Backlist: Pricing without a Net. A Case Study for The Souls of Black Folk in a Dust Jacket
Previously published in another venue on July 21, 2021
How Did You Come Up with This Price?
The old joke is that the standard question booksellers get asked is some variation on “Have you read all of these books?” (although I don’t think I’ve ever been asked that).
When I ran an open shop, I far more often heard, “Is this a library” and “How do I check out a book?” At first I was baffled by those questions, but I gradually came to realize that a lot of communities in the US don’t have a used bookstore, and the only reference point people have for places with books are libraries. When I explained that they were in a store, some people were thrilled that they could buy a book to own; others were disappointed that I expected money for books, which they thought they ought to be able to borrow for free.
As an antiquarian bookseller, the most frequent questions have to do with the prices for books. This morning I was talking to a customer who was lamenting that he hadn't bought a first edition of Frank Herbert’s Dune back when the late, great Barry Levin was asking what seemed like an absurd $650. Today, you’ll be hard pressed to put your hands on a copy for ten times that.
Which brings me to The Souls of Black Folk (Chicago: A.C. McClurg, 1903), which I priced at $20,000. You might reasonably wonder how I came up with that price, especially for a copy in a jacket that is missing its spine. That’s a serious defect by any standard.
I didn’t pull that number out of thin air, even though there were no (public) records for previous prices paid for a jacketed copy. I hesitate to say it’s the only copy with a jacket, but there don’t seem to be many around. For one thing, the jacket paper is of very low quality—it’s very light sensitive and acidic, and pretty much any place the jacket was exposed to light, it disintegrated. I paid ECS Conservation to de-acidify the paper and to conserve (not restore) it and make it functional again as a jacket.
Souls by W.E.B. Du Bois is one of the great books of the 20th century, and it’s on the list of 88 "Books that Shaped America", as chosen by the Library of Congress. As of this writing (2021), there are no first editions for sale online. But I have been keeping track of them for a while. An ex-library copy appeared online and then disappeared (and presumably sold), priced at $3200. A bookseller I know recently sold a good to very good copy, lacking the jacket, for $7500.
So let's take $7500 as a reasonable price for the first edition. How do we value the dust jacket?
I looked at the price differential for major books published between 1901 and 1905, with jackets and without.
Kim by Rudyard Kipling. London: Macmillan, 1901. First UK edition. Asking price for copies without jacket, $700 to $1200. Price with jacket similar to my Souls, $3500; nice jacket, $11,500 to $13,500. Price multiple for a nice jacket: 12×; for a well-worn one, 3.5×.
The Call of the Wild by Jack London. New York: Macmillan, 1903. In a nice jacket, $10,000 to $22,000. Rough jackets, $4000 to $6500. First editions without jackets, $1000 to $3000. The data is muddy, but let's call the standard multiplier 6×.
The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle. London: George Newnes, 1902. At auction, in 1998, a copy in the dust jacket made £80,700. That same year, an “especially fine” copy lacking the jacket made £5750. Multiplier 14×.
You can pick most any famous title from the period and you’ll get similar results, with jacketed copies selling for 5× to 20× similar copies without a jacket. Mind you, those are for books where you can find records of copies in jackets.
So apply 5× to the base price of $7500 for Souls and you get $37,500. Use 10× and you get $75,000. Apply a heavy discount to my copy, to account for condition, and $20,000 starts to seem pretty reasonable. At least in my opinion. Part of the fun of bookselling is to see if anyone agrees with my answer to “How did you figure that price?”
Shortly after I wrote the above, a bookseller purchased the book from me, presumably to sell to someone for even more. Copies without dust jackets changed hands at ever increasing prices in 2022 and 2023, topping out, as far as I am aware, at $20,000, making my jacketed copy—still the only such copy to come on the market—look like a pretty good deal at $20,000.
—Scott Brown