"A large part of the bookseller’s job is seeing something significant in a book which others had missed, ..."

ANGUS O’NEILL - Proprietor, Omega Bookshop, trading independently since 1984.

When the late, lamented Bill Reese wrote his article ‘The Rare Book Market Today’ in April 2000, the trade in rare books had changed more in the previous twenty-five years than in the five centuries beforehand. This was largely due to the internet, of course: the most immediate change (among others, which I shall mention) was that our received ideas of rarity and availability had gone out of the window in just a few years. A typical art reference book, fought over at £85 in the 1990s, now languishes on the outside shelves at £5; as an undergraduate student in 1982, I sold a rather worn ‘uncorrected proof ’ (really, as we all know, a publisher’s rep’s advance reading copy) of John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman (London: Jonathan Cape, 1969) for a gratifying £300 – about five weeks’ student grant, if anyone still remembers such things. I would be delighted to get that price for it now.

Another change is that people buy so much over the internet. Even though books might have seemed a perfect commodity for this, online trading still got off to a shaky start, as many of the kitchen-table booksellers didn’t understand the importance of condition, and thought bibliographical references (if they used them at all) were a kind of tinsel, as opposed to a valuable aid in describing their copy; but the market has settled down, and consumer legislation has removed a few of the pitfalls. There is of course nothing better than seeing a book (and talking to a bookseller face to face), but detailed images have turned out to be quite a good substitute for much of the jargon (‘nf in sl fr d/w’) that we grew up with.

By coincidence, my own experience of the book trade spans exactly fifty years: in 1975, a solitary outcast from boarding school, I enjoyed a holiday job in Ken Swift’s charming, rambling shop in Oxford’s Cowley Road. (This time-honoured way of entering the trade seems to have largely vanished, replaced by internships for the already well-connected, or by nothing at all.) Most of the stock was ordinary secondhand material, although it was in good condition and there was no rubbish. I remember a few highlights: Katherine Mansfield’s The Garden Party, illustrated by Marie Laurencin (London: The Verona Press, ‘1939’ [but 1947]), then a little way into three figures, roughly where it is now after a brief, Japan-inspired foray into four-figure territory in the late eighties (there is an auction record of £3,850 in 1989!); a very nearly perfect Lord of the Rings, sold for either £300 or £350 (a few years later, an immaculate Hobbit struggled to break free from a local auction at £400). But the shop offered a good grounding in decent, literate stock, territory in which I have ploughed a sometimes lonely furrow ever since. Since that time, I’ve worked for a ‘big firm’ (for eighteen months, as a secretary), issued catalogues, done a few fairs, owned a shop in Cecil Court in London, and carried a lot of books for many miles (although travel is more of a luxury than it once was, and the days of covering a long trip’s expenses in the first shop I visited are but a distant memory). I’ve never run an auction, nor employed large numbers of staff and it will be clear that I write from a very British perspective, but I still have time to go out buying, and to research what I find. Those are the aspects of the trade which have always appealed to me the most.

One unexpected development, which started in around 2000, was that my customers began to be born again. Not in any religious sense: but, along with many colleagues, I have noticed that nearly
all my customers today are under twenty-five or over fifty. What happened to the generation between those two? A combination of things, I suppose: the birth of the ‘digital native’ (all those solemn youngsters who so confidently asserted that the book was ‘dead’); the touching conviction that texts would somehow become free and remain incorruptible; or perhaps just lack of space and money. But all that has changed. It could be the equivalent of ‘vinyl syndrome’, in which consumers recognise that high-end audio equipment actually gives better results than a stream of digital signals; it could be the heightened awareness that information can be meddled with, hidden behind a paywall or deleted altogether; or perhaps a new generation has just discovered how beautiful and evocative the printed book can be as a physical object. Possibly the 25–50 age range is just too busy earning a living, but that never stopped bibliophiles before. Anyway, whatever the cause, all these young people are very welcome.

Tastes have changed, too. The days when even the neatest inscription was seen as a blemish are largely over, even in the more obsessive corners of the modern first edition market. I remember encountering resistance when I suggested in around 1990 that the ownership signature of the writer John Brophy did no harm to my first edition of Animal Farm. This sea change is directly down to pioneering books such as David Pearson’s Provenance Research in Book History (revised edition, 2019), but the internet is also indirectly responsible, in that when we seek information on the earlier owners of books, we are no longer confined to ODNB, the Peerage or sheer serendipity. Suddenly an entirely new cast of characters has been summoned up from the shades, and we are better off as a result: although, as usual, a little restraint in interpretation might not come amiss. Not all early owners were especially interesting, and sometimes a plethora of facts may make us (as F. E. Smith may or may not have said) ‘none the wiser, just better informed’. I remember a leading auctioneer offering a recent first edition children’s book (probably a Harry Potter) with the pompous subheading, ‘provenance: contemporary gift inscription, in mauve felt-tip pen, “Suzie with love from Nana”.’ Not much help if we don’t know who Suzie or Nana were, and I struggle to equate this with, say, John Singer Sargent’s copy (complete with Galignani book-ticket) of an early novel by Henry James.

Provenance is exciting but it can have a downside, like most positive discoveries when they fall into the wrong hands. The laudable determination of institutional libraries not to possess anything stolen or looted can sometimes lead to disproportionate concern, as when their buyers insist on a comprehensive paper trail of ownership. It is very rare to find an old book with a complete and unbroken chain of provenance: indeed, were one to acquire a book complete with its 17th-century purchase invoice from the Leipzig book fair, and a collage of noble bookplates from then to the present day, there would be a strong case for considering it part of German cultural heritage and thus blocked from export, even for the most forceful bookseller. Books are multiples, and they were made to travel – Anton Koberger, the publisher of the Nuremberg Liber chronicarum in 1493, had offices all through Europe from Lyon to Buda. But the bookseller’s duty is to persuade rather than to complain, and there are signs that increasingly productive dialogue between libraries and the trade is leading to a more satisfactory approach to this problem. Finally, on this topic, it should be stated unequivocally that the great majority of antiquarian booksellers are implacably opposed to the legal fictions which some jurisdictions apply to the acquisition of clear title, when recognisably stolen books are sold at auction: this is an anomaly which we would love to see abolished. ILAB is working on it, but it will take a while.

Some of the trends which Bill Reese pointed out twenty-five years ago have continued to develop: the rise of the private collector, for instance. The completist has largely given way to the acquirer of high spots. Decent copies of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited (the first trade edition, London: Chapman and Hall, 1945) have gone in twenty-five years from high hundreds to high thousands, while the artificial rarity Basil Seal Rides Again (London: Chapman and Hall, 1963) remains stuck in the low hundreds (£188 for a lucky vendor at a Bloomsbury auction in 2004, £240 at Dominic Winter’s in 2023). Oddly, the true first of Brideshead, one of the fifty in wrappers ‘issued privately for the author’s friends’, has not fared so well: a copy fetched £2,530 in 1994, while another made a disappointing £8,960 thirty years later: perhaps its very scarcity is oV-putting. As any art dealer will tell you, there’s no point in making a market in something you can’t find. I should add that auction records are not the only price data out there, but they are relatively easy to obtain and are useful if interpreted with caution and a little cynicism: the successes are reported more conscientiously than the failures.

Good ordinary books are getting harder to sell, while highlights are ever more sought after. In 2000 and 2010, I inadvertently conducted a controlled experiment on this thesis: asked to clear eighty boxes of randomly packed books from a deceased estate, I found that the heir’s circumstances made it impossible for me to take more than forty on the first visit, and I was pleasantly surprised when a nearly forgotten number popped up on my telephone a decade later. Of the first forty boxes, thirty had to be sold wholesale for very little: the remaining ten were worth £8,000. The second time around, thirty-six boxes bit the dust, while the last four stacked up to £20,000, plus one book which even then seemed to have a way to go, and which I still have: perhaps another £20,000 for that?

The Mittelstand of the trade, the old-fashioned holistic market town shop that could find a home for every worthwhile book, is now a rarity, surviving only when it is in the happy position of owning its own freehold. There are glorious exceptions (G. David in Cambridge, for instance), but only a very few. Most of the valuable business is in the hands of a small number of firms, and there seems a lot less social mobility than there was a couple of generations ago; and, alas, that is not confined to the rare book trade.

Printing and the Mind of Man books (still a key text for the highlight collector) go from strength to strength, buoyed up in some instances by personality cults: the Darwin market, for instance, is perhaps worth a glance, as the high spots appear to have gone up roughly tenfold since 2000. An acceptable-sounding copy of On the Origin of Species (London: John Murray, 1859) fetched £19,550 against an estimate of £7,000–£9,000 at Sotheby’s in 2000, while Forum sold a rough-looking one this year for £98,280, and leaves from the original MS (used by generations of Darwin children as scrap paper) have blossomed from US$96,000 in 1999 (an ‘important leaf ’, estimated at $25,000–$35,000) to £274,000 and £490,000 in 2018. No wonder Cambridge University Library is relieved to have its notebooks back.

What next? Inevitably, the question of artificial intelligence needs to be addressed. To approach this, as an avowed sceptic, I tried to recall the details of a half-remembered remark by Aldous Huxley to the effect that ‘military intelligence bears the same relation to intelligence as military music does to music’, and so, in a vain attempt to check my memory and obtain chapter and verse, I turned to Google. The result was more telling than I expected. The ‘AI overview’, which heads the search results, begins as follows: ‘The connection between Aldous Huxley, military intelligence, and music is multifaceted. Aldous Huxley’s dystopian novel, Brave New World, has been a source of inspiration for musicians, including Iron Maiden, who created the song “Brave New World” based on the book’s themes of societal control and artificial intelligence…’ What a fine, ten-dollar word ‘multifaceted’ is! And how kind of Googleto throw in a disclaimer at the end of this word salad, stating baldly that ‘AI responses may include mistakes’. You don’t say! Lessons have been learned, as they say nowadays.

Seriously, however, a close colleague very nearly fell foul of AI, when a prospective customer asked Google what a book in his stock was worth. The title in question was William Wollaston’s The
religion of nature delineated (London: Samuel Palmer…, 1725). First printed in 1722, the work went through several editions, and one of the 1725 reprints is noteworthy for having been set in type by an argumentative American teenager, the young Benjamin Franklin: therein, of course, lies much of its value. AI completely failed to spot this: it came up with a predictably half-smart summary of online prices and auction records, suggesting a price in the mid-hundreds of dollars, not unreasonable for other editions of the book (which is more interesting than it might sound), but wholly missing the Franklin factor. I am happy to report that another customer came along, one who was willing to engage his brain rather than his keyboard, and the book sold, but it was an awkward moment and AI will only get cleverer, or at least more plausible. Cataloguing and pricing are major elements of a dealer’s skillset, but we will not have a monopoly on them for ever. Two decades ago, I was able to fool a search engine by asking ‘Who wrote Handel’s Water Music?’, but such a trick would be harder now. Nonetheless, a large part of the bookseller’s job is seeing something significant in a book which others had missed, and this seems likely to remain the case for many years to come. That’s how we buy from other dealers!

I write this in a hotel room, overlooking a railway station (shrine
to a technological marvel, still working after 200 years) and a newish
postmodern oYce block (five floors, all empty: if you don’t have to
go anywhere, or come from anywhere, you don’t need to be next
to the station). Today’s (and tomorrow’s) customers for rare books
(another technological marvel, 570 years and counting) can buy
stuV online, but they can also walk into a shop and find shelves of
interesting material, all written and illustrated by real people, and
historically coherent: a very modest amount of skill is enough to
ascertain that the artefact hasn’t been tampered with or rewritten
to please the morals of today (which will pass, as they always do).