The Collectible Book Blog

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.