Rare Book Monthly
Articles - December - 2002 Issue
The Means of Book Trading That Dares Not Speak Its Name: eBay
HOW THEY STARTED USING EBAY
Barlow: “It was the Duncan Hines material that got me on to eBay. At first I had this idea to collect postcards of restaurants, but then I found that that was too general so I limited it to collecting postcards relating to Duncan Hines. This gives me a period and more interesting restaurants to boot. This sort of material is not in book stores – it’s too cheap and too ephemeral. With eBay, I have acquired all but the first edition of Duncan Hines. eBay allows me to bid on ephemera and material not sold by dealers and auction houses, such as restaurant menus. I use eBay primarily to buy particular types of things that I couldn’t get any other way.”
Barlow: “I am also a member of the Grolier Club and also I teach a course on Book Collecting with Terry Belanger at the University of Virginia’s Rare Book School, so in part I started on eBay as research when I was exploring all book searching engines on the net.”
Dealer Y: “I am a perennial collector, a frequenter of flea markets and estate sales. For people like me, eBay functions as a 24 hour estate sale. It is the fulfillment of my dreams, to be able to have access to this material within the confines of my home, in physical/temporal ways that had never previously existed.”
WHAT THEY BUY OR SELL ON EBAY
Librarian X: “For my independent book business, I have spurts of interest in different things. The Hogarth Press is a fairly regular interest. I have sold these at some reasonable profit, but not on eBay but on abe.com and other bookselling sites. You can’t buy cheap on abe.com. You can, however, buy cheap on eBay and sell high on abe. For the special collection I work for, I buy postcards, movie postcards, ephemera, trade catalogues, out of print material on eBay.”
Zubal: “With eBay I have been really focused on popular culture. Literary 1920s, 1930s do sell but at low prices. I only sell things that I would throw out anyway or wholesale at pennies. Instead I sell it on eBay and get dollars, not pennies, for it.”
Barlow: “I buy books, mostly. But I also buy stamps and ephemeral material especially material relating to waterskiing (which used to be a hobby of mine), and material relating to restaurants listed in Duncan Hines.”
Dealer Y: “I buy fine first edition books in modern art, photography, about objects d’art, and sometimes I buy the objects d’art themselves not just the books about them.”
APPROXIMATELY HOW MANY PIECES THEY’VE TRADED IN VIA EBAY/APPROXIMATE PERCENTAGE OF BUSINESS CONDUCTED OVER EBAY
Zubal: “I’d say eBay makes for less than 1% of my total sales. I sell several hundred books a day on my website [www.zubal.com]. I sell at most something like four items a day on eBay. Since it’s very time consuming and labor intensive to do rare book descriptions, I sell on eBay more as a lark to get rid of stuff that I would otherwise generally dump.”
