Doing Your Own Research and Other Book Collecting Pitfalls
Plus a list of new arrivals from Downtown Brown Books
[This Dispatch is landing in your inbox on Wednesday, instead of Monday, because my photo editing is done in Bangladesh. In recent weeks, there has been a lot of civil unrest there. The government turned off the Internet and cellular phone service to make it harder for the protesters to organize and to stop the circulation of videos of the hundreds of people who were killed by police. This brought home to me how interconnected we all are in this global economy. Tarif, my photo editor, and his wife and daughter are fine, if somewhat frazzled from being under a 22-hour per day curfew.]
Last year I wrote about why I find requests for additional photographs of books to be annoying. In case you are wondering, I still feel that way.
I have not, however, been immune from the pressure of such requests and increasingly take more photos from the beginning. That means I have to spend more time cataloging each book, and I can no longer afford to handle $50 and $75 books (although I still have some in my to-do stack).1
In addition to more pictures, the current book marketplace demands ever better pictures. Many book buyers are examining photos with minute attention.2
Booksellers have to watch for spots of glare that look like tears, covers that look bowed due to the curvature of the camera lens, and gilt stamping that looks dull if the light hits it the wrong way.
Some collectors are even demanding the original image files—they don’t want to look at photos touched up in Photoshop.3
Twice this month I had requests for photos of the back flaps of dust jackets.4 I told both potential customers that there was nothing wrong with the flaps and that my written descriptions were correct. One of these potential customers replied, “Need to see that picture before making a decision.”
This is obviously someone doing a lot of their own research, an increasing trend in our culture which has migrated into book collecting. Google made all of us doctors. Reddit made everyone a political conspiracy theorist. And now eBay has made all book dealers and collectors literary scholars.
I’m a big fan of research. I took two semesters of research methods in graduate school. Every month I receive a small pension from my time as a budget analyst back when bookselling was a side hustle for me. So I have both training and experience when it comes to research.
When I hear from collectors that they are “going to do some research” before buying a book, I wonder what they have in mind. Often it means reading descriptions on AbeBooks, browsing forums on Reddit, and watching videos on TikTok or YouTube.
Research can be part of the fun of contemporary collecting and dealing, and many booksellers have taken to it wholeheartedly, writing ever-longer, more fully researched descriptions.5
I have noticed two things these research projects sometimes overlook.
It’s ironic, but many book collectors (and some dealers) forget that a lot of information is not online, it’s in reference books.
Reference books are not perfect. Most have errors of omission—leaving things out.
Booksellers delight in writing “not in OCLC” (the combined database of 10,000+ library databases) and statements like “not in Gay, or Caillet, or Duveen, or Erdman.”
In the first place, not in OCLC doesn’t mean not in any library. It means “not separately cataloged by an OCLC member institution,” but writing that sounds a lot less enticing. I work with Japanese-language books about the United States, many of which are owned by libraries but they are not recorded in OCLC for various reasons. The same goes for ephemera of all kinds and even some genre fiction.
A similar caveat applies to bibliographies and other reference books.
Back when dealers put out printed catalogs, many of them (but not all, by any means) included lists of references cited. Now that most book descriptions appear in online listings, there is no list of references for collectors to consult, and it can be very hard to figure out which sources a dealer is citing. Such exclusivity might be fine when a dealer is talking only to experts in the field, but once it’s on the Internet, it’s likely that most of the people who see a listing aren’t experts.
The old-school approach helps keep book collecting an exclusive club: if you don’t know what “Duveen” means, don’t even ask me about “Caillet.”
After thirty years of bookselling, I have to say that I don’t know which references are meant by Gay, Caillet, Duveen, or Erdman, and I’m pretty sure most of you, dear readers, don’t either. I don’t think we dealers do ourselves or collecting in general any favors by citing reference books most of our potential customers don’t know.
If you don’t know the cited reference, it makes it hard to judge whether saying something is “not in” Duveen really means anything. (Do I have to point out that the list of references that any given book is “not in” is almost all the reference books ever printed? This newsletter isn’t cited in Howes, Blanck, Cowan I, Cowan II, Rocq, Bleiler, Kein, Hanrahan, Bienvenue, P&W, or Flake, to name a few.)
When a dealer says something is “not in” a reference, the statement carries with it the silent implication that it should have been included and that the book is so rare that the compiler didn’t know about it. When the reference cited refers to a private collection, it implies that the collector would have bought a copy if only they’d had a chance.
When I read “not in”, I am not always convinced that a particular book ought to be in a particular reference.6 Perhaps the compiler or collector left it out for a reason.
Whatever their flaws, printed references often represent years and even decades of study by subject matter experts. This applies to bibliographies, the traditional references of the book trade, as well as to the kind of reference books I tend to cite: memoirs, biographies, collections of letters, and peer-reviewed journal articls.
If I want to put a book in context, I try to find a primary source or a scholarly opinion. Annotated bibliographies are great for this, but a lot of interesting books aren’t in any annotated bibliographies and hardly any ephemera is.
I rely a lot on the fine online resources of the Portland (Oregon) Public Library, which includes access to many ebooks and several academic databases (your library may offer something similar). I also subscribe to a newspaper database, which is useful for dating the first appearance of books through reviews and ads or finding out more about someone who doesn’t (yet) have a Wikipedia entry.
(On this week’s list of new arrivals, you’ll see my citations of New Yorker editor Robert Gottlieb’s memoir in descriptions of books inscribed to him and quotations from contemporary newspaper accounts of Kate Chopin’s The Awakening, rather than the unsourced boilerplate that has been circulating for years.)
If a reference book isn’t self-published, then some business (the publisher) had to be convinced to take on the expense of printing and distributing it with the expectation (not always achieved) of making a profit from the project.
That’s a kind of scrutiny that almost no online-only content gets. When doing research is entirely dependent on free stuff on the Internet, sometimes you get what you pay for. Any research into books that does not involve actual books is almost certainly incomplete.
Consider the Source
Collectors’ reliance on do-it-yourself research is a reflection of our age of distrust in experts and authority figures of all kinds. Some of this lack of trust is definitely warranted. I’ve already written about how the regular and unscrupulous use of the term “first edition” has rendered it virtually meaningless. So it should surprise no one that collectors want to see the proof that a book is a first printing.
Once you’ve been burned a few times when a book arrives not as described, perhaps it’s also reasonable for you to ask to see more details, like a photo of the rear flap of a dust jacket.
Such pictures can help rule out later printings or uncommon damage to the jacket. But there are a thousand other problems that a book can have (a spaghetti stain on page 219, for example) that can be hidden through carefully edited photographs. That’s why I rarely buy books online that don’t also have a written description that can be used to justify a claim that the book is not as described. You can’t say something doesn’t match the description when there’s no description.
Those sort of requests for more information are fundamentally based on a lack of trust between the seller and the potential buyer. The most generous interpretation of that trends is that it is similar to President Ronald Reagan’s “trust but verify” stance with the now-former Soviet Union.
We’ve all grown so accustomed to buying from anonymous sources on the Internet that it’s easy to forget that some online sellers are not anonymous.
If you have doubts about a book for sale, google the source, the seller of the book, and not just the book or the author. To continue the Reagan analogy, instead of dealers and collectors being adversaries, perhaps it’s possible to become allies, who assume the best.
Someone who has a verifiable Internet presence that connects directly to the real world (with a phone number and address and other proof of life) is more likely to be reliable than someone who hides behind an anonymous user name.7
Recently an art forger pleaded guilty and was given a five-year prison sentence after a collector became suspicious and started investigating the artist’s work. But the collector did not begin to have doubts until after he had spent more than $100,000 on 130 pieces, all acquired from someone the collector only knew by the handle “River Seine.”
Forgery sucks, but come on. There’s a saying in business, “Know your customer.” But “know your dealer” is just as applicable. Don’t send $100,000 from some guy in Florida whose name you don’t know. Seriously.
Also consider the seller’s return policy. While sending something back can be a bit of pain,8 legitimate sellers accept returns within a reasonable period. I rarely get returns but I also feel like a lot of potential customers don’t give any weight to my money-back guarantee when making purchase decisions.
Beyond the guarantees offered by credit cards, PayPal9, and online platforms, members of the ABAA and IOBA, like me, have to guarantee authenticity for as long as we are in business. It’s not a perfect guarantee, but it’s far better than the 30-day return policy of eBay and the no-return policies of most auction houses.
I won’t claim booksellers are perfect. Even those of us who work hard to be right (who do our own research and don’t just repeat what we learn in the Internet echo chamber) get things wrong from time to time. And there are definitely booksellers who are very good at selling and don’t know so much about books. Some caution and taking the claims of booksellers with a grain of salt is warranted. I certainly review each new purchase when it arrives to make sure that the edition is what I expected, that the book hasn’t been doctored, and that there aren’t condition flaws that weren’t mentioned.
Most of the time, everything is fine, and when it isn’t, I send it back.
One collector suggested that I simply charge more to pay for the labor cost of the photos. Competitive capitalist markets don’t work that way. The market price is the market price.
The detailed examination of photographs used to be solely the province of hyper-sensitive condition fetishists, the sort of people who are pains in the you-know-what to sell to but whose collections dealers love to buy from. While I was writing this, I was asked for additional photos of a 60-year-old book (priced at $85) or my assurance that it was “flawless.” I said I wouldn’t say anything was flawless and besides my description pointed out a few minor blemishes. I relented and sent a picture and that’s another 15 minutes I’ll never get back. With so many books offered by anonymous vendors online and by auction houses with non-existent or questionable return policies, pretty much all dealers now live in the world governed by the whims of the condition purists.
I have a Photoshop guy who removes backgrounds for me and will remove a spot of glare if I ask. I had to train him not to fix the flaws in the books. Most Internet sellers sell brand new items and want their itemsto look pristine. I want mine to look like the actual object in the real world.
One of these books I sold the next day to someone who didn’t need a photo of the rear flap. The other book I still have as I am writing this, and I think it’s pretty well priced. Though if anyone asked, I would say my nicer copy is the better deal in the long run. However many nice copies of a book exist today, there will be fewer in 10 years. Books can only stay the same or get worse, so buying nice copies and keeping them that way is guaranteed to result in a book that has a smaller supply when you go to sell. Of course, whether that translates into a higher price will depend on the demand side of the equation. Very few of us can affect the demand for books in the future; we all affect the supply, depending on how good of a custodian we are.
I’ve whined about long descriptions before, and even took a survey to see how others felt about the question. You, dear readers, didn’t agree with me, but this is my dead horse and I’m going to keep on flogging it. You can hit the delete button on me, if you like.
You could search my inventory to find a few places where I use “Not in.” I’m not claiming that it’s never useful.
Why so many reputable booksellers hide behind obscure usernames on eBay and Amazon remains a mystery to me. That sort of obfuscation rarely happens on AbeBooks or Biblio.
I have had a recent run of problem returns that each required intervention on my part to get my money back. Perhaps this is a trend. Sellers say they offer returns and hope that some percentage of customers don’t follow through to get them. In the first case, the seller shipped the book to the wrong address and then didn’t respond to my requests for a refund. That created an interesting situation on Abebooks, which doesn’t allow requests for returns until after the expected delivery date has come and gone. In my case, that would have been weeks in the future even though the tracking showed that the book had been delivered, just not to me. In the second case, the seller sent the wrong book, which I promptly sent back. Again, they did not respond to my request for my money back, and I had to ask Abebooks to intercede on my behalf. In the third case, an eBay seller didn’t send a book and they told me eBay won’t allow them to issue a refund. Once again, I’ll have to wait until after the expected delivery date before I can apply for a refund. I put it on my calendar so I won’t forget. Perhaps the seller is counting on me not to follow through.
In an effort to save 3% in fees, a lot of PayPal deals are done using the “friends and family” option. In my opinion, this is penny wise and pound foolish. I will send money to a PayPal account on request only after I have the goods in hand. If someone wants to be paid first, they need to send me an invoice or a request for money that spells out what I’m getting and therefore provides purchase protection with PayPal. PayPal will not send you a refund for a friends and family transaction. Three percent seems like very cheap insurance to make sure the deal actually happens as expected.
As always, an interesting and thought-provoking article and three cheers for looking things up in books. I thought I was the only one left. The issues you outined are why we no longer have an online store and choose to keep a bricks and mortar store open instead. The profit margin is just better because we don't have to spend as long photographing and writing up books. But when we did have an online store we always tried to make our listings meet our own expectations when we're buyers. If I'm buying online, I do expect to see clear photos of salient features and a succint description (overblown, irrelevant facts and hyperbole loses a sale to me every time). If a book is signed (or has some other distinguishing feature) I expect to see a photo of that and to read something in the description about how/where it was signed (or something else that speaks to authenticity). I have had enough experience with association members selling forgeries to know that those guarantees of authenticity don't mean much to many sellers, are hard to enforce and getting a refund from those sellers can also be really difficult. I'm not denigrating all members - some are clearly very honorouable and expert. But not all, so I treat association members the same as any other seller and judge them on the quality of their books and their customer service.
Have you ever tracked how likely it is that someone who asks X questions actually ends up making a purchase? If there's a 10% chance of a sale after 10 nitpicking questions, is it still worth it?