Searching For The First Forty Caldecott Medal Books Last year I performed an internet search for the first editions of the first twenty Caldecott Medal books to determine the number of books currently being offered for sale, and similar to past searches, calculate the average selling price. I recently performed a similar search, this time […]
Searching For The Second Twenty Caldecott Medal Books A couple of months ago we performed an internet search for the first editions of the first twenty Caldecott Medal books to determine the number of books currently being offered for sale, and similar to past searches, calculate the average selling price. This past week we performed […]
A first edition The Little House is a scarce bird, rarely sighted in public. First edition copies of Virginia Lee Burton’s 1943 Caldecott Medal winning book are one of the scarcest contemporary children’s picturebook to find. One is currently being offered for sale on ABEBooks. It can be yours for $12,500. [Caveat emptor: I have […]
A first edition Curious George sold at Heritage Auctions for $26,290. This surpasses the $21,850 paid for the first edition Curious George sold at PBA Galleries in 2007. The Heritage sale took place in the September 2011 Beverly Hills Signature Rare Books Auction. The link to the Curious George lot #37070 at Heritage (you will […]
First edition copies of Mike Mulligan and his Steam Shovel in dust jacket don’t surface too often, so it is surprising two copies are currently on the market for sale. Both books are being offered for over $5,000. The Virginia Lee Burton children’s classic was initially published in 1939 by Houghton Mifflin. The first editions […]
Background Similar to a couple of years ago, we recently performed an internet search for the first editions of the first twenty Caldecott Medal books, wondering how many are currently being offered for sale. The searches were performed across multiple book sites, ABE, ABAA, and Bookfinder, and were filtered for first edition books with dust […]
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 […]
We started a thread on the eBay Bookseller’s Forum to identify higher value children’s books sold on eBay, with $300 being the ‘bottom’ threshold. The thread can be found here: Valuable Children’s Books Sold on eBay. The thread covers a broad range of children’s books, from a $12,000 Hardy Boys first edition book to a […]
A first edition copy of Madeleine L’Engle’s Newbery Medal winning book, A Wrinkle In Time, recently sold at a PBA Galleries’ auction for $10,800. Heading: Author: L’Engle, Madeleine Title: A Wrinkle In Time Place: [New York] Publisher: Ariel Books/Farrar, Straus and Cudahy Date: [1962] Item # : 195185 […]
How Collectible Books Are Priced The current method of pricing collectible books for sale is more a learned art than a science. The world of collectible books is quite large and very diverse. Everything from modern first editions to pre-1500 incunabula are sold and collected. Because of the diversity among collectible types, one pricing methodology […]
