Rare Book Monthly
For Printed Materials: The Probability of Appearance
Bad news was good business.
Now let's look for these items on the listing sites. I primarily used ABE but also searched via AddAll. For the 64 items in this study I found 3 examples, two of them for the same item and AddAll found no examples that weren't also on Abe. For the other 62 printings I did not find even one copy. This suggests the ratio of appearances between the OCLC and listings sites is 324:3 but that is not true because the OCLC is a fixed database while the listing sites are variable. Said another way when an item is posted to the OCLC it is probably there for life while when it is posted to a listing site it is there only until it sells. In the past 18 months I have purchased 14 examples of 10 of the 64 items which I found on listing sites and eBay.
By the end of the year I expect to complete an analysis by decade. I'm particularly interested to see how time affects the number of appearances. Content is another factor and becomes important as Munsell's career advances and his judgment about content, marketing and presentation improve. For the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s we have 900 more records and in the fullness of time we will both better understand Munsell's production and I hope, by extrapolation, develop formulas by which to predict frequency of appearance and its inverse: rarity.
For the final decade of Munsell's career, the 1870s, we have only his printed output as Munselliana effectively ends in 1870. For his final decade I expect to propose a theory to predict printed quantity where none has been provided and from there it is a short step to predict probability of appearance for virtually all old material. If I can do this I know Joel will be very pleased. In his own life he never quite reached the stars. Perhaps one hundred and twenty-six years after he died he'll take this final step.
To examine a complete list of all materical used in this study Click here.
If there are others who are interested to participate in this project I would appreciate hearing from you. In time the Munsell study must be simply one source of perspective. It will take a meta-study of other documented printers to confirm or amend the projection theory as it emerges from this first study.
The analysis is engrossing and I believe the application to older material of all types a distinct if yet today unproven possibility.
Reach me by email at bmckinney@americanaexchange.com
