Cage Match: Mockingbird Vs. Android

Plus a selection of interesting (to me! and hopefully to you) newly catalogued first editions

Will Androids Overtake the Mockingbird?

Here’s one of the random things I spend way to much time thinking about:

Is To Kill a Mockingbird still the most valuable novel of the 1960s?

Harper Lee’s first novel, published in 1960, is one of the highest summits—call it $25,000 to $35,000—for modern first edition collectors between the mountains of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises (1926, $100,000+) and Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1996, $250,000+). It has been the most valuable novel of the Sixties for a long time, but that doesn’t mean it won’t be eclipsed in the coming years.

You might be surprised at the price trend for To Kill a Mockingbird. The Ahearns (the late Patricia and Allen, the founders of the bookselling firm Quill and Brush) published a bunch of book collecting guides over the years and from them I was able to assemble five six price points for Harper Lee’s famous book.

1986    $250
1995    $2500
2000    $7500
2007    $15,000
2011    $25,000
2023 $25,000

[Shortly after publication of this newsletter, Allen Ahearn offered his updated price for 2023, and he’s sticking with $25,000]

As of this writing, there are a few copies of the first edition of Mockingbird for sale. Pretty nice at $35,000 and very good copies at $22,500 and $16,500.

The Ahearns seem to have had a pretty good feeling for the market of TKAM. Looking back at the auction records and dealer listings on Rare Book Hub, it’s clear that the price of TKAM took a big leap in the mid-1990s.

I started looking into what might have happened to spark collector interest in the novel so many years after its initial publication.

The most likely explanation for why the book took off is that some marketing person at Harper Collins, the publisher of TKAM, changed the price trajectory of the book with a brilliant promotional campaign.

In 1995, they released a 35th anniversary hardcover edition of TKAM, and the book sold like crazy, going through dozens of printings in the new hardcover edition. The anniversary edition was the exact same book as the original, except for a short “preface” which was really just a paragraph from a Harper Lee letter in which she says she doesn’t like prefaces.

The new release generated countless newspaper stories in 1995—about the novel, the movie, and the book’s publicity-shy author. The 35th anniversary edition was so popular that it is now a collectible book in its own right.

Stop for a minute to consider the genius and daring behind putting out a “thirty-fifth anniversary” edition. Thirty-fifth anniversaries are not a thing.

Big anniversaries end in zeroes or are multiples of 25, or both. Someone at Harper Collins came up with the idea to act like the 35th anniversary was a real event, and everyone just went along with it, including, apparently, collectors who started bidding up the price of first editions.

The price climb for TKAM slowed after 2011—whether the book has really gone up in value over the last twenty years is debatable. At best, it has just kept up with inflation. According to the Federal Reserve’s inflation calculator, $25,000 in 2011 is the equivalent of $34,700 today.

The first printing of TKAM is usually estimated at 5,000 copies. That’s not a huge number, and the book has a very delicate clay-coated-paper jacket that is mostly printed in black on the front cover and spine. Stare at the book too hard and some ink will chip off, revealing the white paper underneath.

As a result, truly fine copies are almost unheard of, and command a significant premium. In 2001, Christie’s sold a “superior” copy for $32,900. That was just a year after the Ahearns pegged the price of a nice copy at $7500. (That Christie’s sale is still the record auction price for an unsigned copy.)

While TKAM has just been keeping pace with inflation, a few other novels from the 1960s are beginning to make real gains in price.

The leading candidate for a Sixties novel to surpass TKAM in price is Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADOES), by Philip K. Dick (Doubleday, 1968). There are four collectible copies on AbeBooks now, ranging from $20,000 to $27,500, in essentially the same price range as Mockingbird.

Androids may be most widely known as the source for the film Blade Runner, but it is also a philosophical novel that explores religion (Mercerism in the book), metaphysics (if a robot doesn’t know she’s a robot, is she alive?), state power (bounty hunters authorized by the government to kill androids on sight), and collecting (the electric sheep of the title are substitutes for real animals, which are avidly collected in Dick’s post-apocalyptic San Francisco).

Androids is arguably the foundational novel about the ethics of Artificial Intelligence, and if you believe the news, AI is likely to change society in the 2020s like the World Wide Web did in the 1990s. Androids’ time has come.

I wondered if anyone else had noticed this shift, how Androids seemed to be sneaking up on the Mockingbird. So I asked around. A couple of booksellers were willing to consider the question and to allow me to share their views here.

One dealer in literary highspots asked not to be quoted directly. Since The Dispatch is not a publication of record, I was happy to grant anonymity without asking them for a good reason.

Truly fine copies of Mockingbird are scarcer than truly fine copies of Androids, they said. But there are far more average collectible copies of TKAM than DADOES floating around. The relative scarcity of Dick’s novel could push up the average price beyond Mockingbird, even if Mockingbird is more popular (the basic economic law of supply and demand).

My informant also wondered aloud about the relative wealth of the buyers—tech millionaires for Androids and the literary rich for TKAM. Given the nature of capital today, they said, the techies might have the advantage.

Amir Naghib, of Captain Ahab’s Rare Books, offered a keen analysis, and gave permission for me to quote him:

I can’t quite grasp the jump in prices I’ve seen for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, even for pretty mediocre copies and ex-library copies. I sold my last pretty good one...for $8500. It used to be that the top of the market hovered around $12,500 to $15,000, and those would linger a while. The movie sequel came out [Blade Runner 2049, in 2017], which I didn’t think was particularly good, and then prices took a jump and I haven’t seen a market correction downward.

What I see are copies in tepid condition priced over and above what near fine or better copies used to command just a half-dozen years ago. It is a big book, and like nearly all the Doubleday sci-fi books from that period, cheaply made. Survivors have always circulated in the trade, and it’s never been what I’d call “rare” or even “scarce.” Bide your time, and one will always turn up at some auction or online, every year. I still haven’t seen a truly perfect, unrubbed copy, with the lime green spine lettering unfaded on the jacket. For that copy, I could see commanding a premium.

TKAM is a different bird. I have one customer who would pay more or less anything I asked him if I could produce a truly perfect, unrubbed copy of To Kill a Mockingbird, but I still haven’t seen it. They’ll be reading Mockingbird for another 100 years, and it’s a cultural touchstone in ways that Androids isn’t… If I were a betting man, I’d bet on Harper Lee any day. I’ve sold four jacketed copies of Androids, and 13 jacketed copies of TKAM. The prices for TKAM are higher in all but one instance.

Lee was a pretty generous signer right up until the last few years of her life, when she just couldn’t do it anymore. Dick, however, was a deeply paranoid drug user who was a reluctant signer of books. A few West Coast cons [science fiction conventions—ed.] and at a few California dealers were the only places where he would sign a limited number of books.

I’ve seen forgeries good and bad, but I’ve only ever seen one signed and one inscribed copy of Androids. If one materialized signed, with real (not speculative) provenance, I could see it outpacing Harper Lee. If a proper association copy turned up, I could see it breaking records. Big book and a reluctant signer make for a perfect storm sometimes.

My informants offered two other contenders from the 1960s that might surpass the price of a first edition Harper Lee: Frank Herbert’s Dune and Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas).

The price of Dune has definitely increased in recent years, tied to the new film version. Like TKAM and DADOES, it has an inherent vice that makes fine copies scarce: the dust jacket spine inevitably fades. At this moment in time, average collectible copies seem far more common than Mockingbirds or Androids, and that has kept the price from surging past $20,000 for unsigned firsts in typical collector condition.

In 1990, before Mockingbird jumped in price, The Bell Jar was probably the most valuable novel of the 1960s. It had the smallest print run of any of the four contenders.

Rachel Phillips, founder of Burnside Rare Books, told me that she was skeptical of Sylvia Plath’s chances to reclaim the top spot. “The Bell Jar is for cool girls,” she said when I asked, and books with strong female protagonists have never fared particularly well in the collector’s market (at least not since Jane Austen and the Brontë sisters). 

The blockbuster films and the tech money flowing into first editions of science fiction classics right now may eventually push Androids and Dune above Mockingbird. Mockingbird will always be the better novel, but perhaps with less cachet (Wait—the movie of To Kill a Mockingbird is in black and white? one of my informants exclaimed when we were on the subject of the influence of films on book collecting).

I’d like to hope that more cool girls will take to collecting and claim Plath’s brilliant book for their own. Girl power could give tech bros a run for their money, but Mockingbird might just fly the coop and leave the cage match to decide second place.

Follow Up

I had quite a few (private) comments on this essay.

Several commenters argued that TKAM’s price appreciation staying close to the inflation rate meant the book was only holding its own and that the coming generation of book collectors would not find it so compelling. In fact, it was argued, future readers might well find Mockingbird’s depiction of race relations hard to stomach.

Those doubters may have a point, but the novel is still extremely popular with readers. On Amazon, it averages 4.7 out of 5.0 stars, with 132,000 ratings. It fares less well on Good Reads, with 4.3 out of 5.0 stars, but 5.8 million ratings. That’s a lot of fans, at least some of whom will become collectors. Of the big novels of the 1960s, Dune has the next highest number of ratings. Its average scores on the five-point scale are exactly the same as TKAM, but with 50,000 fewer votes on Amazon and 4 million fewer on Good Reads.