I have been so hit and miss lately with the blog, but this cold has knocked me for a loop. Monday I was supposed to go see a collection in a Cleveland suburb, but had to send Eric on his own, as I was actually dizzy – or should I say dizzier than usual? :-) The sinus pressure had shifted to my left ear and left me looking like the remnants of a frat party at four a.m.. But by yesterday the instability was gone, though the family room had acquired stacks of books that rivaled the ones that are STILL in Eric’s office. There was nothing to do but deal with them because the furniture store delivery people were due at noon with Eric’s birthday recliner-that-doesn’t- look -like-a-recliner. Most of the books are headed to the store with a fair portion to the antiques mall, but I did list maybe half a dozen online. The ones I didn’t get to are stashed in – yep, the office.
Actually, I wasn’t expecting too much out of this collection because I knew that a well-known dealer, who has since gone out of business, had looked at it some years ago and of course bought the best of it back then. Since most books aren’t exactly soaring like eagles these days there was no need to jump through flaming hoops to get there. So I settled in on the couch and read a novel, barely thinking about whether or not we’d end up with anything. I knew if the price were right Eric would buy them because that’s just the way he is, but quality is another matter altogether. So I was pleasantly surprised by the outcome.
As I’ve mentioned before, the antiques mall allows us to buy things we never would for our online venues. So it was fun to pull out goodies that would be sure-fire winners there. I just sold a small four volume leather set of Le Miserables at the mall Saturday and now have a handsome two volume set with highly decorated spines to replace it, as well as a gorgeous small leather set of Kipling's The Jungle Book and The Second Jungle Book. There’s a lot of other stuff too, but you get the picture. So let’s skip to the good part, okay?
Late in the game, just as I was ready to drag the last of the unsorted boxes out of the room, I noticed something small nestled in at the side of one of them. Show me a small thing and I am compelled to look at it, so I wiggled it out from its resting place against the spines, took one look, and snapped to life faster than Lazarus. I had never seen it before, or even heard of it, but I knew with every fiber of my being that we had ourselves a good one. Quickly, I looked it up on bookfinder only to find two copies – one priced at $600 and one at $180. So which was right? No clue. I emailed a bookseller friend who specializes in baseball books and attached a couple photos. To my amazement he’d never seen it before, but thought I should price it at around $400. It seemed high to me though, so I googled it just to see if anything else came up and, sure enough, it did. An auction house had just reported selling it in March for $425.
Will it really sell for that online? Or is it pie in the sky? Who knows? I have a friend who bought an amazingly beautiful and scarce Haggadah at an estate sale last year and, despite lowering the price multiple times, still has it. I’m enough of a pragmatist to know that online prices are not always reflective of reality on either end of the spectrum. But past experience has also taught me that it’s better to err on the high side than the low when faced with an unknown. If you’ve dug back into my old posts you already know the story of the wildly rare and fabulous golf brochure that I mistakenly, stupidly sold for $25 a couple years ago.
Once you set a price you can always come down if someone makes an offer. But go up? Not so much.
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