Collecting First Editions is Madness

So says Christopher Howse in the Telegraph.

From the piece...

Most books only ever achieve a first edition. Yet the Shakespeare first folio effect still works with popular authors such as J K Rowling. In 1997, only 500 copies of the first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone were printed. A copy can fetch £30,000 – but only if it is in very good condition, as almost all aren't.

That is another symptom of book madness: valuable copies are the ones nobody has read. It is like taking your shoes off when it rains. Nothing spoils a book like reading it. In the British Library, readers tell a librarian if pages of the book are uncut – joined at the right-hand edge – so they may be parted without damage. Private collectors keep books uncut. It's the ne plus ultra of bibliomania: a book that cannot be read.

As for dustjackets, don't speak to me. A Beckett or D H Lawrence fetches many times more in a dustjacket. These are scarce because human beings used to discard them, as they do shoe-boxes on buying shoes. I can't help despising dustjacket magpies when even the presence of the price, which used to be clipped off at sale, boosts book values.

But no ordinary person makes a fortune out of first editions. Auction houses sell them by the wheelbarrow. Indeed if you want a hardback of a novel by Conrad or Masefield, you might as well go to an auction of "modern firsts".

As with financial market, it's all to do with sentiment.