Rare Book Monthly

Articles - May - 2011 Issue

Emotionally Satisfying Investments:  Works on Paper

For books, manuscripts, maps and ephemera:  price change over 100 years

For books, manuscripts, maps and ephemera: price change over 100 years

Arnoud Gerits, the President of ILAB, the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, was interviewed recently in the Hong Kong Economic Times and mentioned that book collecting should be understood as a passion, not an investment.  He’s quoted on book collecting:

“ILAB does not recommend buying books as a financial investment.”  “Don’t buy them as an investment: it is the wrong angle to look at books. Buy them because you love books, you love a subject..."

Is he suggesting it’s not possible to both love books and buy them as investments?  Book collectors certainly believe their books are investments.

I thought it was common knowledge and so decided to contact collectors to see if their perspectives have changed.  They haven’t.  They still view and apparently always have viewed, these purchases as investments, albeit ones that mature slowly and are often pursued for ancillary benefits.   They did not go into collecting expecting to be buried in their books and do not expect it now. In fact, I haven’t found a single collector who subscribes to the “abandon hope all yea who enter here” approach implicit in the “don’t buy them as investments” idea.  Dealers always expect to make profits and Mr. Gerits seems to be saying collectors should not.  Collectors choose to invest in books because they have a passion for them, but they do not buy them believing they are costume jewelry.  They view them as long-term investments and over all but the last five years they have been.


Posted On: 2011-05-02 00:00
User Name: leigh

Whether books are a good investment is off the point. The question is whether it is a business. There are a number of people who consider it there live


Posted On: 2011-05-03 00:00
User Name: wormandcandy

Value is a concept. Books, portable recepticals of information, are now obsolete due to electronical storage/retrieval - altho a lot of info is


Posted On: 2011-05-03 00:00
User Name: PeterReynolds

I'm sure there will come a time when people will say "Wow! I've never seen one of those except on the computer/phone" and want to own the physic


Rare Book Monthly

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