Book Collecting in the Age of the Internet

I’ll provide a personal example. More than a year ago I began to use ABE and to a lesser degree some of the other search engines that look for books anywhere on the web. My subject was material relating to the Hudson Valley in New York State where I grew up. Using the third field in ABE , Publisher, I put in place names such as Poughkeepsie, Newburgh, Kingston, Catskill and New Paltz, both by themselves, with ,New York and ,NY and ,N.Y. I no longer can tell you precisely what I found that first time but I reran these searches on ABE.com recently and found the following:

With	Catskill	Kingston	Newburgh	Rondout	New Paltz
	78	7386	213	9	212
, New York	42	374	107	1	131
, NY	37	327	92	1	106
, N.Y	6	24	15	4	15

In ordering the results I found that using highest price was handy initially. Reading down, the prices are progressively lower. Examining particular listings then takes some time. For Catskill with 78, Newburgh with 213 and New Paltz with 212 you can examine all of the listings. For Kingston, however, it isn’t practical to try to read through all of the listings because there are 7,386 of them. A quick look at the Kingston results shows why there are so many matches. Kingston is simply a common name. So for Kingston I then add New York and the results are reduced to 374. Retesting using ,NY produces 327 and ,N.Y. gives 24.

After looking at these lists perhaps once a week for a month, you should change the results to be sorted by Newest which will then bring up first the newest listings. After that, it gets easier because the new listings will always come up first and usually there aren't too many.

Using this process I made (and continue to make) some amazing discoveries. Some very famous (at least to me) and elusive titles show up once in a while. When I was still a boy I spent time with a book dealer named Bill Heidgerd who made a lasting impression on my by talking about books he knew of and didn't have. One of them was Abraham Bevier’s The Indians, published in Rondout in 1846. This was a book, he explained, that you just could not find. It is in Howes USianaand is listed as an a. It is also shown in the H.V. Jones Catalogue. In 1999 I bought a copy for $550.00 plus hammer (auction house commission) in the Seibert Sale at Sothebys. I was ecstatic. I was almost as ecstatic when a copy showed up on the net a year later. I bought that one too for $575.00. This past year another copy came up on ABE. It had some problems but was listed at $175 which, after some back and forth, came down to $149. A week ago a dealer offered me another copy for $1,500. Now Bevier's The Indians is rare but the internet is creating such amazing liquidity that even very rare, if not necessarily particularly important material, comes to the market regularly.

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Book Collecting in the Age of the Internet

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Book Collecting in the Age of the Internet

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