Does Anyone Want Books about Books Anymore?

Why you probably don't care about two new children's-book bibliographies

Two new lists this week from Downtown Brown Books, New Arrivals, including a complete set of Douglas Adams novels, all signed; and a list of Dan Simmons books from the Tom Garner collection.

Bibliography Redux

Donald “Rusty” Mott is a second-generation bookseller. His firm, Howard S. Mott, Inc., dates back to 1936. With an 89-year history, the Motts are well known among antiquarian booksellers of a certain age, a handful of collectors, and select librarians. It’s a bespoke operation, built on quoting, collection development, and book fairs. Rusty, now 80, has been in the book trade for basically his whole life.

“As for internet selling,” he told me, “I had hoped to fall off my perch before I ever listed a single thing on the net.” COVID forced him to reconsider, and after five years, he is still testing his wings. He feels no need to rush in to anything. Mott typically lists fewer than two hundred items at a time and only on Biblio.com. He conceded that his reticence to sell online might have been a miscalculation. “My sales there have proved that I should have made the plunge earlier,” he said.

The Motts are natural archivists, who seem to have saved everything. If someone has a question, say, about which ABAA dealers exhibited at a particular book fair in 1960, Rusty probably has the answer in his files or his parents’ files. He estimated that his reference library includes 9,000 books, not counting thousands of catalogs dating back to the 19th century.

Rusty took issue with my previous Substack, where I characterized bibliographies and other traditional bookselling references as increasingly obsolete. “Drivel” was his one-word response.

He and I are actually on the same side here, even if my reference collection only occupies four bookcases at present, compared to 15 cases of catalogued inventory.

My essay was intended as a lament that the most ardent of book people—book collectors and booksellers—have lost interest in reference books. They are becoming obsolete, I wrote, not because the information isn’t useful, but because “it started to seem like everything was going to be on the web.” Even if that vision of the future didn’t quite materialize, interest in reference books didn’t rebound.

A few weeks ago, I bought two newly published bibliographies by the children’s book collector Stan Zielinski, Caldecott Medal First Edition Identification Guide, 1938-to-1978 and First Edition Identification Guide: Beginner Books, B-1 to B-50.

Stan Zielinski’s Bibliographies Available on Amazon
1. Caldecott Medals, 1938–1978: First Edition Identification Guide, $59.95 (color)
2. Beginner Books, B-1 to B-50: First Edition Identification Guide, $59.95 (color)
3. Beginner Books, B-1 to B-50: First Edition Identification Guide, $19.95 (b&w)

As a generalist bookseller, I always have a selection of kids’ books, although I’ve never specialized in the field. From hard (a bookseller euphemism for expensive) experience, I’ve learned that first edition identification can be difficult for older children’s books, which don’t always follow the rules established for adult books from the same publishers. Often differentiating printings of children’s books comes down to the price on the jacket or the list of titles in the promotional copy. To the uninitiated, the detailed Wizard of Oz bibliographies might be mistaken for diagnostic manuals.

Given the complexity of the bibliographical information, I have always wondered at the lack of published references for children’s books beyond the standard guides to Dr. Seuss and Maurice Sendak, and some series books, like Oz and Nancy Drew. Before Zielinski’s new book, the most recent bibliography of Caldecott Award winners, the annual medal for the best American picture book, appeared in 1949, before most collectors cared about dust jackets, which are not even mentioned in passing in the guide book.¹ Among today’s collectors, 90% of the value of a book is in having the right jacket.

Timothy Forry, of E. M. Maurice Books, told me that the difficulty of the field is the precise reason why so few references have been published. “It would be such a monumental task,” he said as he imagined the requirements. “I would need a team of people and vast resources to put something like that together.”

One of Forry’s go-to references is the closest thing to a comprehensive children's book bibliography, E. Lee Baumgarten’s Price Guide and Bibliographic Checklist for Children’s & Illustrated Books for the Years 1880–1970, last updated in 2004. Baumgarten kept a database of 18,000 books with information culled from a variety of sources. The 2004 update includes the original dust jacket price of the book and whether the first edition states “first edition.” Many children’s books, Forry explained, state first edition on the first printing, and then all the reprints say nothing at all. Too many overly optimistic collectors and dealers assume that if a book doesn’t say it is a reprint, then it’s a first edition. Baumgarten can show when that’s an incorrect assumption.

His work is useful except in those cases where the issue points are complicated. The dealers who refer to it often mark corrections and clarifications gleaned since it was published. For example, Baumgarten identifies the $1.50 jacket price of the first printing of Harold and the Purple Crayon, but he does not indicate that the price needs to be at the bottom of the front flap, a detail few dealers know because it isn’t published anywhere.²

Not that it matters. The first fifteen listings for Harold and the Purple Crayon on Abebooks claim a mystifying array of conflicting issue points for the first edition.³ None of the booksellers explain where their first edition points come from. While Baumgarten’s information is incomplete, it is closer to the truth than the information offered by many of the online sellers. Peter Glassman of Books of Wonder in New York, the éminence grise of children’s booksellers with 50 years’ experience, said he’d estimate that about half of booksellers “just guess” at first edition identification “and the other half count on being able to find the information online.” Few, in his experience, invest much in reference books anymore.

Booksellers, as a group, are notoriously cheap. It’s not surprising that we are not inclined to spend money on reference books. It’s harder to explain why collectors don’t require us to. Collectors appear to be doing as much research on the web as dealers, and no one knows where their facts came from, with decidedly mixed results.

Stan Zielinski waded into these choppy waters with a website devoted to children’s books, 1stedition.net, a now-out-of-print guide to picture books, and his newest bibliographies. Twenty years ago, when he began publishing his first edition identification information online, old-school dealers told him, “You can’t do this.” Knowledge of first edition points for children’s books was their competitive advantage, and Zielinski believes they felt unnecessarily threatened by his efforts. “I’m trying to help the hobby,” he countered.

Zielinski is a retired manufacturing engineer who kept the machines running at Nestlé factories. He is still perfectly at home talking about optimizing the “wrench time” of mechanics. He applied that focus to comparing copies of children’s books in order to work out the distinguishing characteristics of first printings. His two new bibliographies devote more than 500 pages to describing the printing histories of just ninety-one of the thirty-thousand titles he tracks in his home database.

As a bookseller, I figure I only have to use a reference book once to make it pay off. I felt that way back in 2002, when Marc and Helen Younger and Dan Hirsch published their guide to Dr. Seuss books, which cost $150. In April, I spent another $150 on a used copy of the J. R. R. Tolkien bibliography, not because I had a particular need for it, but because it’s usually twice that price, when you can find one.

My approach is increasingly in the minority. Three dealers I spoke with about Zielinski’s books cited the price, $60, as a deterrent for buyers. None of the children’s book dealers I spoke with cite Zielinki in their catalog descriptions, preferring to rely on their own reputations as experts to convey first edition information.

Responding to the price criticism, Zielinski converted the Beginner Book reference to black and white so he could sell it for $20. Amazon prints them on demand when someone orders a copy. Zielinski said he makes five dollars per sale, whether the book is in color or not. “I don’t have commercial motivation behind what I do,” he said.

Beginner Books in particular seem tailor-made for collecting. It’s a numbered series, the books are uniform in size, they are mostly affordable, and there is some bibliographical complexity to keep things interesting. Even the most expensive titles, like The Cat in the Hat and Green Eggs and Ham, are not nearly as pricey as the most-sought-after Caldecott winners.

The collecting public doesn’t see Beginner Books that way, Forry told me. “I have a couple on my shelf that have been here for many years. I might die with them.” He added that with only twenty years’ experience, he’s one of the younger children’s book dealers.

Dale Johnson, a retired mail carrier who has been collecting children’s books for fifty years and selling them as Cross Genre Books since 1985, said he has a shelf of uncatalogued Beginner Books. The lack of collector interest is “is a real mystery,” he said. “So many adults in my age range cut their teeth on those when they were growing up. You’d think there’d be a pretty strong built-in nostalgia factor.”

Then he offered a koan that would be right at home in a Beginner Book about bookselling:

It’s interesting which things are hot
And which are not.

Reference books seem destined to remained decidedly not hot, as Rusty Mott’s experience makes clear. “I am contacted frequently by colleagues wondering whether we have a certain reference work,” he wrote me. “I’m stunned by some of the requests I receive from specialist dealers who don’t own, nor can seem to find, the appropriate reference book they need. I almost always have it.”

—Scott Brown, Downtown Brown Books

Further Reading

Popular Mechanics magazine put a scandal involving Pokémon on its cover. In short, a bunch of card prototypes have come on the market in recent years, selling for very high prices (thousands and tens of thousands of dollars). Eventually, some collectors started to get suspicious, even though the grading company CGC had authenticated them. Using little-known clues left behind by color desktop printers, the collectors were able to prove that the cards were forgeries. CGC, one of the grading companies that I criticized in a Substack about COAs and autograph authentication, says it relies on expert and scientific analysis when authenticating objects. In this case, they relied on their source, someone connected to Pokémon. I wrote about the temptation of trusting sources rather than evidence in my Substack about forged Cormac McCarthy proofs.

Finding the Popular Mechanics article online is not easy. The issue isn’t yet posted to the PM website. It is available in Apple News+, if you subscribe. I found it on Libby, the free app used by my local public library for e-books and magazines.

1. Kerlan, Irvin. Newbery and Caldecott Awards: A Bibliography of First Editions. University of Minnesota Press, 1949.

2. My source for this issue point is Timothy Forry, of E. M. Maurice Rare Books. Whitmore Rare Books, another reliable source, offered the same point of issue in their Catalogue 26 (“Original $1.50 price at the bottom of the front flap”). Type Punch Matrix, who acquired the inventory of Aleph-Bet Books, one of the leading children’s book dealers, also cites the price at the bottom of the flap (“original unclipped ($1.50, lower corner) … dust jacket). Admittedly, this conclusion supports my general bias toward simple solutions. I find it more plausible that the first printing is identified by the location of the price rather than any one of the many combinations of prices and publisher codes offered in online descriptions of the book for sale. Publisher codes and typographical errors are widely cited by online booksellers as first edition points when they seldom actually are.

I think the most likely scenario is that when the book was published in late August 1955, the publisher did not have high expectations. A November 1955 profile of Ruth Krauss, the wife of Crockett Johnson, the pseudonymous author of Harold and the Purple Crayon, does not mention Harold. Instead, it describes him as the creator of Barney, a one-panel syndicated newspaper cartoon.

There are few reviews of the book in August and September, but they begin to turn up regularly in October. On October 16, the New York Times reviewed the book citing the price as $1.50 for the trade issue and $1.75 for the cloth library edition. That is the earliest notice about a library edition that I have found. A notice in November in the Cleveland Free Press provides the same information.

Under this scenario, sales of the book took off, and the publisher moved the price from the bottom of the flap to the top of the flap in order to print the library price at the bottom, as was standard practice for children’s books issued in sturdier library issues. All the copies of Harold and the Purple Crayon that I have seen with the $1.50 price at the top of the flap have the lower corner clipped, which supports the idea that the price was moved when a library issue was introduced. Also in this scenario, all the blather about publisher codes is nonsense; the location of the price is the only issue point (the codes and the library text on the front of the dust jacket, which is known in at least two variants, may determine the first printing of the library issue).

3. The complete list of various points of issue for Harold and the Purple Crayon from listings on Abebooks describing first editions of the book (as of July 2, 2025) follows. The correct point of issue is a $1.50 price at the bottom of the front jacket flap.:

• “First issue with ‘30-60’ and ‘No. 5671A’ to the front flap of the dust jacket”

• “First printing with $1.50 on front flap of dust jacket” (this copy is actually the first printing, but the bookseller doesn’t note the position of the price; it is, however, visible in the photos).

• “First issue dust jacket has the ‘30-60’ and ‘No. 5671A’ printed at the bottom of the front flap, with $1.50 printed price present.”

• “Dust jacket without the price to top of front flap, with code ‘30-60 / No. 5671A’ to front flap and ‘No. 5672A’ to rear flap.”

• “Price of $1.50 still intact at the top of the inner front flap but the bottom of the flap clipped.”

• “Dust jacket with lower flap corner clipped but the $1.50 price remains”

• “$1.50, lower corner” (another actual first printing)

• “Dust jacket has the $1.50 printed price present”

• “‘Library Edition’ printed on front panel of dust jacket… proper codes of 30-60 & No. 5671A on the front flap and No. 5672A on the rear flap”

• “First issue dust jacket; $1.50 flap price and ‘No. 5671A’ code on bottom of front flap.”

• [No points given]

• “First issue, with No. 5671A on front flap.”

• “‘Library of Congress Card No. 55-7683’ on title page, ‘30-60’ on front flap, $1.50 price, ‘No. 5671A’ code on bottom of front flap, and ‘No. 5672A’ on rear flap.” (this copy is actually the first printing, but the bookseller doesn’t note the position of the price; it is, however, visible in the photos).

• “LOC #55-7683 on title pg… Price clipped 1st state jacket with 30-60 No 5671A on front flap and No 5672 on rear flap”

• “The lower, front corner of the front flap is clipped. Light soiling. To the lower, front flap there is the proper first edition code of 30-60, No. 5671A and to the lower, rear flap of No. 5672A.” (this also seems to be the correct first edition)