> I've only got eight photography books so far, but I haven't been at this long
> -- just give me time. Hehehe.
Marnie,
Actually, I know a fair amount about books. I was in charge of the Rare Book
Room at one of the colleges I attended and would have gone to work for the
Library of Congress if it hadn't been for the election of Ronald Reagan. I
know a number of booksellers (I still have an 1818 edition of Gibbon's
autobiography that was a gift to me from Larry McMurtry) and have kept up
with it more or less over the years.
Believe it or not, photography books are one of the absolute best types of
books to collect in today's book market (the other is first editions of
modern fiction). Knowledge and taste can go a long way in identifying
important books--I regularly make "finds," getting books for a few dollars
that are much more valuable than that, because I know what the books are.
But the main reason they're so collectable is that almost all photography
books have low printing runs and are seldom reprinted. Furthermore, a _lot_
of them end their commercial lives as remainders.
Here's the approximate curve of a photography book's commercial life:
1. Printed, available in bookstores for full price. Not available
everywhere, but readily available if you keep up with your sources.
2. Remaindered or sold on sale. Seems like nobody wants it. Book is common
and cheap at this point.
3. Remainders are gone; book starts to get harder to find.
4. Most copies have gone into libraries or collections; book is scarce,
found mostly on the used / rare market, value rises.
The "problem" for the producers of these books is that the demand is low but
constant. So the demand isn't great enough to soak up a big printing all at
once, yet the demand never really goes down, so as the printing run slowly
gets consumed the _relative_ demand for the increasingly scarce remaining
copies tends to keep going up.
Of course it has a lot to do with the quality and intrinsic worth of the
book.
I can give you a few concrete examples. John Szarkowski's famous _William
Eggleston's Guide_ was published in 1976. By the late '70s, one of my
dealers remembers seeing _stacks_ of them at bookstores in NYC remaindered
for $5 each. By the time I bought mine, in about 1983 or '84, I paid $30 for
a used copy. Now it's about a $250-$300 book--_if_ you can find one.
_William Eggleston's Guide_ was just reprinted. Now, you could be excused
for thinking that the reprint is undesirable and that the first edition is
preferable. While that is true to a certain extent, the reprint will _also_
become valuable in the future, for the very same reason the original is
valuable. It will go through the same four steps I detailed above. Reprints
can be good buys too. I couldn't afford an original edition of Robert
Frank's _The Americans_ when I started getting interested in photography in
1980, but eventually I bought a very clean copy of the 1986 Pantheon
reprint. My book was sold new at $35. I bought it remaindered for half
price. It's now valued on the used market at above its original selling
price. The first (1978) Aperture reprint of _The Americans_ can go for up to
$300 (there's a rare signed copy for sale at Time and Again Books in NYC
right now for $3,000. Same book, but the signature is worth $2,700). Even
the 1994 Scalo reprint is a $50-$60 book now--and it's a paperback!
Here's a typical catalog entry for the real first edition of the book
(unsigned). Note the price. Note also that it's not a perfect copy.
FRANK, Robert
Robert Frank: Les Américains (The Americans)
Paris: Delpire. 1958. True first edition (French). Illustrated laminated
paper-covered boards (illustrated by Saul Steinberg), no dust jacket as
issued. Photographs by Robert Frank. Text (in French) by Alain Bosquet.
Edited by Robert Delpire. 174 pp. with 85 b/w plates. 7 1/2 x 8 3/8 inches.
Very Good+ to Near Fine (bump to boards at lower right hand corner, some
wear to crown and base of spine, slight shelf wear to covers, all pages
Fine). Binding professionally repaired (scans of the covers, and a copy of
the conservation report and invoice, available upon request). Also includes
a copy of the sole owner's original Wittenborn and Company receipt from 1964
(small Wittenborn sticker affixed to rear paste-down endpaper). ISBN
2851070088. Bookseller Inventory #B0012
Price: US$ 2750.00
Bookseller: Vincent Borrelli, Bookseller, Albuquerque, NM, U.S.A.
This seems out of reach, until you remember that the book was widely panned
on its release (it was printed in France because no American publisher
wanted it) and copies went begging for a number of years after it appeared.
Now, not every photo book is a first edition Frank. But the thing is, if you
KNOW that the Delpire edition of the book is worth three grand or more,
you're prepared if you ever run into it when you're book-hunting. You
probably won't get lucky and find that particular book, unless (maybe) you
live in France. But believe me, books this valuable and more so are found
every day by book-hunters who pay pennies on the dollar for them. The key is
simply to know what you're looking at when you find something. Virtually
every used and rare book dealer has a story of his or her best "find," when
they bought a book for $2 or $20 that was worth thousands, tens of
thousands, or even hundreds of thousands of dollars. If you doubt me, go to
your local used ./ rare bookstore and ask the proprietor!
I found my copy of Cartier-Bresson's _The Decisive Moment_ in my
grandmother's library after she died. She collected books on France, mostly
on cooking, travel, and royalty, but somebody had given this to her as a
gift and the photos were not to her taste. She didn't even display it with
her good books out on the shelves--and it was hidden away in a cabinet with
a bunch of discards, old papers, duplicate copies, and other junk. It was in
perfect condition because it had essentially never been looked at. It's
about a $2,000 book in this condition. Granted, this doesn't exactly count
as a "find," because I found it in a relative's house and simply asked the
direct heirs if I could have it. But it's a major book that has never been
reprinted (if it ever _is_ reprinted, snap one up). I'm very happy to have
it.
I bought a copy of the original Calloway _Alfred Steiglitz_ for $30
remaindered. It was printed by the National Gallery of Art after Georgia
O'Keefe choose the National Gallery as the repository for her Steiglitz
collection. As you probably know, Miss O'Keefe was Steiglitz's lover and the
subject of many of his pictures. I plucked it off a stack of remainder
copies sitting on a bookshop floor that came up to my knee. It's now a $400
book. It was also recently reprinted.
If you know what's important and can tell a well-made book from a bad one,
and know which books reproduce the artist's work well (this requires going
to museum shows and seeing what the original prints really look like--for
instance, virtually none of the many books of August Sander's work really
reproduce the look of his original prints), and you collect the kind of
photography books you personally know most about and enjoy, chances are very
good that in a relatively short time you will amass a rich, varied, and
virtually irreplaceable collection.
I think the current reprint of the Szarkowski book I mentioned above is an
excellent one to buy right now. In fact, there have been a number of
reprints of the really great books of the 1960s and 1970s recently--Danny
Lyon, Larry Clark, Bruce Davidson, and so on.
As for new books, I'll tell you about one new book that will be valuable in
the future: Helen Levitt's _Crosstown_. Miss Levitt is still alive, but she
is aged, and this may be the last major retrospective printed in her
lifetime. It's an outstanding collection of her work; the reproductions are
well done and sensitively chosen. The book is beautifully designed, printed,
and made, in an unusual cloth binding without a dust jacket, and it's
limited to an edition of 6000 copies. The first printing is still available
from Amazon.com for less than $60. I can virtually guarantee that this is a
book that ten years from now and twenty years from now will be worth many
times its original price.
Even just buying new books, if you choose wisely, you can build a valuable
collection in a relatively short amount of time--these books don't take a
hundred years to become rare and valuable. Some can become so in as little
as five or ten years; in twenty or thirty years, _most_ good photography
books have satisfied the definition of a collectable book: "worth more used
than it sold for new." But if you add remainders and used books to your
shopping list, the opportunities for building a nice collection for
relatively little money expand even more.
Finally, if you buy books you genuinely like (I wouldn't counsel doing
anything else!), it doesn't matter if they increase in value or not. I have
a few books (Alice Springs' book of portraits, Eric Newby's _What the
Traveler Saw_ [pictures shot with a Pentax, by the way!] that I love even
though they're not well-known or valuable. Why? I like the pictures, of
course!)
Sorry for the long post. As you can tell, this is a subject near and dear to
my heart. Anyway, I highly recommend starting a photo book collection TODAY.
Even eight books are a good start, so long as they're good ones!
--Mike
