An educational and informational site about rare, old and antiquarian books.
When an auction generates astonishing excitement in view of both the quality and quantity of books being offered, the excitement is also reflected in the prices realized. Even if the prices are often unrealistic, for many buyers, the auction remains a remarkable event that is worth the extra expense. High emotions are exactly the ingredients […]
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Rare book sales in the first quarter of every year are usually kept in balance by a slow auction season start on one hand, with two major book fairs on the other. The California International Antiquarian Book Fair, which takes place in February, is the world’s largest, both in terms of attendance and dealer participation. […]
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In terms of total dollars, global auction sales of rare books in the 2nd and 3rd quarters of 2016 were slightly down from the same period in 2015; this year’s $87 million figure, for the period, represents a 6% decrease compared to last year. But a closer look at the top three markets – the […]
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The 2nd quarter of 2016 felt the tremors caused by the UK affirmative Brexit vote. The subsequent drop in the value of the British currency delivered a rather controlled above normal interest in rare books offered in British pounds. Opportunistic buyers took advantage of the lower dollar or euro to sterling exchange rate, mostly through […]
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The Rare Book Sale Monitor (RBSM) has been tracking the sales performance of “blue chips” for some of the major genre of rare books. In addition the author breakdown follows some of the most frequently traded authors of books that are considered rare, in order to track their performance. The sampling selection included in each […]
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Up until recent times, financial advisors have been reluctant to recommend “alternative” types of investments in collectibles, such as rare books, to their customers. Primary concerns circle around the factors of illiquidity, additional costs for storage, insurance, transportation and fraud. The lack of standard quantitative performance measurements comparing the long term returns of financial instruments such as stocks, bonds, […]
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Investment experts engaged in discussions on the topic of making money in collectibles are quick to point out that investing in collectibles may not be a good idea. Their argument mainly focuses on the lack of liquidity and efficiency of the marketplace causing such investments to be highly speculative in nature. Rare Books Digest has […]
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The April 2012 article titled “Adam Smith’s Classic of Modern Economic Thought,” articulated the difficulty in tracking price changes in rare books that exhibit limited transactional activity. The Rare Book Sale Monitor, which tracks monthly sales from multiple channels and compares them to historic quarterly pricing in order to report on significant shifts in pricing […]
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The study of the circumstances in which individual copies of books have changed ownership throughout their lifetime, also referred to as provenance, is quite important to the workings of the Rare Book Sale Monitor (RBSM). Since any tool used in measuring a commodity’s price changes over periods of time is quite vulnerable to sampling errors, […]
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In last quarter’s Rare Book Sale Monitor (RBSM) update we outlined how the RBSM handles the ranking of a book’s condition. In this update we will go over some of the workings of the RBSM engine in ranking special features of an antiquarian volume. More specifically, we will cover modeling aspects used to identify data […]
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