$187,740 - The Price of Publicity

Or why buying at celebrity book sales might not be the best idea

Short Catalog for the 25th Anniversary of IOBA

The Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) is the biggest organization promoting best practices in online bookselling. I’ve been a member for a long time under various business names, and I think the group has done excellent work raising the quality of online book listings. If you buy from an IOBA member, you get a guarantee of authenticity and you can expect good business practices.

As part of IOBA’s 25th anniversary this year, the group is hosting a virtual book fair open only to its members. The fair starts Thursday, May 2, and runs through Saturday, May 4. There’s a link on the fair website to add it to your calendar so you won’t forget.

Here’s a preview of my booth:

RBG’s Notorious Books

Let’s state the obvious. It was not a good idea.

I am referring to the recent sale of 110 books from the home library of the late Supreme Court justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg at Heritage Auctions. These books were acquired just two years ago at a series of sales at Bonhams that generated national publicity.

It is rarely a lucrative financial move to buy at auction and then turn around and resell the same material at another auction. The fees alone are brutal. Bonhams added 27.5% to the final bids made by the buyer. When the books were resold, Heritage added 25% and under usual circumstances, would also collect 10% from the seller.

In order to just break even, prices would need to rise 39% between the sales.¹ Even in these inflationary times, that’s a lot of increase in two years for any book, let alone those purchased in a bidding frenzy.

Like you, I was curious why someone would resell these books so soon. After all, they spent $267,084 on them. That’s a lot of love for Ruth Bader Ginsburg to lose in 26 months. Perhaps it was one of the usual reasons: death, divorce, downsizing, or debt. I asked Heritage, but they wouldn’t say. Since the sale only included RBG’s books and not any other collectibles, it seems likeliest that the decision was about the books and not a bigger life change, but who knows?

What we do know is that the selling triggered a substantial loss. The books were hammered down at Heritage Auctions on March 29 for $88,160.² Assuming there was a standard seller’s commission, that means that the books cost $267,000 in 2022 and earned back something close to $80,000 in 2024, putting the loss at $187,740, or roughly 70%.

These 110 books accounted for just over 10% of the $2.4 million spent at Ginsburg’s library sale. Ginsburg was not a collector. Her books were mostly recent publications, many of them paperbacks, inscribed to her or with her bookplate. The highest prices paid in the original sale were for her own works, like the $100,000 check someone wrote for a bound copy of the Harvard law review from the years the RBG worked on the journal.

The seller at Heritage was not quite so free spending at Bonhams. The most expensive lot they bought was seven bound volumes of Ginsburg’s Supreme Court opinions for $35,000.

In short, these are extraordinary prices, but as I pointed out at the time, not so crazy when compared to other collectibles.

Celebrity estate sales are becoming a thing, enough of a trend that The New Yorker published an article on the practice. They aren’t exactly new. The first ones I recall were the estates of Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis ($34.5 million in 1996) and the Duke and Duchess of Windsor ($23 million over nine days in 1998). In the last few years, record prices were also paid for the effects of the novelist Larry McMurtry, the writer Joan Didion, and the fashion designer André Leon Talley.

Even the less-widely hyped sale of Tony Bennett’s estate earned $2 million this month, with the highest bid ($78,000 in an RBG-worthy frenzy) going to a secretarially signed letter from Martin Luther King, Jr.³

The collecting of relics owned by famous people may seem quite modern, but it isn’t. In Meetings with Remarkable Manuscripts, a terrific recent work about twelve handwritten books and their owners, the author Christopher de Hamel describes a number of early book collectors. Many of them also collected relics, bits and pieces of flesh and bone from the bodies of saints. We don’t collect the people themselves anymore, we just buy their stuff.⁴

These modern estate sales concentrate our cultural fascination for celebrity into cold, hard cash. For many treasured items, like a pair of Celine sunglasses owned by Joan Didion ($27,000) or a pair of Steve Jobs’ Birkenstocks ($219,000), the connection is metaphysical. It’s the knowledge of the previous owners that matters.

That’s one reason why I like Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s books more than the household effects sold in many of these celebrity estate sales. Most of the books had her bookplate or were inscribed to her, taking the connection to RBG from the realm of faith and into the tangible real world of paper and ink.⁵

Here are a few observations on specific books in RBG’s second sale.

There Was a Good Deal at the Original Auction

Overall the prices at the original RBG sale seemed insane compared to the regular book market, and most of the resold lots lost most of their value. There was, however, one bright spot: Bonhams lot 147, seventeen volumes of “History and Government” sold for $7650 back in 2022. At Heritage this month, those same books, offered one at a time, totaled $10,350. The highest price ($1,187.50) went to an inscribed copy of William Gould’s Diary of a Contraband, a Civil War slave narrative. Other books from the same lot on the Civil War and on the presidency sold for close to $1,000 each.

The one group of books from the Ruth Bader Ginsburg library that was resold at a proft (Bonhams, lot 147)

Second Tier Feminism Flopped

When I wrote about the original RBG book sale, I expressed optimism that the auction might indicate something new in book collecting, a new class of collector who is interested books about women and their lives.

It’s fair to say I was wrong or at least not very right. The worst performing books in the Heritage sale were exactly the ones that seemed most overpriced at the time.

Erica Jong’s What Do Women Want? inscribed to Ruth Bader Ginsberg (sic!) lost 93% of its value, selling originally for $7,650 and reselling for $525 (regular signed copies can be had for as little as $8).

A two-book lot at Bonhams, pairing Lilly Ledbetter’s memoir with a book about women in the workplace inspired by Ledbetter, also lost 93% of its combined value. These books dropped from nearly $18,000 at Bonhams to $1200 at Heritage. Ledbetter came to the attention of the public when her pay discrimination lawsuit against Goodyear Tire was rejected by the Supreme Court, with a strong dissent from RBG.

Eric Jong’s big price decline is not surprising because Jong has never appealed to collectors. The fact that very nice copies of her landmark book Fear of Flying sit unsold online for $300 is hard to understand.

Also hard to understand is why Lilly Ledbetter’s memoir resold for only $800. How many opportunities do collectors get to buy a book inscribed by the named litigant in a major court case to the Supreme who had her back? But collectors generally seem uninterested in Ledbetter and regular signed firsts of her book start at $15 on eBay.

However, there was a bit of encouraging bidding on top tier feminist material. RBG’s copy of Kate Millett’s influential book from the second wave of feminism, Sexual Politics, a well-worn later printing⁶ without a jacket, sold for $1625. That’s real money for a rather ugly book, even if it lost 91% of its value over two years.

Another strong showing was made by a second edition of Sex Discrimination and the Law (1996) inscribed by all the contributors to Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was one of the dedicatees of the book. It sold for $9,375 at Heritage. For the broader book market, the level of bidding for such an excellent association copy is encouraging. The seller may not have felt that way, however, as they lost $20,000 on the deal.

The three books with the biggest percentage price drop between sales (images from Heritage Auctions).

Moonshots Fell Back to High Earth Orbit

While some of the less-interesting feminist books set the record for largest decline in value in relative terms, the mystery seller’s most substantial losses in actual dollars came from their most expensive purchases.

The biggest loser, at nearly $21,000,⁷ was an inscribed copy of Al Gore’s Assault on Reason inscribed to Justice Ginsburg. It went from $31,562.50 at Bonhams to $10,625 at Heritage. Books signed by vice presidents have rarely generated much enthusiasm among collectors. Regular signed copies of Gore’s book start at $20. The 50,000% premium for the Ginsburg copy can only be explained because the inscription thanks her for administering the vice-presidential oath of office. Presumably if you collect presidential books, that’s a pretty top-flight association.

The next biggest loser, in dollar terms, was a lot of seven bound volumes of the notorious RBG’s published opinions. Their price dropped $19,000, from $35,000 to $16,000.

The next largest drops were $18,000, for Sex Discrimination and the Law and $17,000 for Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics (both already discussed above).

The conventional wisdom has always been that the general public, by which I mean that portion of the public with apparently inexhaustible spending money for baubles, overpays at celebrity auctions. This rare experiment proves that belief to be true in most cases. On the whole, books from RBG’s library lost 59% of their value when they were sold without the national media attention surrounding the original sales.

That argues for collectors with both time and patience to wait for the material to reappear on the market when it will likely be cheaper. But as the top lots in the Heritage sale demonstrate, the prices can still be quite stiff the second time around, but maybe they won’t be crazy.

Until next time,

Scott Brown
Downtown Brown Books

1. Here’s the math… Take a book that had a high bid of $1000 at Bonhams. With the buyer’s premium of 27.5%, the buyer would pay $1,275. A book that sold at Heritage for $1770 ($1416 at the hammer, plus 25%), would typically net the seller (the former buyer) 90% of the hammer price, or $1275. Going from $1275 at the first auction to $1770 at the second is a 39% increase.

2. For those of you doing the math, the winning bids at Heritage were hammered down at $88,160, which was increased to $110,441, with the buyer’s premium. The standard seller’s fee is 10% of the hammer price, or $8,816, meaning that the typical seller would end up with $88,160 - $8,816 = $79,344. Of course, the seller might have negotiated a better deal with the auction house. But in any case, they lost close to $190,000 on the deal.

3. I’m not an expert on MLK’s signature, but I don’t think you need to be one to concluded that both the signature and the handwritten postscript were done by a secretary and not by Rev. King himself. I’ll note that the auction description doesn’t say it is signed by the Civil Rights leader. The description is factually true—“A typed letter signed with autograph postscript, one page, on Martin Luther King, Jr. personal stationery, dated April 5, 1965, mounted to a white cardboard backing”—although the estimate of $20,000/$30,000 implies a real autograph.

4. There is actually still a market for the bodies of famous people, as evidenced by this sale of a piece of bloodstained cloth from Abraham Lincoln’s deathbed.

5. Where there’s a lot of money sloshing around and a gap in the market, you can be sure someone will try to fill it. The metaphysical problems around game-worn sports memorabilia is an example. How do you really know Babe Ruth wore these pants? A company will tell you. Resolution Photomatching is just one of several firms that compares the imperfections in the clothing to a database of sports photographs, looking for a match. Collectors pay big premiums for clothing with one of these photographic certifications.

6. Bonhams omitted the fact that this wasn’t even a first edition from its catalog entry. That’s yet another example of why its a good idea to look at auction items in person.

7. These loss figures are calculated from hammer price to hammer price. The seller will actually lose more than that once all the fees are subtracted from the sales price.