Every year, books are printed, sold, and traded worldwide. A recent statistic from Google Books dated 2023 estimated that 129,864,880 books have been published since 1440 when the Gutenberg press was first invented. However, this number is not definitive and does not include self-published books, or those printed after 2010. But it certainly does make one contemplate. Which of these books would be considered valuable by collectors? What is the great fascination with what to some may appear to be solely old books containing outdated ideas? And finally, what relevance do these titles have, particularly in a World that is, and definitely will be, governed by technology in future academic fields and professions? To understand the answers to these questions, it is imperative firstly to be introduced to the trade of book antiquarianism.
Kindly, Jessica Starr from the Jarndyce Antiquarian Booksellers firm accepted an invitation for an interview. Located at 46 Great Russell Street London, opposite the British Museum, Jarndyce has a rich history since its establishment in 1969, having published over 250 catalogues that specialise in English Literature and history spanning from the 17th to the early 20th century.
By definition, book antiquarianism is the practice of collecting, studying, and selling rare and old books.
What would you define book antiquarianism as?
“So not necessarily old books. They can be old, but also rare or expensive. Something like Harry Potter is a modern book, written in the 21st century for the most part, but they sort of fall under the antiquarian umbrella in some ways because early editions are very valuable, of the Philosopher's Stone in particular.”
Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J.K. Rowling is probably one of the most well-known examples of what is deemed a ‘rare book’ that the typical person has heard of. Currently, depending on the edition, its print number, its condition, and whether the sellers have authenticated the copy, prices can range anywhere from £50 up to £135,000. However, there have even been circumstances where this price point has been exceeded.
What does a typical day or week look like in your job?
“What I really love about this job, I've been doing it for about ten years, is that every single day is different because you never know what's going to come across your desk. We have quite a big client base and we sell to people all over the world. Quite a bit of my day is spent sort of emailing and similar tasks. We spend a lot of time going through auctions and just looking online for different books for sale. And then we are always getting parcels and processing those. I spend a lot of time, probably most of my time, cataloguing books. Today I've been cataloguing the first edition of Jekyll and Hyde from 1886. I'm cataloguing books right now for the Boston Book Fair in November. So, we do a few international book fairs a year in New York, Boston, and California.”
The job demands of a book antiquarian may differ depending on the day. The occupation primarily consists of contacting clientele, cataloguing stocks, appraising books or other literary artifacts, creating a personal collection, attending book fairs, and studying more about the book trade. Book fairs are a significant part of book antiquarianism as they aid dealers in providing a central location to display stock and buy other rare books or materials of interest. Meanwhile, they can meet like-minded people and form connections within the industry while gaining expertise and knowledge about the books they intend to sell or procure.
Some of the most well-established and well-known book fairs that are host to antiquarian books are The Boston International Antiquarian Bookfair and London International Antiquarian Bookfair. But every month, small book fairs take place all over the UK with details about these found on the event’s websites or the Antiquarian Bookseller’s Association website. For example, The Boston International Antiquarian Bookfair is one of the oldest book fairs in America and attracts book collectors from across the globe. This year it’s taking place on the 8th to the 10th of November. According to the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers’ website, rare book dealers at the fair offer, “rare, collectible and antiquarian books, modern first editions, manuscripts, autographs, maps, atlases, and a plethora of other literary ephemera’ to those in attendance."
What do you enjoy most about your job, perhaps the aspect of discovery?
“Discovery is a really good word. You always are just finding surprising things that sort of make you be like; I can't believe that this still survives!”
Whilst researching the history of book antiquarianism, one can come across the 1994 book called ‘Antiquarian Books, a companion for book collectors, sellers and librarians’, by the authors Philippa Bernard, Leo Bernard, and Angus O'Neill. On page 5, it includes this quote. “Good, old fashioned, general second-hand and antiquarian book shops are becoming quite scarce.” Would you say that's still the truth?
“Yes, although I think that the book in itself is probably a bit out of date as well. There was this real fear in the 90s that second-hand book shops and antiquarian book shops would be made obsolete by the Internet. And that hasn't happened. In fact, the Internet has affected the way that we work in a number of ways because it's so much easier to find information. So, we always say that it made rare less rare. It used to be maybe that you would see a book on a catalogue, and you would think I've only ever seen this copy, so it must be really rare.
Now you can go online and see every copy for sale in the world, so it makes things less rare and therefore less valuable. But the stuff that is rare, that's uncommon, is harder to find. The people that want especially expensive books, although not everything that we sell is very expensive, want expertise to back that up. Sometimes if you're just buying from eBay or something, you don't really know what you're getting. Whereas when you're buying from us, you know we back up every purchase with a guarantee that it is what we say it is. I don't really worry that we are going to sort of disappear entirely. But I think that the sort of mid-range firms and some of the smaller firms have changed the way that they do work. There's maybe fewer brick-and-mortar book shops, like we're quite unusual maybe in having an open shop. Some will just have one or two people, who will work from an office and will still go to book fairs and still sell online but won't have a shop front. Real estate is so expensive, especially commercial real estate in this country. So, I think it's changed, but I don't think we're disappearing.”
Multiple articles over the last decade have started reporting on the noticeable decline of walk-in second-hand bookshops. The main factors contributing to this reduction is the lack of spontaneous walk-in clients, the rising costs of rent and the switch to online selling. For many firms and individual sellers, it is much more profitable and efficient to sell online. Some may perceive this as a loss for the culture and customers, whilst others may simply view this as a sign of the times, as technology has become even more prevalent and influential in people’s lives.
Would you say that possibly the book collecting niche market is actually growing as more people discover it?
“I think so, I think it's changing…We get people coming to us who are who are thinking much more expansively about what a book collection can look like, especially people who maybe don't have the money to invest in sort of ‘the obvious books’. First editions of great novels, important works of science. There’s a very important book called Printing in the Mind of Man, which came out in the 60s and it sort of used to be the guide on how to collect books. Many want the first appearance of some of the most important ideas in Western thought, and some people are thinking less and less like that now and getting so much more creative with collecting. I think there are more people collecting and there's more people playing with what a book collection can look like and thinking they don't have to be spending hundreds of pounds or thousands of pounds…Therefore, I think that book collectors are becoming much more diverse and they're thinking more creatively. And I think, it's really exciting. There was also a fear that there is a sort of stereotype that book collectors tend to be mostly like older men, such as retired men who've been building their collections over many years. And I believe we still have those customers, and we really cherish them. But the base, in my opinion, of who is collecting is really growing.”
What would you say is one of your most interesting book sales or a book that you remember that you came across, that just remains in your mind?
“So, one of my favourite things that I've ever sold was two manuscript journals. A girl called Emily Shore, wrote them and the journals that we had were volumes one and two, and she wrote them between the ages of 11 and 19 in the 1830s. She actually died at 19 from tuberculosis. But she was otherwise an exact contemporary of the Bronte sisters. And those journals really challenged my perception of what childhood in the 19th century was like and what girlhood was like. And she was so precocious and brilliant and interested and engaged and introspective and so passionate about the world around her and how it was changing. Everything was a marvel to her. I sold that to a collector who has since become a dear friend, and we collaborate a lot now, on how she's building her collection. It's created one of my favourite sorts of client dealer relationships and also was just such an amazing thing. Then a few years later we found another manuscript of Emily Shores that had been lost for around 150 years. I think those are probably my favourite things that I've sold, and I think about [Emily Shore] all the time. I'd remind myself that I'm projecting my sort of modern views on childhood, womanhood, personhood, or whatever it is. What we think about how women experienced the World; we have to remind ourselves that we are projecting that onto them and that they were so much more. I mean, historical people in general were just people. They were much more complex I think that we give them credit for. “
In your opinion, what if, if there are any, the greatest challenges currently within rare book buying or collecting right now?
“So, I think it has become harder to buy the sort of again, ‘obvious books’. Because we're specialists, for example, in English literature, we need to have first editions of Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, of the Bronte's, Wilkie Collins and all these great writers like Byron, Shelly and Keats. So, in some of these cases, those sought after books are also getting harder to find because there were and there are a finite number of them… I think that can be challenging, but it's also an opportunity to look at things that have been overlooked. For authors that maybe people weren't paying enough attention to, or their work has been overlooked because they had these sort of super celebrity peers at the time that they were writing. That is a challenge but is kind of an opportunity as well.”
There is an observable trend that people currently challenged by the increasing book prices are as a result inspired to collect a more unique niche of books, rather than just the obvious great scientific works like ‘The Origin of Species’ by Charles Darwin or similar historically significant and culturally influential texts. What are your thoughts on this?
“Absolutely. Brian Lake started this business in 1969. And I think one of his real strengths has always been looking at not just the blockbusters, instead also thinking about what other authors were doing in this period and what the people of the time were reading. It wasn't just those who were famous. There's lots of writers today that were phenomenally popular and famous during their lifetimes who we don't think about at all anymore…He's been really good at looking at the sort of underseen. Which again, has resulted in some really cool catalogues and discoveries.”
Emory University is one of the World’s leading organisations in collecting and cataloguing more modern literary authors which are stored in their Stuart A. Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book library. On their personal website they affirm that they host, “a globally significant collection of material related to modern and contemporary poetry and literature,” in their institution. Within their archives, they include papers and works from some of the most accredited and awarded writers of recent decades such as, Ted Hughes who was the former Poet Laureate for Great Britain, 1995 Literature Nobel-Prize Winner Seamus Heaney and multiple book prize winner and the knighted Sir Salman Rushdie. These are some of the most well-renowned writers, particularly in Great Britain. For example, the AQA GCSE English Literature specification allows students to learn Ted Hughes ‘Bayonet Charge’ poem for their exams, similarly the WJEC GCSE English Literature exam board permits students to be taught Hughes' poem ‘Hawk Roosting’.
Evidently, via the brief examples provided, the cultural relevance and impact of some of the aforementioned literary writers is undeniable. This prior segment relates to what the future state of the modern market of book antiquarianism will look like. When reading about modern writers, it is evident that a significant portion of their manuscripts are no longer in the written word. Instead, a lot of these are on digital devices such as laptops. For example, the writer Salman Rushdie sold his personal archives to Emory University which consisted partially of four apple computers.
So how do you think that collecting books in the future from current writers would look like? Do you think it's a little more of like inclusive of technology in that sense?
“We at Jarndyce don't sell modern authors, and we probably won't. But I think for my colleagues who do work with modern archives and even beyond, these sorts of technological limitations and considerations need to be factored into a purchase. There's also lots of legal reasons why people put embargos on information. It's kind of a can of worms. But whether that information is immediately available, or if there will be an embargo on when people are allowed to look at it, and what that will look like, we don't know, and we can't know. In terms of a library perspective, I know that Emory University is one that collects a lot of modern authors archives and sorts of technological tools.
Additionally, I think of how fast technology advances considering you can actually have someone's laptop or hard drive, and that technology can become quite quickly obsolete. So having to transfer constantly and keep the integrity of the material, you then need to be factoring in how to keep this type of computer or memory storage. For example, whether the material is on floppy discs, which are actually not archivally terribly sound. So, it is a huge expansive question. If you think about a Word document on a word processor, what about track changes, is that part of the archive? And I do think that most modern authors still do have physical manuscripts, printed with notes on them, I think, I would hate to envision a world where that's not the case, but obviously, seeing the flip side of having writer’s computer files would allow future researchers to know in theory, exactly when the author wrote it down to the minute. When did they edit this? When did they add this? What was happening in their lives when they were doing this? Were they writing at 3:00 in the morning or at 12:30? Is it before lunch or after dinner? All those kinds of questions, they would allow us to know about all of that. But it's a great question and it’s going to be really interesting for everyone to be thinking about.”
The matter of upkeeping technological files is certainly an issue to be greatly debated, as it indeed poses a greater struggle and cost to upkeep rather than storing an antiquarian book on an archival shelf. Frankly, with the speed of technological advancement our society currently lives within, there is a high likelihood that it will be difficult to keep such documents on their original devices, considering they are constantly being upgraded. What if an old device breaks? Will there be replacement parts available? Is it likely that these file formats will have to be regularly uploaded to more modern data systems to ensure they are not lost? Would that constitute as ruining the integrity of the material? The solutions to these questions will further be explored in the following decades, as the proportion of technological devices playing a role in book antiquarianism will increase and require more thought through archival solutions that all will adhere to.
To conclude, is there any final point you would like to touch on that might have not been included in the interview?
“What I always like to say is that it doesn't have to be expensive. And we have books from just £5 up to £50,000. I think there is a price point at which everyone can be a book collector if you want to be, and I think building collections can be enriching for people's lives.
For example, on a Kindle you don't really own those books, right? You buy them, but they can be taken away from you. They can be changed. They can just disappear one day. So, I think modern life is more ephemeral like that, the digital age is a marvel, but there's an intangibility to it. I think that as humans we can be kind of programmed to like stuff and there is almost no greater joy in life than to be surrounded by things that inspire you and move you in some way. Book collecting is an easy, and can be very affordable way, to bring a real kind of joy to your life. I love talking to my clients about their favourite shelves in their libraries and what they're buying, across all price points and scales from the very grand to the kind of silly. It really can be for everyone and all you have to do is think about it a little bit and be interested in something because genuinely, books have been written about everything, especially if you're looking historically, there are books about that.”
This final answer concluded the eye-opening interview about the realities of book antiquarianism in the 21st century. The significance of this rarely spoken about career is evidently incalculable as those within the trade help to preserve and cherish these historically and culturally significant manuscripts, books, letters and more. The passion of the interviewee was inspiring, and even if one is not interested in book antiquarianism, it is heart-warming to know that there are those dedicated to researching and helping to ensure these historic works are remembered. This sentiment is particularly relevant in today’s society where most people’s lives are governed by technology, making it easy to dismiss the wonders of these great artifacts.
