Recommendations on buying rare books online. You can use the internet to find relative prices and how much things have gone for. If you do your research and know the market, then you will realize when someone is offering you a good deal and when they aren't.
If you are going to spend a lot of money then you have to be careful. I buy rare books online; there is no question about that. The most expensive book I bought online was probably a $500 copy of the first book Howard Fast wrote. But just like anything, you have to be careful and you have to be sure the person or site you are buying from is reputable. Rare book dealers are generally members of the ABA, Antiquarian Book Association, so if you are buying from somebody who is a member it's probably okay.
I do have a story about buying online. A book dealer knew that I was interested in rare Howard Fast books and he offered me one for $1500. I told him that I saw it offered by so and so for $790 and he was honest enough to say that he had in fact doubled the price. I never dealt with him again, but used to buy from him all the time. I guess the moral of the story is you have to know your own idea of the value of the book. You have to have an idea of what you are willing to pay. I've noticed that when it's something that I really want I almost feel like money isn't an object, but it's because I know the values that I have personally assigned.
I wouldn't recommend anyone jumping into expensive books. You have to get the feel of it for a while. Most book dealers really like to talk and so you should talk to them and learn as much as you can.
You can also use the internet to find relative prices and how much things have gone for. If you do your research and know the market, then you will realize when someone is offering you a good deal and when they aren't - like the guy who tried to sell me the book for $1500.
Comparative shopping on the internet is easy if you know where to look and the resources are on my website (www.trussel.com) on the collecting pages. We allow someone to search for a book and there are so many software packages now on the internet, which are free and will let you see 20 copies of the same book and what they are selling for.
If you are buying antique cars people go crazy for that one special car and it's the same with books. There are books that are pretty hard to find. There are books I find that I search for years and years before I finally find a copy. It's definitely a market for signed books, especially signed first editions, and also for association copies - in other words if you have a copy of some other book that was in Peter Jennings library they call that an association copy. Copies of book that are connected to an author whether he owned it or his wife owned it or that kind of thing.
I have lots really old magazines where the first printings of stories that later became part of published collections appeared. Howard Fast wrote stories, The Pot Boilers, in Women's Day magazine in the 1930s, which was eventually published as a book, but I wanted to get the early magazine. Now with the internet we can actually find the 80 year old magazine for a reasonably cheap price.
