I’m running late this week, so my usual Monday list is posting on a Wednesday.
This list (online, pdf) is devoted Asian Americana, books and ephemera documenting the experience of Japanese and Chinese immigrants to the United States. It’s a far cry, I know, from my more frequent offerings of Ray Bradbury and signed, limited horror novels. But it’s a subject that has interested me since at least 2000, based on my old websites on the Wayback Machine.
Most of my sales of these books are to libraries and research institutions, as you might expect. However, a few private customers buy now and again, when something fits their own particular interests. In this era of high-spot collecting, selling the odd or unusual to private collectors is increasingly difficult.
The New York Times recently covered an auction of a rare Ferrari that sold for only $51.7 million, an apparently disappointing result (it last sold in 1985 for $500,000, which was also probably a modest price at the time). The car had some one-of-a-kind features and that, in the opinion of experts, made it hard to market.
The Times quoted a rare car dealer, Simon Kidstone, who said, “It’s a great car. I don't think, unfortunately, that everybody understands it. In a market where appearances are very important and people like the comfort of belonging to a group of like-minded owners, anything that needs explaining is always a little bit more of a challenge to sell.”
There’s a lot of wisdom in that for collectors. High spots—famous books (or cars)—are easy and obvious and, I should add, great to have, but one of the pleasures of collecting is ferreting out the unusual, unexpected, and unlooked for.
My wife, Amy Stewart (who also writes a Substack newsletter), is just finishing a new book on people who have found their own, unusal collecting paths, The Tree Collectors: Tales of Arboreal Obsession. It’s now available to preorder, with publication scheduled for June 11, 2024 (book publishing is not a fast moving industry).
If you’ve ever thought explaining your book collection to a spouse was difficult or complained about how heavy books are to move, just be glad you aren’t a tree collector.
The Tree Collectors, Amy’s 14th book, is the first one she illustrated herself, although she paints almost every day and has done for more than twenty years. If you want to snap up one of her paintings, she’s doing her annual fund-raising art auction right now on eBay, with all proceeds going to World Central Kitchen.
Also on eBay
My fall clearance sale on eBay is about to go on Thanksgiving break.
Among the last items is one I’d especially like to highlight, the 1693 second, expanded printing of Sor Juana’s second volume of collected works. If it weren’t lacking the preliminary pages, it would be a solid five-figure book (I priced a copy of the third volume at $18,500 last year and sold it to a dealer before it was even catalogued. The dealer sold it for $30,000, thus proving the reasonableness of my prices or my lack of bookseller imagination, or both). While this Sor Juana is incomplete, it includes all the writing from the first great poet of the Americas.
Have a very happy Thanksgiving.
Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books