I don’t know any serious book collector who could ever mistake the stock in an antique shop for that in an antiquarian bookstore. Based on having been in perhaps thousands of the former and hundreds of the latter, I know I never could. Hey, antique shops for the most part don’t even sell antiques these days, (much less true antiquarian books) unless you realistically consider Carnival Glass to be an antique. Of course the various definitions of “antique” vary, but in the past the old standby of “over 100 years old” was at least instructive. Now “antique” is synonymous with “collectable” and in today’s economy that’s probably overly enthusiastic and it’s probably more like “anything that somebody might buy for some unknown reason.” For instance, yesterday Irene, her sister Jeanne and I spent a couple of hours trolling through the “antique district” in downtown Seymour, a small bedroom community of New York nearby Shelton, where Jeanne and Steve, her husband, have always lived. Granted Seymour isn’t yet as upscale as Shelton is getting to be but the antique shops, while cute, have truly awful books…the most useless trash imaginable….but by far the worst, because they were ALMOST something of interest, were three small books that were each bound in leather and were about 50 years old. Fine bindings by themselves are a catagory of book collecting and as such were of some small interest to me as a dealer/collector, but they weren’t very fine at all, being badly rubbed and stained and with otherwise obvious damage on a lot of people, but worse than that they were written in what I believe was Lithuanian or at best Polish and appeared to be reprints of sermons of some obscure Protestant minister. Not that this makes them bad by itself, as I suppose that somebody, someplace wants marginal-quality leather-bound books written in a foreign language and featuring people nobody has heard of lecturing about something nobody cares about but hey, who am I to judge, and if I was, I would also be judging the nearly $200 price-tage each one of the three volumes carried. So let’s see…no earthly purpose for anybody wanting these things but because they are somewhat cute let’s charge a million dollars for them just in case. Real value, as determined by me, because I do have some expertise in this subject? More like $10-15, with their only purpose being to fill a shelf of other, better-bound volumes for some decorator who needs to plug a hole of maybe five inches.

Let’s compare that with three volumes that a true Antiquarian bookseller has just offered me. Granted, Ron operates a bookstore that, for monetary purposes has to double as a collector’s book store and a used bookstore, two other things that are not being an antiquarian shop, but in addition to that he’s a true antiquarian dealer. He and I got off to a rocky start as I made the mistake of talking about a relatively rare book I own (a first edition, first state of The Emerald City, a follow-on book writtin in the early 1900s by L. Frank Baum, who in 1899 made history by writing the first definitivly classic American children’s book, the Wizard of Oz) out loud to a collector in Ron’s store who was looking for L. Frank Baum. Ron was right to bring me up short…dealers should always go THROUGH the dealer in his own shop, not around him…and after he graciously accepted my apology (and I promised to send him a better description of the book so HE could contact the L. Frank collector aforementioned) he and I turned to other matters and it in turn turned out that he owns three leather-bound and VERY early books on fly-fishing, either my first- or sometimes (after early poker books) second-love in the book-collecting world. Now these are in his own personal collection and weren’t in the store, but the next day he brought them in, called me and I trotted right down. These three books are spectacular, treasures, works of art. They are all about fly-fishing, one of the most desireable subjects among serious book collectors, although there are literally thousands of works in the field. They are all VERY Early….two of them very early 1800s and one of them, amazing, early 1700s, putting it right around the time of some of the Compleate Angler stuff, this one written by Grey, who was a contemporary of Isaak Walton who of course wrote the C.A. along with Cotton. These three books are all rebound in the most high-quality leather, beautifully done indeed, which protects that very paper of the earlier pieces. They absolutely shine in the half-light of Ron’s shop and after I buy them, which I intend to do, they will shine in the coach as well. Something like this will not leave my personal collection until Irene and I someday need the money, but they are as guaranteed to increase in value as anything could be, especially since Ron has them priced at…wait for it….about the same prices as the three scruffy books in the junk…I mean antique…shop mentioned before.

What does all this say? Nothing much. But it does point out why so many antique shops fail, and why, over time, stores like Ron’s survive. I wonder if there is a lesson here, about value and so on, that we could learn in other areas of business…for instance, in the financial industry, where they persist in producing worthless financial products that don’t bring any value to anyone? Or am I, once again, over-harping on the obvious?