The collecting field just within the category of history is enormous.  The same is true for other categories.  You can come up with an endless array of collectible book interests.

For tips on buying collectible books on eBay, see our series on eBay buying. 

Another place for ideas is a site like Barnes & Noble.  You can go to their main page, hit “Books” and choose to view all categories.  Dozens of particular genres will be displayed.

I collect bibliographies, author biographies, reference works on the book trade, and items of local historical interest.  Almost all other books I have to consider as for sale, and try not to get too attached to them.  I am building a collection of 18^th century American imprints, but this is with a future catalogue in mind.

I encourage you to build a personal library around your interests.    When you picture yourself settled into your favorite chair with a couple of hours of relaxing reading to enjoy, what would you like to be able to pull off of your shelves?  Start building that library, the one that you will take pleasure in for years to come!

Rare First New York New Testament

The New

TESTAMENT

of our

Lord and Saviour

JESUS CHRIST,

Newly Translated out of the

Original Greek:

and with the

Former Translations

Diligently Compared and Revised.

Appointed to the Read in Churches.

New-York: Printed and Sold by Hugh Gaine, at his Book-Store and Printing-Office, at the Bible, in Hanover-Square.

M,DCC,XC.

Full leather, 6.5 x 4, rear joint cracked and partially split, loss at the spine ends. No endpapers, with the Table of Kindred as the last page.

Evans’ American Bibliography no. 22359 notes the following errors, which are present in this book: Acts viii. 9. sorcercy, for sorcery; Phil. iv. 15. beginning, for beginning.

Rumball-Petrie’s Rare Bibles, An Introduction for Collectors and a Descriptive Check-List ) has the following note for this piece: “No. 142. First New York Testament. 1790. Printed in New York by Hugh Gaine, it is a duodecimo without pagination.”

Hills’ The English Bible in America, A Bibliography of Editions of the Bible & the New Testament Published in America 1777-1957 has the following: “No 1789. Unpaged: 168 leaves. Title has initials H. G. in script letters in oval design; Order of Books on verso. Table of Kindred at the end. Errors - [same as above]. This is the first New Testament printed in New York.

Isaiah Thomas’ The History of Printing in America (first appearing in 1810), notes that Gaine was born in Ireland and set up a press in New York about 1750, publishing in Hanover Square for about 40 years.

Did you notice what research was used, and how it added to the value of the listing?

The book sold for $4,000.

After subtracting the eBay fees and my $10 investment we made a tidy profit.

Does this happen very often?  Are there rare books out there waiting to be discovered?  The answer is…YES.  It happens often enough here to keep the bills paid and groceries on the table.  Remember, I bought it from a DEALER and paid his asking price!

Have you made any great collectible book discoveries?  Our readers would love to hear about them.  Feel free to add your story to the comments page (click on the title above to open this post to full-page, and the comment box is at the bottom).

This is the last of our posts under the general heading of How to Buy Collectible Books on eBay.

Once you have set up your sniper program, learned how to set up your eBay search page, and done your research, you are only a few steps away from becoming a successful eBay bidder.

Do you still have any questions about the book that you are looking at in the auction?  Go ahead and contact the seller.  Every eBay auction has a link to do this.  It is to the right of the current bid price, marked “Ask seller a question.”  It is always better to do this than to assume something.  If you have done proper research you will know how many pages, plates, maps, &c. are supposed to be in the book.  You might even know what the printing year should be, or who the printer should be.  In order to firm up your sense of the value of a book you might want to know that everything that belongs in the volume is present.  Ask the seller.  Ask far enough ahead so that the seller has time to respond to your question.

How much should you bid?  Remember, if you have your sniper set up and working, you only need to bid once.  As a general rule, eBay items, including collectible books, sell at 30% of high retail.  At least that is what we find from 10 years of experience.  You can check high retail at addall.com.  Do not bid what you can already purchase the book for elsewhere.  Use the auction to get a bargain.  (Now, if no other copies are for sale elsewhere, that’s a different story).  If you are bidding to pick up something for resale, don’t go over the 30% amount.  If you are bidding to fill out your collection, put in what you are willing to pay.  The amount of bargain pricing that you want is up to you.  Figure somewhere between 30% and 80% of retail. 

You can pay by PayPal, check, or money order.  Recently eBay has begun to put a damper on check and money order purchases.  They now do not allow sellers to mention this option in their listings.  But you can still pay that way if the seller agrees.  Contact them after the auction closes and see if they will take your check.  We actually prefer checks and money orders (saves us the PayPal fee) and have had very little trouble with them in over 10 years of selling on eBay.

The last tip for this topic is to write a simple note to the seller and request careful packaging.  A brief note with your check or message with your PayPal payment will suffice.  “Please package carefully for shipping” lets them know that you are paying attention and that this is important to you.  A lot of eBay sellers know absolutely nothing about rare books and do not prepare them properly for the mail.  A gentle prodding in this regard will normally result in a more securely packaged book.

We hope that this series has been helpful to you and that it will aid your quest for the collectible book!

A few stories are beginning to pop up on the internet about book donations for children.  The Christmas season inspires many local donation drives, and we think it is a great idea. 

I can remember my grandmother reading to me when I was a wee tyke.  I have been interested in books ever since.  I learned to read before going to kindergarten (my mother insists I learned by reading the back of cereal boxes at breakfast) but had few books of my own.  Trips to the local library were common, and I was always able to purchase a few now and then from the Scholastic Book Club offerings at grade school. 

We always encouraged our children to read, and a good report card always earned them a trip to Barnes & Noble to pick out a new book. 

Do you have unused children’s books packed away or stuffed into a shelf somewhere?  Why not donate them to a children’s book drive in your area?  A child may not know if a book is collectible or not, but if you can provide them with a great story to read, you may be contributing to the future of book collecting, and definitely to the mind of the child.

You can even donate books for children around the world!  One online directory that will help you to get started is Directory of Book Donation Programs. 

Several news stories hit the wires today about book collection efforts for the holidays.  There is one in Beloit, MI, described at Books sought for children.

A second describes the effort in Jacksonville, FL: Organizations ensure children have a book-filled Christmas.

Type in Book Donations For Children into your favorite search engine and many opportunities can be found.

Is there a donation drive in your area?  Feel free to post them in the comments form for this article (open the article first by clicking on the headline above).

Encourage tykes to read, and provide opportunities for them to get their hands on books!

What is a collectible book worth?  How rare is it?  Who else has a copy, and how many are known?  These are important questions for today’s book collector.  They are especially important for the eBay bidder.  The only way to answer these questions is through research.

Our previous “how-to” research posts in the series of Buying Collectible Books on eBay have covered the search site addall.com, and the library database site WorldCat.  In today’s post we would like to add some information on bibliographies, Google searches, saved eBay sales, and historical societies.

A bibliography is a list of books written by a particular author or about a particular field of interest.  There are thousands of them, including scarce single-issue pamphlets, short lists at the end of a scholarly book, or multi-volume sets. 

When I was just starting out in the book field I was encouraged by a book dealer to buy a set of Allibone’s A Critical Dictionary of English Literature and British and American Authors Living and Deceased…(1891), a five-volume set. 

I paid $184 dollars for it, which was a huge investment at the time.  This set has paid for itself many times, in fact, it paid for itself with the first catalog I issued after putting it to use!  Why?  Allibone lists over 46,000 authors and their works, many with comments on the quality of the book written.  We use this information to write brief biographies of authors and to comment on the contents and value of a book that we are selling.

Every popular rare book genre has a bibliography (perhaps many) and you will want the one that describes the books in your collecting field.  If you cannot find one by doing a Google search containing – your interest bibliography – just send me a comment at the box below this article (be sure to open this post fully to see it) and I will let you know what is available.

Google itself is another research tool for the book collector.  Often I find that scarcer items and maps may not turn up when search addall.com, but they may appear in a dealer catalog that is not associated with a collective online database.  It is worth Googling your title or author, or perhaps the printer, to see what might turn up.

eBay itself is a research tool.  Save the auction results of key books that you hope to acquire.  Use that information to determine what a bargain might be the next time the item comes up for auction.  Learn how to use the eBay search function, and save the searches!  To the right of the search results number you will see “save this search.”  If you click on it and look at the small pop-up screen, you can receive emails anytime books meeting your search criteria show up on eBay.  Let that one sink in…never miss an important listing!

Lastly, I have found historical societies, museums, specialty libraries and groups devoted to particular authors to be willing and able to help a collector identify a book or to discuss its importance.  They are always interested in the subject, and have a wealth of knowledge to share.

Research is discovery, in the book collecting game.  Make some discoveries of your own!

By S. P. Wurth.

One of the key elements in book research is to try to determine just how scarce an item is.  People collect books for many reasons, but one of the main ones is to acquire a book that is uncommon, scarce, or rare.

We often start out by examining book dealer catalog holdings, and we described this process in our article about addall.com.  But what if nothing turns up there?  Is there any other way to find out just how rare a particular collectible book might be?

In this age of the internet, there is a quick way to do so.  There is an enormous database of library holdings at your disposal, and I encourage you to make use of it.  We search this database many times per day, and it yields valuable information.

The site I am talking about is WorldCat.  WorldCat is an online database of library holdings around the world, with the main participators being libraries in the United States.  WorldCat describes itself as “the world’s largest network of library content and services. WorldCat libraries are dedicated to providing access to their resources on the Web, where most people start their search for information.”

You can sign up for a free account at their site, and save search lists, build bibliographies, and use their tools for internet research.

Here is how I find it to be the most helpful:  the library database allows one to search by author or title, and it will give you a list of all of the library holdings of a particular book or author.  By searching this way, you will find out if the collectible book that you are researching is well-represented in libraries.  If you do not find many, or any, listings, you know that you are looking at a rare piece.

This is extremely useful for eBay searches.  Let’s say that you have located something on eBay that is in your collecting field, and you ran a search on addall.com, and cannot locate a copy for sale online.  You also Google the title and nothing comes up for sale anywhere.  Now you can turn to WorldCat and see how many copies are reported in library holdings.  It is very rare that an interesting item is not in a library anywhere, but if there is only a handful located, you know that this is a very scarce item.

The search results are also helpful for identifying the genre of a book, and often the number of pages, plates, &c. that should be in the book.  At the top of each listing there are categories in which the item has been placed, and sometimes this helps to understand the contents.  Also, under the “details” tag, often the number of pages and other key elements are listed.  All of this information will help you to determine if the eBay listing that you are viewing is accurate, or if you might need to ask the seller a thing or two before you bid.

Get started with WorldCat searches, by visiting their site at the following link: WorldCat.

This article is one of a series: Buying Collectible Books on eBay.

By S. P. Wurth

This will be the first of several articles on developing research skills for rare book buying.  The secrets discussed here are also invaluable for selling rare books.  This blog post is one of series that we introduced under the title Buying Collectible Books on eBay.

In order to be a successful book collector, one must become skilled at research.  Those of you who collect coins are familiar with the phrase, “Buy the book before you buy the coin.”  That means that if you are going to spend money on a rare coin, first be sure that you know what you are buying.  Get the authoritative reference book on the series, and do your own inspection of the coin.  The same applies when one is investing in a collectible book.

The great thing about book research today is that the internet provides the book collector with a myriad of resources.  There will still be references that you will want to buy that are bibliographies specific to your field of interest, but for quick results on whether or not you want to set up your sniper to pick off that volume you spotted on eBay this morning, the internet will give you fast results.

The search engine that I use constantly is www.addall.com.  This site will quickly scan the 14 major online bookselling sites and deliver results to your screen.  You can search for both books in print and out of print (be sure to choose between those two options when you set up your search).  What this will tell you is how many copies of a particular book are being offered for sale, and at what price.  The results list has clickable links at the top of each column, allowing you to sort by price, bookseller, author, dealer, etc.  Oh, and what’s really cool: it’s a free service.

When you use addall, you will be able to quickly tell if the book you are looking at on eBay is common, scarce, or rare.  You can find out what you would have to pay for it if you bought it directly from a dealer – and sometimes you should do just that!  If you like what you see and find that it would be cheaper just to place the order online through the link at addall, go for it.

Results posted in addall may be skewed regarding how many copies of a particular book are on the market.  Book dealers often post their holdings to several online databases, and addall pulls from all of them and does not eliminate duplicates.  Keep that in mind and use your noggin when reviewing the results page.

Before I found out about addall, I used to use www.bookfinder.com.  That service works great too, and they are easier to use if you are searching for books in languages other than English.  You should try them both and see which you prefer.

Keep in mind that the prices listed in book dealer catalogs may be the prices at which the book DOES NOT sell.  In other words, if there are 10 copies available for a certain item in the $300-$350 price range, I can be pretty sure that $300-$350 is too high of a price for the book. If the scarce book sits in dealer catalogues without being sold, the price may be too high.

There is another, and often more accurate, way to determine the real value of a book.  Look for it in our next post on Auction Records.

Put on your thinking cap before shelling out your hard-earned cash for rare books.  Do your research!

By S. P. Wurth

I don’t know about you, but I have more important things to do than to wait for each rare book that I am interested in to close on eBay.  Don’t get me wrong – I love collectible books and buy thousands of them every year.  Many are purchased on eBay.  Most days we bid on a dozen books or more, winning many of them.  How can a book collector do this efficiently without spending hours staring at their computer screen?

We use an automated bidding program, and I encourage you to do the same.  This process is known as sniping, a term taken from the military sniper who waits in hiding and picks off the enemy with one accurate shot.  Automated bidding programs are directed and loaded by you, and they are one of the best tools the modern book lover can add to their repertoire of eBay tools.

I know that some folks have a negative view of sniping.  Believe me, only those who choose not to use such a system feel that way.

Here are the advantages:

1.      You don’t have to hang around your computer to bid.  If you use a web-based sniper, your computer doesn’t even have to be on!

2.      You can escape “auction fever.”  Just set your snipe to the highest level that you are willing to pay for a book, and forget it.

3.      You aren’t concerned with who is bidding and who is not bidding.  Before eBay scrambled bidder id’s it was easy to tell who you were bidding against.  Sometimes, if one were not sniping, you could have a conflict if it was a friend or a customer.  But with a sniping program, if you set it up hours or days before the actual bid is placed, you are not concerned with possible competition problems.  (By the way, there is still a way to tell who the scrambled bidder is: feedback ratings change slowly and are not scrambled.)

4.      By using a good program, your bid will be automatically placed for you within the last few seconds.  The program places the bid – you don’t have to worry about manually getting that last-second bid in there.  If you try manually, all sorts of things can throw you off and if you wait until there are 6 seconds to go in the auction and then try to place your bid, it might not get through.  Most sniping programs are calibrated to eBay’s site clock and will place your bid at the last second, or whenever your program settings dictate.  As I watch some of my better auctions close, the last bid is generally placed 3-7 seconds from closing.  I wouldn’t want to try that manually.

I am using Auction Sentry Deluxe for my sniping program at present.  I really like it!  They offer a free trial for 10 days, and you should know if it works for you within that time.  Their current rate for purchasing the program is $13 for a one-year license.  I am not making anything on the recommendation, and I do think that it is a great program.  Unfortunately, it is only offered for machines running Windows. 

 I used to run isnipeit, available at www.isnipeit.com, which also worked well.

There have been times when I used a web-based program.  I think that particular service is now defunct, but there are a lot of programs available.

A great site for reviewing software for eBay is The Auction Software Review.  Here is the link to their sniping review page, with 24 web-based and 17 desktop applications for you to sort through.  The reviews from this site I have found to be reliable.

So, are you serious about building a rare book collection?  Get sniping!

This is the second in a series of articles on Buying Collectible Books on eBay. 

By S. P.Wurth

This is the first of six articles that were briefly described in our Introduction.

The eBay marketplace is huge, and this can puzzle anyone hunting for collectible books.  I can remember when I would search all of the listed books: all of the listings, every morning.  It took me a few minutes, back in 1998.  At first I would scroll through everything listed within 24 hours and then everything closing that day.  There were seven or eight pages of listings, if I remember right.  I usually did this once in the morning and once in the evening and felt confident that I was catching everything of interest.  Back then a lot of the older books were listed in the “Antiques” area in a book category.  That changed long ago, and now one most sort through a combined Books – Antiquarian & Collectible hodge-podge of auctions.

This morning when I looked at the first page in Antiquarian Books there were 101,809 books on 1,114 pages.  How does one ever find anything?

I am going to let you in on the secret of how I search for rare books on eBay.  This is the daily search, I will cover automated searches that get sent to your email box in another post.

We want to narrow down and sort out what appears on your eBay search page, and we want to change the look of that search page.  I will show you what I do – you can adapt it easily to fit your book collecting goals.

Let’s start with the basic eBay search page.  The FIRST thing I am going to do is opt out of the beta test program that assaults you now when you log into eBay.  I don’t like it.  So, go to www.ebay.com.  Slide down the category column at left until you come to books.  Click on the books link.

You will come to a general books category.  At the top right of the page, under the little “eBay MasterCard” logo, is an “opt out” button.  There is also a line at the bottom of this page, which reads “You are currently testing eBay’s new search experience. If you prefer, you can opt out of the test.”  Opt out.  I do this mainly because I am used to the look of the old search style, and I am after speed, and frankly I have a system that works and I don’t need to change it. 

After opting out you will be sent back to a general eBay page, on which you will once again click on Books.  (These settings will remain until you do a cache dump, so you won’t have to repeat this every time you go to eBay).  Ok, now you should have the following main and sub categories under Books:

§  Antiquarian & Collectible

o    Category:

o    Americana

o    Art & Photography

o    Biography & Memoir

o    Children’s

o    Cooking, Food, Wine

o    Exploration & Travel

o    Fraternal, Social Organizations

o    History

o    Illustrated

o    Law & Government

o    Literature

o    Military & War

o    Natural History

o    Philosophy

o    Pulps

o    Reference

o    Religion & Spirituality

o    Science & Medicine

o    Sports

o    Vintage Paperbacks

o    Other

o    Binding:

o    Fine Binding

o    Hardcover

o    Hardcover w/Jacket

o    Leather

o    Manuscript/Unbound

o    Pamphlet

o    Softcover/Wraps

o    Vellum

o    Other

o    Special Attributes:

o    Signed

o    1st Edition

o    Printing Year:

o    1950-Now

o    1900-1949

o    1850-1899

o    1800-1849

o    1700-1799

o    Pre-1700

That’s still way too much information.  Click on the main header “Antiquarian and Collectible.” 

We are now going to change our Display Settings.

The unaltered Customize Your Search screen will look like the image below.  Click on it to enlarge.

On the right hand side of your screen, just past the little “Sort by” window, there is a Customize Settings link.  Click on it.

We want to Customize the Display.  When I am searching, I am only looking for the picture, title, price, number of bids, and time.  I don’t care about anything else.  I don’t want anything else displayed.  So, I move “PayPal” and “Shipping Cost” from the right-side box of “columns  displayed” to the left-hand box of “available columns.”

Next, in the right-hand “Columns Displayed” box I move “bids” down one row so that it is below “price.”  I want to be able to scan price first as I buzz through the listings.  Just click on “bids” and then hit the arrow pointing downward to the right. 

You can adjust all of the rows displayed this way.  You can move each column either into your display box, so they will show up when you search, or out of display and into available, which will eliminate them when you search.  Then you can adjust the order in which you see the columns in your screen.  I like this arrangement: picture, title, price, bids, time.

After getting the Display set the way that I want it, I next move down to “Column Settings.”  Here I uncheck “Convert prices to US $.”  I leave the prices in the original currencies.  That way when I am reading through the listings I can quickly tell if the item is shipping from Great Britain, Australia, Canada, &c.  You will see the conversion automatically if you choose to view the listing.  It will be there next to the foreign currency amount.  At this point I am only deciding if I want to view the listing as I rapidly scroll through.

Next change the number of items that you view per page to 200 from the standard setting of 50.  If you are going to view all of the items in a category or by date printed, there is no sense having to reload pages.  Look at as many items as you can at one time.  Saves time.

I then change the “Search Sort By” window to read “Ending Soonest,” rather than using the default “Best Match.”  My goal is to search everything in a few categories and dates that are ending today.  This setting gets me closer to my goal.

Ok.  That’s a lot of instructions, but it really only takes a few seconds to do.

Click on “Apply Changes,” and your screen should look something like this:

(click on the icon below to enlarge)

The areas in which I want to search for rare books are now narrowed down and ready for my perusal.  I search by date.  Every collectible book on eBay printed before 1850 will now face my scrutinizing gaze.  I am going to slide down the search options column to the left, and select Show Only Listings Ending within 24 hours.  I then look at the “Printing Year” category.  I always look at everything in the three oldest areas: Pre-1700, 1700-1799, and 1800-1849.  Each book in those areas will be viewed by me, that is, each title.  I will only delve into the actual listing if I am interested in it.

Today’s search turns up the following number listings in these categories:

Pre -1700 53 items

1700-1799 76 items

1800-1859  170 items

The process described above has reduced 101,809 books on 1,114 pages to 299 books on 3 pages.  These are the books that I want to look at, because here is where I find items to resell at a profit.

I encourage you to change the search display settings to the ones shown above, and then modify the category and date settings on the eBay search page to zero in on just the collectible book categories that interest you.  This will save you hours of unproductive eBay surfing, save your eyesight, and reduce that unsightly drool on your keyboard.

Happy hunting!

eBay: Tips on Buying Books

The online auction monster eBay is a great source for you as you build your library of collectible books. Your intrepid blogger purchases books from this source many times per week; sometimes many times per day.  And since I purchase mainly for resale, you should gather that as a collector, you can find some real bargains.  Unless a real bidding war heats up (and we will show you how to avoid that) items on eBay sell for about 30% of a high-end retail value.  This is important to know if you are selling, and a great opportunity if you are buying.  There are always exceptions to the rule, of course, but this is what I have found from my own experience and research.

I assume that you are familiar with eBay, have an account; know the basics, &c.  If not, eBay itself has some great resources, and I am not here to reinvent their wheel.  What I want to share with you is how I buy books, why it has been successful for me since 1998, and let you make up your own mind about what will help you.

Here is what you need to know:  How to search effectively; how to snipe; basic research skills; bidding tactics; and follow-up with the seller. 

There is a particular way that I set up my eBay search feature that lets me get right to where I want to be in the Book category.  Sniping is strangely considered an Evil perpetrated by Big Bidders, but it is simply a tool that allows you to be dispassionate and keep your head in the bidding process.  It also allows you to do other interesting things (laundry, train spotting, découpage, goldfish training, (your own favorite goes here), while the auction proceeds without your physical presence. 

There are ways to quickly find the book that you are looking at on eBay is being offered for sale elsewhere, and at what price.  Has the book been auctioned or catalogued recently by a reputable firm?  If you suspect that the book is scarce, how many libraries in the U. S. currently report holdings?  Is there a bibliography that will tell me more about the book, how many pages it should have, illustrations, points of issue, &c.?

After setting up a sniping program and doing the necessary research, there isn’t much to bidding tactics.  (My bidding tactics are overseen by that tyrant, Mr. Cash Flow).  You will know in what range the book is valued on the market, and will adjust up or down based on your own desires and circumstances.  The only real tactic with a sniper program is choosing the time that the bid is placed on your behalf, and the amount of money you want to spend.

After you purchase, you should contact the seller and ask them to package the book well for shipping.  Some sellers know how to package books properly, others shove them in a manila envelope and hope for the best.  A simple request often solves the problem, and at least lets them know that you are paying attention.

Each of the specifics mentioned above will be expanded upon in our upcoming posts.  Check back soon!