If you are a Rare Book Hub Monthly (RBH) reader you probably know that our site has two sides. One side is by subscription and it gives members access to our over 15 million auction records, and the other side contains features like this article in the RBH Monthly that are free.
But did you know that there are other free features that are well worth using and that you may have overlooked just because they are a little tricky to find?
The most significant “free” feature is the “free” membership. Features of the “free” membership include:
-
Rare Book Monthly
-
Search Upcoming Auctions
-
Matchmaker automated searching of auctions
-
Records Tracking
-
Auction Calendar
-
Emailed Weekly Auction Updates (optional)
To sign up for these additional “free” features go to the RareBookHub.com home page and click on the link in the upper right hand corner “Become a Member.” That will take you to the various categories of membership. The “free” category is the one at the far left. Scroll down a little and click on the little brown box that says “Register,” and voila, within a short time you’ll receive an acknowledgement and instructions for setting up your account.
Once you have that account, log in and once again at the top right hand corner look for the link “My Account” and click on it. That will bring up a page with a variety of information. Look for the box headed “My Mailings” and click on both options “Auction Updates” and “Monthly Mailings.”
The auction updates mean you will receive a weekly mailing of the most recently completed auctions each week which is extremely detailed and contains information not only about books, but a great many other categories including quite a few you might not expect like photography, baseball cards, comic books, and other areas that are not usually thought of as rare book related.
Again, once you have registered as a “free” member in addition to getting the weekly mailing (which usually comes out on a Sunday) you can also find this information by logging in, and clicking on the home page top banner on the category that says “Upcoming Auctions.” Click on that pull down menu and locate “Recently Reported Auction Updates” with the subhead Weekly Reports. Here you can see all the weekly reports gathered in one easily accessible location.
Pick any of the reports that you might like to browse and click on the brown button “Read More” - that will take you to an extremely detailed account of all the activity for that particular week.
Scroll down a bit and you’ll find perhaps the most interesting feature consisting of a box headed Top 25 Lots Reported This Past Week.
Even if you are primarily interested in books, it would be hard not to notice that this box is frequently dominated by non-book items like the previously mentioned sports cards, comic books, or prints and multiples, often at very eye-popping prices. It definitely helps to get a sense of where the money and the market is headed to compare these Top 25 prices with the prices that books you may find desirable are bringing.
Did you know in browsing through March and April 2025 alone there were results that included:
-
A 1970s Apple Company check signed by Steve Jobs in the amount of $7.05 that sold for over $60,000
-
A 2024 baseball card for LA Dodger star Shohei Ohtani 2024 with a hammer price of $1,062,500 and it was in a sports memorabilia auction where there were at least dozen cards that brought $100,000 or more.
-
A 1941 3-sheet movie poster for the Wolf Man that brought $190,500
-
1941 Ansel Adams' photo MOONRISE Hernandez, New Mexico realized $635,000
Checking out the Top 25 box can be interesting, informative and will definitely show that there’s more included in RBH auction results than books.
But back to books.
Go back to any of the individual completed auction listings. Pick an auction, click on the link. It will bring up all the lots sold in that auction. The way it will display is in numerical order by lot number. But, just in case you’re curious and want to see the results listed in order of monetary value, the brown box near the top titled “Auction Report” and you’ll see that for example at the Doyle’s sale on April 11 a first edition of the Wonderful Wizard of Oz with scarce inscription by W.W. Denslow sold for $49,875.00, which was many times higher than the pre-auction estimate of $8,000-$12,000. Best of all, click on the link and you’ll see the detailed auction catalog notes and a clean clear photo.
(Reminder to the reader: You need to be signed into your account for this link to work).
So if FREE is your thing, you’ll find a lot to like in the “Free Membership” section of RBH.
There are more to our free membership features than present space allows. Check some of our other stories by publisher Bruce McKiney to find out how to locate books of your own particular interest in upcoming events using the “Search Upcoming Auctions” feature.
