthatbook. Librarians and bookfinders will have a better idea of how to track down older books.

I suggest using OCLC and WorldCat to look it up. Google either or both and put in the title in the search.

[mage_apprentice]

WorldCat says 1920 and OCLC only has ME documents. I'll check the LJ communities and see what they say.

[influencethis]

Now let me get my library/book knowledge on for you:

Check here for why you can't find an ISBN number. You also won't finder a printer's key in many books before the 50s, especially academic ones. My guess is the prohibitively expensive way that printer's keys were made would cause academic publications to shy away from them.

Libraries are masters of book information. They know the value of books that they own, and they are aware if they have a rare book on their hands. Weeding (getting rid of books) is done with huge amounts of fact-checking and ensuring that valuable and rare items stay in the collection. Even though your book may be a first printing, just the fact that you got it from an academic library for free tells me it's not worth much.

[mage_apprentice]

That would explain a few things, but it still seems rather . . . strange that a book like the one I came across (which is still in really good condition along with all the information provided about it) and yet the staff knew almost nothing about the book itself. I asked them personally about this and they had little to no knowledge about this. Maybe I just didn't ask the right person . . .

And I unmodded your comment.

[kippurbird]

Abe books is a good place to check for book value.

ISBN numbers didn't show up until the 1970s, so a book this old wouldn't have one.

[mage_apprentice]

Looks like an Ebay version of a book store. The prices were within a range, but not very specific.

Still, it was a nice place to look.

[influencethis]

That's all? I found this list with descriptions of first-edition books just from a Google search.

[mage_apprentice]

Holy cow! The prices in the list I found on the same site were within $5 to $15! Some of the descriptions in these pages match the condition of the book I have!

Obviously there are some people on Abe Books who don't know what they have . . .

[mage_apprentice]

It really depends on how many prints of the particular book there are and what edition and print it is. Though, on a monetary scale, some books are completely worthless no matter how old it is, like a Bible.

[ieatbacon]

If it's a book they were weeding, it's probably not worth much - as an above poster said, the people in charge of the weeding are pretty well aware of what they have and won't let anything valuable go. Age doesn't necessarily make it valuable. Even being a first edition doesn't - if there were lots of copies printed or if it's a book that's not in demand (which it's likely not or it wouldn't have been weeded; academic libraries never like toet ANYTHING go) I used to work in an academic library; we weeded so much stuff from the 1800s. Some of it went to the book sale, but plenty more got recycled - not worth anything because no one anywhere in the world wanted it (we had to try to give it away before recycling it) The person at the checkout desk may not have known much about your book, but I guarantee you the person in Acquisitions ( or Tech Services or whoever authorized the weeding) did.

[mage_apprentice]

Since I'll be up at the campus tomorrow, I'll be sure to drop by the library and ask why it was weeded. It still seems strange to me because this particular book had quite a bit of sway in the public opinion over the Treaty of Versailles and is still being sold with a new edition on the way, also, many of the economic theorizes proposed by Keynes and his book are still discussed by economics today since the Great Depression. If the copy I have of this book is worthless, then it's worthless in the sense that a Bible is worthless: mass production.

[epilogueexile]

On the topic of the worth of old books, I know someone who has a first edition copy of Huckleberry Finn. At first glance that sounds like it would be incredibly valuable, but actually, since Mark Twain was already popular by that point, enough were printed that they aren't actually worth very much.

[mage_apprentice]

That's pretty cool, though I have to wonder how many copies actually survived up to now.