The Precarious Balance: Scarcity and Demand for First Edition Picturebooks As most experienced book collectors and booksellers know, the scarcity of a book has a major impact on its value in the market. Scarcity in and of itself does not drive value, but instead value results from a combination of scarcity and demand. For books, […]
Experienced booksellers and book collectors have come upon the front flaps of dust jackets with the top or bottom corner clipped, yet, strangely the books’ price still evident on the uncut corner. Why is the DJ’s corner cut off and the price still evident? Why cut the book’s corner at all? This mystery is explained […]
American Library Association Announces Literary Award Winners BOSTON, Jan. 18 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ — The American Library Association (ALA) today announced the top books, audiobooks and video for children and young adults – including the Caldecott, King, Newbery and Printz awards – at its Midwinter Meeting in Boston. A list of all the 2010 Newbery and Caldecott […]
By nature not an overreactor, but fearing for the lead-free life of my children, their children, and children in near and far locales, including Eastville in southwestern North Dakota, decided to part with my five thousand or so collectible children’s book collection. The value of the collection, the vast majority first editions, some rare, some […]
Dr. Seuss and the Beginner Books Up until the mid-1950s, there was a degree of separation between illustrated educational books and illustrated picturebooks. That all changed, dramatically and with much national fanfare, with the 1957 publication of Dr. Seuss’s The Cat In The Hat (Random House). Here was an early reader, full of 220 madly […]
Where Have All The Books Gone? Based upon our experience, there are fewer key collectible picturebooks on the online market than a year ago, continuing a trend we have seen over the past couple of years. Try a search on any of the metasearch book finding websites, such as ABEBooks, Addall, Bookfinder, or the ABAA, […]
Earlier we posted a column titled “What Books To Collect,” which provided several categories of books or illustrators for various economic levels of collecting. Today and over the next couple of posts, we would like to discuss the state of the children’s picturebook collecting hobby, and provide some background information on the current market place. […]
This blog and our website focuses on collecting and valuing first edition children’s picturebooks. We try to stay on subject as much as possible, and refrain from presenting material that strays too far from the hobby. Picturebooks are the center of our attentions. Some of our readers – parents, teachers, educators, and feminists – will […]
Several weeks ago, we garnered a by being tagged by Fuse #8 Production in the "Someone Believes I Think!" post. The idea originated in February from The Thinking Blog’s tagging five blogs which make you think (for those tagged, below, click on the link to see guidelines for tagging thinking blogs). Certainly a unique idea […]
From Publisher’s Weekly: For Better or Worse, Used Book Sales Grow Trade publishers ambivalent; online businesses prosper by Jim Milliot — Publishers Weekly, 4/2/2007 "Prompted in part by Amazon.com’s decision to sell used trade books in 2004, the Book Industry Study Group commissioned a report in 2005 to determine the size and composition of the […]
