Buying Rare books on eBay | Research Skills
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!
