What Condition Our Condition Is In

Plus my latest list of new arrivals

List 94: Mostly First Editions

This week's list is mostly modern first editions, like signed books from Anthony Bourdain, Elizabeth Gilbert, and Maurice Sendak. There are also two Harry Crews books with great inscriptions explaining the dedications in the novels. In non-fiction, you'll find a book on medical marijuana inscribed to the National Book Award-winning scientist Stephen Jay Gould, whose experience with the drug is quoted at length in the book. There is also a nice UK first edition of The Souls of Black Folk, and a pretty copy of an early book in English from the Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain. One of the only books that is not a first edition is a pocket Greek New Testament with an eighteenth century painted vellum binding with the original leather carrying case. Please have a look.

What Condition Our Condition Is In

A customer recently wrote to me to protest my description of the copy of Opal Wheeler’s Caldecott Honor book, Sing in Praise (Dutton, 1946), that they purchased from me.

I described the book as “A very good copy in a very good dust jacket with light wear to the spine ends,” which is a pretty typical description for me. I also supplied three (!) photos with the online listing and a fourth photo taken at the customer's request. It was a nice, eighty-year-old children’s book, but not perfect, hence “very good.”

My customer wrote back, “There are nicks both top and bottom [of the] bookboards as well as wear to spine tip and top corners. Dust jacket has chips and missing paper [at the] tail and tip-of [the] spine and folds.”

Yep. I couldn't disagree with that minute dissection of the condition of the book and its jacket, but I stood by my description.

The customer added, “I would rate condition of both as good only.”

That was too much.

For me, books in “good” condition aren’t usually collectible unless there are no better copies within reach. Back in 1996, in my catalog 5, I defined good as “a decent copy with significant flaws.” About 2010, in my 28th catalog, I defined the term as “the bookselling euphemism for not so good, but still acceptable.” Sing in Praise did not have “significant” problems and was much better than “acceptable.” Hence, very good.

Of course, I offered to take the book back and to issue a refund.

My customer didn’t like the return option, and has, so far, kept the book. I am not sure if this was an actual complaint or a shakedown attempt to get me to issue a partial refund after the fact.

In either case, I decided I should review the language I use to describe books (fine, very good, good, etc.) to make sure my use of the terms hadn’t slipped.

For many decades, until it folded in 1999, the book condition definitions published by AB Bookman’s Weekly were the near-universal standard. AB published a few articles in each issue along with lists of books offered for sale and lists of books wanted by dealers and shops around the US. On the East Coast, many booksellers organized their schedules around AB’s arrival (I was on the West Coast where, even if you paid extra for fast delivery, AB arrived a day later, by which time all the good deals were already taken. It would be like Abebooks having a 24-hour delay just because you lived in Oregon).

If you wanted to have your books listed for sale in AB, you had to agree to use their condition description terminology, and eventually most booksellers got in the habit of using it everywhere.

For a while after AB shut down, dealers continued to advertise that they used AB’s condition definitions, but you hardly ever see that anymore, and with good reason.

The definitions were terrible.

In the first place, the top two grades, “As New” and “Fine” were basically the same, meaning flawless. The difference was that “fine” books were perfect “without being crisp.” Very good could be used for a book with small signs of wear, with the requirement that all “defects must be noted.” Good was an average used book.

Strictly speaking, hardly any book could qualify as fine, meaning almost all books in collectible condition were very good. By contrast, the modern coin grading scale has 12 grades between “very good” and the coin equivalent of AB’s “fine” (“uncirculated” or “mint state” in coin-speak) and 11 more grades for what AB’s standards call “fine” or “as new.” Coin collectors get 23 grades; book collectors got three from AB.

AB, as a privately owned magazine, was essentially a dictatorship. The editor, Jake Chernofsky, didn’t want to change the definitions and no one could make him. He had the only platform in the US that had a national audience for buying and selling books, and if your business needed his services, you had to play by his rules.

It is telling that the organization imposing the standard was a private company. The same thing has happened in other collecting fields where grading has become fairly standardized: comics, coins, trading cards, video games, and increasingly posters.

In each case, a company has started offering grading services to resolve disputes over condition. Collectors have responded enthusiastically, and the definitions established by CGC, PCGS, Wata, and a few other firms have become pretty standard in their collecting fields. (As a side note, the modern coin grading system was proposed by a collector in 1949, the same year that AB began publishing, but the system's universal adoption is tied to the grading services).

I am not aware of any company trying to establish standard grading terms for books, and the complete lack of any standards does create problems, or what economists call friction, in the book market.

Just this month I sold a book that was truly fine/fine by AB’s standards, and arguably even “as new”, because the book remained fairly “crisp.” The eventual buyer contacted me and asked, “I was just wondering what the fine/fine description entailed since it looks pretty good in the pictures.” Uncertainty creates hesitancy and hesitancy keeps people from collecting books because they are unsure of what they are getting.

The natural solution to the demise of AB’s condition definitions would be for one of the bookselling organizations to establish new standards. It’s a controversial issue as the ABAA (Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America) notes in its explanation for not having standardized terminology, “Even among experienced booksellers there are differences of opinion.” If the booksellers can’t agree, what are collectors to do?

All sorts of industries have compromised to establish standard terms. The ISBN, familiar to anyone who buys books, is an international standard book number. Publishers around the world had to agree to a system for uniquely identifying books. There are also standards for electronics, home appliances, accounting, etc. Wi-fi, Bluetooth, and USB are tech standards, as are the jpeg and mp3 file formats. It’s hard to establish standards, but not impossible, and the entire industry tends to benefit as a result.

The Independent Online Booksellers Association (IOBA) must be congratulated for stepping into this contentious arena to publish its own condition description terminology, which its members must comply with if they don’t publish their own definitions. I am probably not alone among IOBA members in not realizing (or remembering) this condition of membership. The definitions aren’t perfect, but they do offer a wider range of grades than the old AB standards. (Firsts magazine published a detailed, illustrated guide to condition descriptions which was very useful, but they never put it online and so it remains little used).

I quoted IOBA’s definitions to my unhappy Sing in Praise customer, as a basis for defending my very good grade against their claim that the book was only good.

I will be revising my terms and conditions to say that I use IOBA’s grading standards. The more people adopt them, the better. A common language, even an imperfect one, is better than everyone using the same words to mean different things.

My biggest complaint with IOBA’s standards is with a section that was copied from the old AB definitions, the admonition that “any defects or faults must be noted” (emphasis added).

When I owned Eureka Books, I established a rule for cataloging that I still try to follow. The condition description for a book shouldn’t be longer than the discussion of the book itself.

The problem with long condition descriptions is that they ironically make it harder to tell what the condition actually is. A long list of flaws also tends to make all the flaws seem equal, when some are much more serious than others.

I would prefer to replace the phrase “any defects” in the IOBA condition definitions with “significant defects.”

Otherwise you get descriptions like the following, which was how a dealer described a book I recently purchased online.

You’ll be surprised to know I called it “very good,” which IOBA defines as “a book showing some signs of wear.”

The book is in very nice condition. I don’t see any soiling. There is a little bit of color fade off the top edge of the front and rear. The spine is a little concaved, not at all unusual for this book or for a fairly thick book... The cloth lies pretty flat against the textblock at the top where it is most concaved. There is a little crinkling at the top edge of the spine. The lettering on the spine is nicely bright, as it is on the front. All six cover edges are in very good condition. The same goes for the four corners. I didn’t see any conspicuous rubbing. The top page edge is yellow. It looks very good. Both the middle and bottom edges also look very good. They are all very clean. The middle page edge has two or three very light scratches, irrelevant to the actual pages. The book is square and the spine looks straight. The book is very solidly bound from cover to cover with nicely tight pages throughout and nicely tight covers as well. No binding issues. The interior of the book is in excellent condition. The mapped inside covers and end papers are very clean and in excellent shape. Scrolling through the pages, I saw only one light amber spot just off the middle edge of one page, the ‘Books By’ page. I haven’t found any conspicuous creasing, no placeholder creases. I saw only a few light crinkles. There are no markings in the book. No attachments of any kind. And the author’s signed inscription is the only writing to be found anywhere... I’ve always had it in a fitted protective cover. I took off the protective cover to get a better look at the jacket. It doesn’t appear to have any soiling. There is a little bit of toning. I believe the original color was already off-white. The wear on the jacket is minimal. One tiny tear (1/8th") off the front top edge, two tiny (1/16th or 1/8th") tears at the top edge of the spine, along with a thin crease there, a little bit of crinkling at the bottom edge of the spine, other than that just a few edge crinkles. The flaps are also clean. They do have toning off their top and bottom edges, a bit off the bottom edge of the front flap comes up a little ways. There is a thin crease below the front flap’s top corner, and two tiny insignificant nicks at the front flap’s top edge. That’s about it for wear. The jacket is NOT price-clipped, not clipped at all.