There are three major components which ascertain value in collectible books: intrinsic importance, rarity, and condition. Herein, let’s discuss importance.

In hindsight, it would seem that Hemingway is more important to literature than, say, Robert W. Chambers, and the prices of his books in the antiquarian marketplace will reflect that. Robert W. Chambers? Who? Well, in his day, Chambers (1865–1933), whose time overlapped with Hemingway’s, would regularly sell a quarter-million copies of his novels. In hardcover! That he is now largely forgotten a footnote in American literature, is the focus of what I'm largely concerned with here.

A fascinating book by Allen Churchill called The Literary Decade (1971), read many years ago—and reread several times—pointed out this phenomenon. A literary history of the 1920s, it supplied fascinating anecdotes and gossip about writing and publishing in that period. But what a bookseller sees between the lines is the juxtaposition of the bestsellers of that time, sold in staggering numbers, and which writers now are seen to be the truly important ones.

With this in mind, in the 1920s, Robert W. Chambers sold a quarter-million copies and Hemingway, Fitzgerald and Faulkner had first printings of 3,000 to 5,000 copies at best, many of which didn't sell. A bookseller seeing this phenomenon comes to realise that the public, and the so-called experts—the critics who pass judgment on literature—are wrong far more often than they are right, at least in the long run. One assumes, then, that this applies in the other arts as well. Only time is the true arbiter, and the wise man learns to go with his own judgement, for he concludes that his opinion is just as valid as the critic’s.

Vanity Fair magazine, sometime in the early 1930s, conducted a contest that requested the opinions of their readers as to which current American writer would retain his fame in the year 2000, and still be avidly read. The winner was Sinclair Lewis, Nobel laureate in 1930, and now, in the 21st century, largely unread except by students who are forced to read him for their courses.

Two questions arise. First, how could popular taste be that far from reality that the winner—deemed a genius less than a hundred years ago—is now quite obscure (in fact, completely out of favour)? And second, how can this be explained, for it seems a universal
phenomenon, not limited to us or our century?

Byron and Shelley were the equivalent of rock stars or Hollywood celebrities in their time. That their poetry is still studied speaks to true value, but what of the popular novelists of that era? Bulwer-Lyton, as famous and read as widely as Scot and Dickens in his time, is remembered today only for his famous line, “It was a dark and stormy night.” So forgotten is he, that few are aware that that famous beginning is part of the first sentence in his novel Paul Clifford (1830), which goes on for most of a page. You could look it up. He also wrote The Last Days of Pompeii. You may have seen the movie but who has read the book in the last hundred years?

Some of the several generations which were so influenced by Hemingway Faulkner and Fitzgerald are still alive. Having survived almost a century, and their importance to American literature being assured, there is an assumption that their first editions will continue to rise in value in the exponential manner they have done in the last few years.

But what seems to me to be forgotten is that literature has its greatest impact on the young. The books we read early on leave an emotional residue which never dissipates. Of course, there are those books which captured us in our immaturity and which in later years we hasten to relegate into the obscurity of an emotional past which slightly embarrasses us.

A perfect example in the 20th century would be Ayn Rand, whose The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged seemed like revelations to literate 17-year-olds (including me) when we first read them. That many of us, as we matured, realised that Rand’s work contained many contradictions and that the rigidity of her beliefs was different only in kind from those of the devisers of all systems, were doomed to be left on the margins precisely because of that rigidity. We were too young to realise this as adolescents, but maturity brought clarity. The smart ones sorted Rand’s ideas, retaining those which suited us, and discarding the rest as we should have. Tolstoy or Adam Smith she’s not. But for now, her prices remain high in the marketplace while we await time’s verdict. As we pass into the obscurity of history so will our nostalgia disappear.

Collectors of modern firsts are essentially paying premium prices for significant copies of books they loved as youths. The sight of the book on one’s shelf in the format of its original issue recalls that early emotional impact and elicits a warm nostalgia for our lost innocence.

All these points are not to prove to you the futility of speculating in modern first editions, nor to abandon the whole genre as a pointless gamble. I’m attempting to demonstrate what the collecting of modern firsts should be, for the basic premise of collecting doesn't change.

It is the books you loved, the books which filled you with all that emotion when you first read them and still do, that you should buy. You will someday want to read them again but when you see them on the shelf in your library, those precious volumes will arouse the same emotions and evoke a deepening joy. For they attest to the person you were before you read them and will measure the person you’ve become since.

You will be looking at the first edition—an identical copy to one the author’s publisher first handed to him, and that initially provided you with such a wonderful experience. And you will feel that sacred connection that exchanges of such import convey. You will be connected by the object created, to its creator, and you will always have that emotion to go back to when you need succour. You will become connected to the sacred act of creation, for without the reader there is no connection, therefore no reason to create. The connection between the artist and the recipient of his art is as holy a connection as exists; it should be treated with the same awe and reverence as all things holy.

As such, when you are 90 years old and your grandchild says to you, “Who was Robert W. Chambers?” you can say, “Someone who meant a lot to me when I was your age. Someone who showed me something of beauty I didn’t know was there.”

And then you will know why the hard cold cash, the price you paid for it, was of no importance whatever.



-David Mason