How to effectively build a collection of books, manuscripts and ephemera
- By Bruce McKinney
Living with a collection is a great pleasure.
By Bruce McKinney
In starting out to build a collection that may be entirely books or include books there are a series of questions to be considered that will help define the collecting experience. Thinking about these issues at anytime helps collectors understand their options. There are six: [1] defining scale of interest and range of materials; [2] choosing a subject; [3] sources of advice; [4] defining collection parameters; [5] how will we buy?; [6] outcomes.
Defining scale of interest and range of materials Scale is a function of time, space and cost. Is this a sometime thing that may become a passion in the future? Is this simply a casual undertaking? How much money will you spend? These are important issues to consider.
Is this to be a shared experience? How broad will the collection be: books, manuscripts, ephemera, paintings, other art and objects?
Is this collection going to inhabit the library or also other spaces?
Will your wife, husband, partner or friend participate in building the collection? If so, their perspective needs to be considered. A collection that involves two perspectives may involve more than books. Great collections often involve an amalgam of materials purchased from a variety of sources and fields.
Choosing a subject A collection may evolve from personal interest, the continuation of a family commitment, from personal associations or location. If you live in Gettysburg you will probably choose a subject related to the Civil War. If two people will share the experience of building a collection they should also share the decisions about what to collect.
Is your focus impact, budget or value? Spending a budget is basically about bookkeeping. Demanding good value will require discipline and study as you are going to understand material before you buy it. Impact involves compelling material, the judgment to select and the skills to acquire. Such collections often involve knowledgeable dealers in many disciplines.
Sources of Advice The question here is whether the collection will be dealer-directed or self-directed and the best answer seems to be a combination of both. I have been collecting for years. I have learned to know my areas of collecting better than almost anyone so I know what is rare, what is common and what is fairly priced. When we buy hand-colored images however I get advice if the image is expensive. The rule then is to know all you can. For everything else get advice.
|
How to effectively build a collection of books, manuscripts and ephemera
- By Bruce McKinney
Ephemera and paintings work well together.
Defining collection parameters: The collecting world is divided into subject-defined and personally-defined collections. The best way I can explain subject defined collecting is by example. You can collect all the plays of Shakespeare, all the speeches of Lincoln, every book listed in the Zamorano 80, all the Grabhorn or Arion imprints. The operative world is all in subject-defined collections.
Personally defined collections are more ambitious, require more work and discipline. Here, starting with an idea and often with a date range, you evaluate all material that, from the time you begin, appears at traditional auctions, on listing sites and on eBay. It sounds daunting but is not. You can do this yourself using services provided by individual selling sites or use our MatchMaker service to scan all selling categories automatically every day for fresh material posted over-night. About 100,000 items are posted daily and the best materials disappear quickly, often without a trace. Without a way to screen new arrivals many opportunities and bargains are lost. Fortunately, even with a broad service such as MatchMaker, most collecting concepts generate less than 150 matches a day, enough to provide perspective, but which take only a few minutes to evaluate. In a few months you begin to know your area of interest well and can start to buy efficiently.
How will we buy? There are six ways: [1] from dealers, [2] from listing sites, [3] at auction, [4] at private sales, [5] on eBay and [6] at shows.
Dealers who issue catalogues will be helpful and you'll be interested to receive these mailings. Some of the smartest people in the book field issue detailed catalogues and you'll learn a great deal about material from them. Most dealers will provide perspective and advice if you are their client. If you believe their opinion is valuable be prepared to also occasionally buy from them. Other dealers list on the various selling sites. There are 22,000 active listing dealers today. About 500 issue catalogues of one type or another.
The listing sites are your next source. For old and rare books www.abebooks.com is the largest. It is approaching one hundred million items listed. Another is www.alibris.com and a third is Choosebooks [www.choosebooks.com]. Among the association sites www.ilab-lila.com is very good. As an alternative to looking at individual sites you can use a search engine that looks at many sites at the same time. www.addall.com is quite good. Initially, these sites are going to worry you because the scale of material available is daunting. Don't worry, most of what you are going to buy isn't going to always be available. In many cases, what you want to collect will only occasionally be available. On the listing sites there are of course great bargains and random rare material. In time you'll recognize these items. Initially you need to learn to see the market in a new way.
|
How to effectively build a collection of books, manuscripts and ephemera
- By Bruce McKinney
An effective collection includes material from many disciplines.
One of the best ways to see the market is through traditional auctions. This past year more than 160,000 auction lots were posted on AE several weeks ahead of their sale, the realized prices added following the sale and the full lot description and price then posted to the AED [Americana Exchange Database], where this material becomes searchable along with 1.3 million other records to provide a history of transactions for almost all important printed material.
This material provides a cash history. For collectors whose collecting criteria includes fair value the AED is the single best source for establishing what the value is. Using it you buy the bargains and sometimes successfully negotiate with sellers to achieve a compromise price that gets you the item that you want within reach of what you believe to be fair market value.
There are also private sales. You'll find them randomly advertised in local newspapers and on the internet. Included among them are traditional auctions that sell the occasional important item but do not document their sales. Auction houses are moving onto the net but most are certainly not yet there. Pursuing such material requires patience and luck but occasionally yields some great finds.
eBay is a world unto itself. It is the world's garage sale. There are bargains available every day. It is also a science. If you become an eBay buyer it will change your collecting parameters. All the other sites sell mainly documented material, that is, material that has been written about and explained in various bibliographies. eBay of course has documented material but its strength is in the undocumented material. It's very challenging but worthwhile.
The final way to find material is at shows. Trade associations hold them as do various show promoters. Every serious collector occasionally attends them. You won't necessarily buy but you will meet dealers and be able to see first hand the relationship between condition description and actual condition. If you are lucky, you'll find one or two dealers with whom to work long term.
Outcomes: Everything you acquire will someday be given away or sold. Yup. Life ends. If you are a great collector you may achieve a bit of immortality by attaching your provenance to material that for a few decades was part of your collection. If you collect well, build skillfully, document and share in time, even if you were always a hard headed negotiator the market may say "Jill and Frank Ross" owned it and remember only good about you. And even 300 years from now, that fact will remain attached to the piece and collectors who won't be born for several hundred years will grow up to appreciate your collecting skills. It won't get you into heaven, but it will get you immortality.
Collecting is a medusa's head of possibilities. The responsibility for understanding the many possible elements lies with the collectors who must, in time, define their scope and scale, find sources, develop skills and, to be very good at it, develop a passion for the material and a love of the search to find it. Today the tools for building intellectually vigorous and visually powerful collections are at hand. It is again Sutter's Mill and the year is 1849. In twenty years today's opportunities will be a memory, the gold nuggets long since collected. For today, the future is still ahead of us and the opportunities to build collections there for the taking.
|