Collecting Books the Old Fashioned Way

How the Internet offered more yet we ended up with less

New Arrivals Now Online: A selection of first editions from AC Greene’s Best Books on Texas list, plus other 20th century Texas books.

As with so many areas of modern life, the Internet didn’t bring collectors everything it initially promised.

Book collectors were supposed to be beneficiaries of the “long tail,” the theory that online markets would satisfy demand for the countless niche items that occupy the thin, extended end of the distribution curve. The market provided the long tail, but most of us haven’t taken advantage of it.

Despite having access to a greater quantity of books than any previous collecting generation, more than ever, people are all chasing the same relatively small number of titles. There aren’t enough of those books to go around, so the most popular ones are reprinted in new, collectible editions, often more than once. In addition to the 25,000-copy first print run of Stephen King’s The Shining, for example, collectors can also buy signed, limited editions by Subterranean Press, Cemetery Dance, Taschen, and the Folio Society.

Rather than building one-of-a-kind collections of, say, 19th century novels about working women or wireless telephony prior to World War II, our collecting interests are narrowing. The more books we have access to, it seems, the fewer we want to spend time with.

We have created a paradox. When no copies of a particular first edition can be found for sale, the lack of availability discourages collectors because building a focused library seems too hard. Yet when the books are available, easy access to first editions is a deterrent because it makes collecting seem too easy.

The availability of even one copy of a book for sale online has a significant impact on me when I buy books for my shop. I tend to focus on titles that are either not available anywhere else or are priced inexpensively. I don’t want to invest my limited acquisition funds in the third or tenth copy of some title, unless I can get a pretty good deal on it. Otherwise, I’d rather hold out for a book where I’ll have the only copy. Collectors often employ a comparable approach. In most cases, we are both overcompensating.

If there are only three or even ten copies of a book for sale online (in similar condition), objectively, that’s not a large number. It would not take much of a change in the collecting zeitgeist to make all of those books disappear. Sometimes when an author dies, a book can go from seemingly plentiful to completely unavailable in the space of 24 hours.

In addition to encouraging collectors and dealers to put off buying a book, the presence of copies online also induces self-doubt. This looks interesting to me, a collector might think, but if no one else has purchased it, perhaps I’m wrong.

Any dealer can confirm my experience that at least a few times a year, shortly after something sells, I get an email asking about it from a collector who couldn’t pull the trigger and then regrets their hesitation.

In the face of the paradox that most books seem either too common or too scarce, collectors are retreating to tried and true subjects, where the availability of books is well established and knowable. And if a collectors isn’t sure, someone on Reddit or a Facebook group will offer advice, as long as its a mainstream book.

If you are collecting outside of the traditional paths, you don’t know if a particular book will never turn up again or if some collector on their deathbed has twenty copies squirreled away and the market is about to be flooded. You have to rely on your own judgment, and the habit of checking the web has eroded the confidence of both collectors and dealers. The web is a great help when its helpful, but it produces uncertainty when it’s not. And for most of the books ever published, the Internet offers precious little advice.

In the past, collectors and dealers published bibliographies that provided roadmaps for future collectors, often with information about that rarity of a title. Most references had small print runs and many were never reprinted. Collectors and dealers alike needed references, and they could be expensive when new and even more expensive when they went out of print.

When I was getting started in the 1990s, old-time dealers used to consider their reference collection to be their retirement fund. Then the Internet arrived, and it started to seem like everything was going to be on the web. Reference books weren’t going to matter so much. Now, collectors’ interests have narrowed to such a degree that otherwise useful books are obsolete because no one wants the titles listed in them. As a result, the price of references has plummeted, and even at rock bottom prices they don’t find buyers

Today’s new arrivals list on my Downtown Brown Books website is based around one such “obsolete” bibliography, A. C. Greene’s The Fifty Best Books on Texas. My list of Greene books belonged to Tom Garner. While his collection eventually coalesced around writers he knew¹, I think he collected Greene’s list because he knew A. C. Greene. Before Tom died, he had acquired first editions of about half of the list.

Americana generally, including most 20th century Texana, is out of favor with collectors. Even though Greene’s list tends toward books with literary style, Texas literature has never attracted the attention that relics of the Texas Republic have. Most of the books on the list are affordable even if they aren’t especially common.

Forty years ago, when Greene published selected his best books for Texas Monthly, collecting the list might have seemed predictable, and even lacking in imagination. Today, a collector would have the field mostly to themselves, a collection with an air of retro cool and genuine discovery, particularly if you hold out for superior condition and interesting associations. While the list may look mainstream, the books are actually scarcer than they might seem.

The Internet offers us tremendous choice, but we’ve used it to deliver more of the same. The real adventure in collecting has never been in chasing what what everyone else wants, but in finding something no one has thought of or in rediscovering what everyone else has forgotten.

—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books

1. Future new arrivals lists will be devoted to Dan Simmons, Joe R. Lansdale, Ray Bradbury, and Kurt Vonnegut, in that order.