An Interview on First Editions

Matthew Haley is a books and manuscripts specialist at Bonhams & Butterfields in New York. Recently, Collectors Weekly spoke to Haley about first editions, the difference between first editions and first printings, and some of the most collectible titles and authors on the market today.

From the piece...

Collectors Weekly: Which American classics are most sought after?
A first edition of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale" from 1851 would be a cornerstone of any collection.

A first edition of Herman Melville's "Moby-Dick; Or, The Whale" from 1851 would be a cornerstone of any collection.

Haley: We’ve already discussed “To Kill a Mockingbird,” and there’s “Moby Dick” and “The Great Gatsby.” Those are all five-figure books in first-edition form. Anything that’s a household name is going to be the most sought after, really. Books that have been turned into classic movies like “Gone With the Wind” are also desirable. Genres also have their followings. Crime, children’s books, and sci-fi are all their own collecting fields, and each has a subset of collectible authors within it.

This brings us to the different types of first-edition collectors. There are people who want the classics in first edition—in other words, the classic books regardless of who the author is. But there are also people known as completists who want the complete works of a given author in first edition, including rare juvenilia stuff published when they were children. The most obvious form of completist in book collecting is someone who wants to own all of the James Bond books by Ian Fleming, or perhaps all of the James Bond books, including those written by Ian Fleming, Kingsley Amis, and Sebastian Faulks.

P.G. Wodehouse is another favorite of completists. The approach is not limited to authors, particularly. How one collects books is as varied as people’s tastes. But collecting by author is one way for a collector to express his or her affection for a given writer. It’s probably slightly easier to complete a collection of first-edition Ian Flemings than Hemingways. Also, Ian Fleming has that boyish movie tie-in as well, which is quite good fun.

Collectors Weekly: You’ve mentioned movies a couple of times. “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” was at the top of the “New York Times” bestseller list after the release of the film “Julie & Julia.” Do movies always make first editions more valuable?

Haley: It depends on how classic the movie becomes. The Bond movies are unquestionably classics. Philip K. Dick’s “Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?” became “Blade Runner.” That movie is considered a classic, but in a sense the book was already there, so either way it’s going to remain collectible.

One recent circumstance that comes to mind is Philip Pullman’s “Northern Lights,” part of the “His Dark Materials” trilogy, which had a sudden peak in terms of their value in auction. After the film “The Golden Compass” came out, the peak dropped off slightly. So I think it’s quite a difficult thing to try and predict.