Trends in Modern Book Collecting

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?

For those who want answers to all these questions, read no further: I can assure you here that I do not have answers to all of them. The rest of this article will deal with those questions to which I can posit some sort of provisional answer but, perhaps more importantly, it will attempt to take a look at some of the history that has led up to the current state of affairs, which may help put this moment in time, and our particular current predilections, into some kind of context or perspective.

First, I should make clear a handful of assumptions that are based on my own experience which is, by definition, limited and likely to be more subjective than I think. Assumption number one: there seem to be a lot more dealers selling modern firsts today than there were when I started doing it, 20 years ago or so. I say this because it seems that all the dealers I first met when I started out are still doing business, and there are dozens -- maybe hundreds -- more who have started since then. Many of these are people who were collectors once: they were my customers as collectors and have now gone into business themselves, at least part-time, some full-time. The number of dealer ads and listings in this magazine dwarfs the number in the closest thing to a comparable medium from 20 years ago -- the bi-monthly American Book Collector.

The second assumption is really a corollary to the first: there must be more collectors today if there are more dealers and the dealers seem to be surviving and making a go of it.

Third: I was struck by what appeared to be a shift in "trends" in collecting -- more high spot collectors, fewer "completists." But I should point out that both of those categories of collectors, combined, make up only a fraction of modern book collectors. To quantify it, the "trend" probably involves numbers something like the following: that a generation ago 10-15% of the collectors were completists of one sort or another and 5-10% could be characterized as "high spot collectors." Today, those percentages are probably reversed. So, while this represents a significant, even dramatic, shift in the collecting market, it's also not a fundamental one: at most, it probably affects no more than a quarter of the market, and probably is actually somewhat less. It's noticeable primarily because the high spot collectors cast a high profile, since virtually every book they buy is a relatively expensive one, and also because, to a large extent as a result of this shift, prices of "high spots" of modern literature have increased dramatically in recent years, far outpacing the general rise in prices of other collectible books.

Finally, my own bias as I approached this question: I think there is a tendency to disparage the collectors of high spots as people mindlessly following someone else's idea of what a "good book" is and, conversely, to imagine the completists as noble-minded individuals pursuing a collection for the intangible greater benefit it may provide to humanity. My gut reaction to such stereotypes is that they must be wrong -- they're just too easy. The "wealthy collector who knows nothing about books but is throwing so much money at the field that he's wrecking my chances of getting a good book" is just too convenient a devil for me to believe in. And, while I have no problem with the notion of the noble-minded collector studiously building his collection to the greater benefit of Knowledge, I tend to think of all book collectors as noble in some degree or another: choosing to surround oneself with books -- special books, of one sort or another -- seems to me to be an admirable thing. It denotes a respect for the written word, for the language, for the ideas and insights that have brought us not only to where we are but, more importantly, to all the possibilities that exist of where we might yet be. So this exercise in exploring the question of whether there is such a trend, and what it means for all of us and what it portends for the future, is one in which I think a meaningful understanding must go beyond simplistic stereotypes and get to root causes, as well as to a more textured understanding of the book market and the roles that different categories of collectors are playing in it today.

So then, the first and most obvious change is that we have a larger collecting market today than there was 20 years ago; what does this have to do with "trends" in collecting? If the composition of the market were proportionately the same as it was 20 years ago, there would be as many more author "completists" as there are high spot collectors, but this patently doesn't seem to be the case. The prices in the market alone would indicate quite clearly that it's not the case, even if we didn't have anecdotal experience supporting that notion: where high spots have increased in price by factors of up to 50, and sometimes even 100, over the past 15 or 20 years, there has been no corresponding increase in the price of, say, secondary appearances of even the great, established collectible authors -- Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Steinbeck -- let alone the later generation of Roth, Updike, Mailer, et al. In fact, to a large extent, listings of these items seem to have disappeared altogether from many dealers' catalogs. Why? A look at the history of book collecting, especially modern book collecting, can give us some perspective on these changes, as well as on some of the changes we can expect to see in coming years.

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Copyright © 1999 by Ken Lopez