I am doing some work with the Bibliotheca Philosophica Hermetica in Amsterdam. It's a rare book library with some of the most incredible and beautiful books about esoteric philosophy. I love it. Also know as “The Embassy of the Free Mind”
As you walk into the library, there is a big bronze statue of Marisilio Ficino. Ficino was peak Renaissance — he was head of the academy in Florence and hired by the Medici's to translate greek texts like Plato and the Hermetica into Latin, for the first time. He wrote a book called "De Mysteriis" (the mysteries) that is totally bananas.
Published 1497, it has never been translated. It contains a chapter on Ficino’s own philosophy on pleasure “De Voluptate”
The book got me to start collecting. My copy contains all kinds of marginalia… I’ve been translating the whole book with a scholar at Oxford. I’ve since built up a collection at the intersection of early science and philosophical magic. For instance, dellaporta’s “natural magic,” a book called “mathematical magic” from one of the founders of the Royal society, “arithmology” (a book about divine mathematics by Athenaus Kircher), “Secrets of Nature” by Anton von Leeuwenhoek (inventor of microscope), a book on “artificial curiosities” showing illustrations of steam powered autonomata from the mid 1500s, etc etc etc.
I think the themes of these books — consciousness, magic, intelligence, mathematics — all bring a peculiar perspective on our current AI Renaissance… so I want to use AI to help make these books more accessible and understandable
I recommend the 1621 book Anatomy of Melancholy by Robert Burton. He was a big bibliophile with a huge collection, and also melancholic, so he wrote about melancholy while pulling material from his own reading. The result is a huge book that is figuratively 50% main text and 50% marginalia; if you find a good edition where they are printed as actual marginalia instead of footnotes/endnotes, it gives a completely different perspective into the mind of the author as he wrote the book.
One big reason I go to estate sales is to perhaps one day find a treasure like this; unfortunately many a rich home has either very few books or if they do have books they are mostly junk (estate sales being homes of older folks, the book selection invariable is heavily loaded towards WW2 history) or not of interest to me (coffee table books, cookbooks, etc.)
The closest I have come is a copy of a museum exhibition catalog about Dieter Rams from 1981 that is signed by him. I bought it online. The copy was described as having a scribble on the front page and priced very low as a consequence. Years after, I saw Dieter’s signature somewhere and realized that my book was signed.
I got a copy of a David Attenborough signed book in a similar way. It was a used book about wild flowers with an introduction by Attenborough bought very cheap about 100 INR in a used book store in Mumbai. Only later while looking at the book I realised it was an autographed copy.
How do you identify a valuable book? Are there some 1000 well known valuable items you keep in mind? Or are you looking inside every jacket hoping to find an author's signature on a 1st edition? I assume the price of a false positive is low (ie I'll buy these dusty books for $20), but sounds like a lot of legwork.
I imagine it is definitively less sexy than the Ninth Gate
It depends on what you’re collecting but for pre-ISBN books, AbeBooks is the central marketplace for rare books so that’s one place to look up titles but most book collectors specialize, often in a very specific niches like certain authors or topics, usually restricted to a single era.
The hard part is tracking editions and verifying that you have a genuine first edition. Collectors depend on bibliographies which are themselves rare books that describe all the publications of a specific publisher or author and how to identify editions. Often there are marks but for valuable books it usually requires knowing the exact typos and changes between editions to authenticate them. There are a lot of counterfeits, both modern and contemporary to the original printing.
The other problem is that the vast majority of books are worthless unless they’re in very good condition. Not “good condition for their age” but damn near pristine, even if it’s hundreds of years old. If it’s falling apart, it’s almost certainly worthless, unless it’s an honest to god manuscript.
It’s mostly dependent on luck. It’s really hard to make a living with book collecting unless you’re running an auction house. Most companies handling estate sales are smart enough to check AbeBooks so the lucky life changing finds are getting rarer and rarer.
A family friend lived his entire life as a bookhound, and the bread-and-butter was not first editions worth thousands, but books for fifty cents that were worth $20. Buy for a half a buck, sell to a bookstore for $5.
The key now is being able to handle the non-isbn books because everyone is out there with phone scanners now.
i wouldn't rely on only abebooks for price comparisons. bookfinder.com crawls more sites so you can get a better picture of the broader marketplace for a specific title.
A first edition from any reasonably well known author from 50 years ago or before is automatically pretty valuable as a basic rule of thumb. Especially if it’s the authors first or second book.
be careful going down the rabbit hole. rare books are very slow to move (aka inventory risk). you'll be stuck trying to sell the same books for years, sometimes decades. if you have something valuable and don't sell it, then your estate will only be able to sell it for a fraction of the market price. i would only recommend it if you are enthusiastic about books.
My big find was a fair-condition copy of Graham Greene’s retracted second novel in a secondhand bookstore in Canada for CDN20. It’s not in collectable condition, by any means. The spine is angled and the dust jacket is missing, but just the opportunity to read this (not that good, to be honest) book and the delight of finding a copy that I could afford were a joy for me.
Do you think it was mispriced then, even given its condition, or did they know exactly what they had? Just wondering if you mean it was a steal, or that the price was right but still rare to find?
I think it was mispriced, but not necessarily by a lot. I bought an ex-library copy of Greene’s withdrawn third novel a couple years ago (rebound as was a common practice with library books in the first part of the twentieth century) for $300 so I’d guess that the book should have been at least $100 back then (collectable editions of the book typically sell in the thousands).
The January 16, 2024 edition of the CBC radio show "As It Happens" has an interview with Gerry Vogrincic, the doctor who bought the book in 2007 and just sold it.
There's a transcript of the interview here [1]. Search for "Old Anatomy Book".
The audio for the entire episode is here [2]. I don't recall how far into it this interview occurs. (I've sometimes found their interviews split into separate clips, but if that's the case here I don't know where to find it.)
Maybe eventually. First an accurate transcription and translation of the annotations would have to be made. Then there'd have to be a lot of editorial work integrating the changed. You'd have to decide what you want--a 'reading' edition that presented a unified text? Online, with a good photographic reproduction, you could do something like what was done for Emily Dickinson (https://www.edickinson.org/)--page images with text transcriptions where annotations can be toggled on and off. You'd just need to find someone willing to pay for it.
"As much as such prices might set a gold digger's heart racing, they are not usually what motivates book collectors, whose relationship to their objects of desire is varied and complex. At a Boston fair in October, I heard a dealer with an impressive selection of dust jacket art say, "Don't judge a book by its content." However tongue-in-cheek, this twisted aphorism exposes the curious fact that many collectors don't actually read their books." https://gwern.net/doc/psychology/collecting/2008-01-18-aliso...
Tsundoku is mostly about buying books with the intention to read them, but then not getting around to it.
But to many book collectors, the books are mainly or purely collection items, to be found, owned, sorted and looked at, but without any intention of ever reading most of them.
Apparently, for a time, it was in vogue for medical students to have a medical text rebound in the skin of their human cadaver from their autopsy class.
As you walk into the library, there is a big bronze statue of Marisilio Ficino. Ficino was peak Renaissance — he was head of the academy in Florence and hired by the Medici's to translate greek texts like Plato and the Hermetica into Latin, for the first time. He wrote a book called "De Mysteriis" (the mysteries) that is totally bananas.
Published 1497, it has never been translated. It contains a chapter on Ficino’s own philosophy on pleasure “De Voluptate”
The book got me to start collecting. My copy contains all kinds of marginalia… I’ve been translating the whole book with a scholar at Oxford. I’ve since built up a collection at the intersection of early science and philosophical magic. For instance, dellaporta’s “natural magic,” a book called “mathematical magic” from one of the founders of the Royal society, “arithmology” (a book about divine mathematics by Athenaus Kircher), “Secrets of Nature” by Anton von Leeuwenhoek (inventor of microscope), a book on “artificial curiosities” showing illustrations of steam powered autonomata from the mid 1500s, etc etc etc.
I think the themes of these books — consciousness, magic, intelligence, mathematics — all bring a peculiar perspective on our current AI Renaissance… so I want to use AI to help make these books more accessible and understandable