Ken Lopez, for the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers has an extensive post on modern book collecting and well worth reading for anyone interested in pursuing the endeavor.
From the story...
About six months ago, I found that I was repeatedly discussing with a number of fellow booksellers, and more especially with a number of collectors on my mailing list, the apparent shift in collecting styles -- especially with regard to modern firsts -- that has taken place over the last 20 years or so. My main impression was that there has been a shift away from what I would call "in-depth" author collections toward the collecting of a relatively small number of "high spots" of modern literature.
No doubt the subject came up as I was attempting yet again to explain the extraordinary rise in the prices of a small handful of important -- or at least highly sought after -- modern titles such as The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird and On the Road, to name just a few. The prices for collectible copies of these books have skyrocketed in recent years, reaching unthinkable new levels and then leaving those levels in the dust mere months later. How high could they go? What do I say when a customer asks if these (or others like them) are good investments at this price level? What was fueling the prices? Could the bottom drop out of the market and their prices plummet as fast as they had risen? And, finally -- but perhaps most important -- what relation do these prices have to anything approaching real value? When a signed copy of On the Road is being offered for the price of a luxury sedan or a small house, is there any realistic "value" being offered, or is this a field that is, at best, completely untethered -- detached from any reality -- and, at worst, the culminating end of a massive pyramid scheme?
I didn't exactly choose to ponder these questions out of disinterested intellectual curiosity: most often, I was being grilled by customers and prospective customers, and they deserved some kind of answer. And that answer tended to be that these days, as a result of a shift in collecting trends that has been taking place over the last two decades, there is much more demand for the high-profile titles that comprise today's definition of a truly striking book collection and, in a market driven almost purely by supply-and-demand, that increased demand translated very readily into increased prices. It was an easy answer and true as far as it went, I guess, but it seemed to me to beg not only all the questions listed above but also a host of other ones: How did this situation come about? Is this trend in collecting a sign of the "dumbing-down" of the book market -- away from the more scholarly, thorough, "completist" exploration of a particular author or field, and toward the rote repetition of "received wisdom" with regard to what is or is not fit, or important, to collect? And, ultimately, the question behind all these questions was: Is this good for the collecting world, or bad for it? Is it good for dealers and bad for collectors? Vice versa? Or could it be an area where dealers and collectors, despite being frequently on opposite sides of the price trench, have shared interests, which can be served in the collecting market of today?
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