"Sign for it? No, please just pay a stranger to awkwardly place it on the ground in front of my front door. I would appreciate if they sent me a picture of it placed there, for assurance."
I'm guessing they just have 1 set price for all of their items, rare or no. But the shipping method for a $75k book would obviously differ from a $7.50 book!
That one is in mint condition....kind of. It's been rebound in a signed binding by Rivière & Son; it doesn't have the original cloth case Chapman and Hall issued in 1843. It was probably rebound by a wealthy victorian collector or something. So really that one is actually more expensive than it should be. It's kind of overpriced if you're a Dickens Collector; they'd want the original binding. But, if you're a collector that wants something in good condition and looks pretty, maybe you'd buy it.
It absolutely kills me that the photographer is putting their grubby fingers all over the book in the photos. If you're holding a rare piece of literary history that I could get a mortgage against put some damn gloves on.
I know it seems counter intuitive, but it is proper handling technique to use clean dry hands on old books and manuscripts.
From the Library of Congress website:
“Before handling any collection item, thoroughly wash and dry hands. Contrary to widespread belief, gloves are not necessarily recommended to handle rare or valuable books. Gloves (nitrile or vinyl) are always recommended if there is reason to suspect a health hazard (e.g., mold, arsenic). Clean gloves (nitrile, vinyl, or lint-free cotton) are also recommended when handling photograph albums/photographs or books with metal or ivory parts. Aside from those specific situations, it is generally preferable to handle your books with clean hands, washed with soap and thoroughly dried, rather than with gloves.”
For what it's worth, I work in medicine and gloves are also not recommended as they are proven to increase infection risk rather than decrease it. Disinfect and sanitise before all moments of patient contact, but other than that, no gloves. It confuses our patients and we have been met with some hostility for it, but the average person genuinely doesn't know.
And because it will never ever sell for anywhere near $75k. Anyone trying to drop tens of thousands of dollars on an original A Christmas Carol, is gonna want an actual original (not a rebound one) which they can easily find for less than half that price.
For an early edition of a book that beautiful, apparently crafted extremely well even for its time, that is also a foundational work of Western Christmas tradition with hundreds of adaptations over the years and continuing productions being put on to this day... $75k honestly seems pretty reasonable. Obviously out of range for the vast majority of people, but well within the reach of a "normal" rich person.
It’s so influential it basically killed the tradition of involving Yuletide spirits in Christmas stories. Everyone read it and said “well this genre has peaked.”
Books are made to last and mass-produced, they don't reach the extreme prices of some other collectible categories with unique items or very limited surviving examples except in the rare case of being individually produced or exceedingly rare + desirable. $75k is actually a ridiculous asking price for an unsigned copy, that's twice as much as a high end copy (which a rebound copy is not) will sell for.
Part of the reason books have a hard time reaching a certain plateau is because a popular enough title like A Christmas Carol is reprinted heavily and continuously for nearly 200 years. There are so many options on the low and middle end market, and very few customers willing to pay the premium for a first state copy when prices drop off by thousands for the immediately following printings where the difference is incredibly minor live it saying "one" instead of "1" somewhere and having slightly different endpaper shades.
You mean the marbling on the endpapers? It's the same process you've probably seen videos of hydro dipping where they put dyes on top of water and dip paper into it.
That's a very basic custom leather binding, there are binders in every major city who still do exactly that kind of work today. Hell Riviere is still in operation (now Bayntun-Riviere) so that exact bindery is still binding books with that style.
One of the most expensive items lost in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, too. Charles Lauriat, a book seller, boarded with Charles Dickens’s own annotated first edition copy from 1844. It had handwritten notes, rough illustrations and other changes that Charles Dickens was making, as well as notes about his 1844 copyright legal battle.
Lauriat threw the briefcase containing the book into a lifeboat of women and children, then jumped in himself and helped lower the boat. Unfortunately, it got snagged on a davit as the Lusitania sank and almost everyone in the lifeboat was pulled down with the ship. Lauriat survived but the almost priceless book was lost.
Yeah he actually was up on deck, then remembered it, rushed down to his cabin to get it, the power went out so he had to use matches to find it, and finally he made it up on deck like 6 minutes before the ship sank. The lifeboat he boarded was almost level with the water when he jumped in. Lusitania sank in 18 minutes so that man was on demon time
I could see it making for a fun short. Play up the frenzied comedic angle. Possibly even done in real time.
A final shot as, after the entire ordeal, the briefcase sinks down below the waves. Lauriat, grateful to still be alive, is nonetheless only able to watch helplessly.
Agreed. If I was rich I'd buy some just to put on display on a bookshelf, but with the internet, there is no modern need for them. The only exception might be legal or medical encyclopedias. If you are in those fields, it makes sense to buy them.
My dad became a lawyer right before the internet took over, and he had dozens of those giant, legal books. I can only imagine the thousands and thousands of dollars that his firm must have spent on them. Eventually he got rid of them all.
I just remember looking at them as I stood in his office, seeing them take up an entire wall of shelves, books from the top corner off of the room to the bottom corner on the opposite wall.
Oh, I am sure they still do. I just haven’t been in his office in many years. And in his later years he has become a man of few possessions, so I’d be surprised if he still had more than 5-6 lying around.
I remember getting an encyclopedia from the grocery store as a kid. My mom would buy her groceries and every month another letter came out and we could get it when she had bought enough. I read each one all the way through more or less because what else were you going to do in 1983 at 8 years old.
I totally understand reading an encyclopedia like it’s a novel. It’s not too much different than looking up something online, then something else catches your eye then you go down a whole rabbit whole.
There was one from the 1790s recently that was about £8. A lot of the mid-19th century ones onwards sell for £3 or £4 (unless they're rare and collectable).
Damn I forgot about Europeans haha yeah I guess yall would have access to more history than someone from Texas where I live, but from other comments it looks like older books can go for cheaper than I thought
Now that I think about it, the oldest book I own is in that age range. A Jules Vern book printed in the 20s. I am sure the big money is in the original editions though.
They didn't have movies or video games back then so the big portable, consumable media of the era was books. So they're kind of like DVDs of popular movies - they made so many of them that until the lifespan of the materials started to come up and they physically start disappearing, they are too common to be worth much because you can always find another copy in another attic, basement, or second hand store.
Or it's just one of the vast majority of 100 year old books that aren't worth any more than 20 bucks. If it doesn't have a very obvious date that's more likely than not.
This book has not been treated well, lots of faded things on the spine, so that's probably one of them. I had to look it up to figure out how old it is and it looks pretty close to the first edition ones for sale.
You could fill entire shelves with mid 19th century books without spending more than a couple bucks a piece without putting a ton of effort into it. This is well into the mass production era of books, there are infinite books of no monetary value still around. Hell I have signed 19th century books that were a couple bucks, and they're not worth any more than that. Even 17th and 18th century books aren’t inherently valuable due to age, just not quite laying around for a buck levels, you might have to break out a 20.
Nah it absolutely depends. Go to a zillion second hand bookstores and you’ll see books from then and earlier that are obscure and bashed up and cost almost nothing.
They printed a LOT of books even then and it’s not like they’ve all been burnt or are all in high demand.
Nah i have some books from the late 1800s/early 1900s that didn't cost me much. Most expensive one I have is a 1903 copy of the Thomas Jefferson Bible and it was like $50.
I have an early edition of Ulysses (not the Paris first print) I got for a fiver about twenty years ago. Found a train ticket from the 30s still in it as a bookmark as well.
Pretty much all books from that time go for a lot these days
I sell old books for a living and that's definitely not true. We sell plenty 1890s stuff for under 10 bucks. Thinking age equals value is one of the most common mistakes people make with books. There's a ton of fairly worthless 1800s literature in circulation
Probably the most common mistake though is, amusingly, judging a book by its cover: people think pretty half- or full leather binding is automatically valuable. They're definitely pretty, but most of the time barely worth the paper they're printed on
Really depends on the book. There are encyclopedias from the early 1900's you'd have trouble paying someone to take.
People often don't realize how common old books are. You can buy books printed in the 1700s for much less than 100 bucks and even earlier for not much more because there are so many still around. Brattle in Boston has a whole wall of them for something like $15 per volume.
I thought A Christmas Carol was sold to a newspaper and serialised. Surely he'd already made his money and the book was just a way to ensure people owned a copy of the story, more about prestige than profit.
"Dickens turned in 30,000 words in six weeks, conjuring the narrative while taking 15 to 20-mile walks around London during the depths of night in the autumn of 1843. Still, his publishers, unconvinced by the lacklustre sales of Chuzzlewit, refused to cough up for the book, leading Dickens to pay for the printing himself. He didn’t make things easier for anybody by rejecting no fewer than two rounds of endpapers – first a drab olive set, then a jauntier yellow set, which clashed with the title page. The finished book was quite the luxury item: bound in red cloth, pages edged with gilt, it finally completed production two days before publication day on 19 December. Priced at the modern equivalent of £25, it nevertheless captured the hearts of the increasingly Christmas-hungry Victorian middle-class, who snapped up all 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve."
Looks like they pulled that from the Wikipedia page where someone has just applied the CPI index. Inflation indices don't work well over long time periods because the economy has changed so much.
The book sold for 5 shillings but that was a week's wages for many people. Bob Cratchit in the book was on 15s a week as an (underpaid) clerk/junior accountant.
Eventually they did more than ok. Turns out there's an entire region of the Carolinas where a rather sizable number of his descendants are ALL living with a share of the inheritance.
I have a friend who revealed to me that she was taken care of. She was telling me about the estate and how all her relatives had a share of it, and then somewhere along the way she says what her maiden name is. And it takes me a few seconds and then...
Odd, I used to work for the Dickens Museum - all his descendants are thoroughly mapped, he didn't die that long ago. We had no record of any in the Carolinas.
Additionally, the estate is long since dispersed. While his descendants are mostly well to do, generational wealth is powerful, there was no Dickens trust of that sort.
He had a younger brother who emigrated to America, but received no financial support from his English family as he abandoned his wife in England to take up with an American woman. He died in his thirties. Again, though, this was less than 200 years ago - not exactly ancient history.
And 'sizable amount'? He has dozens of living descendants, not hundreds.
But this isn't like claiming descent from Charlemagne. His last grandchild died in the 1960s. There are about 50 living descendants and they all know each other.
Yeah Dickens was all about that serialization and paid by the word. Which is why his chapters end with lame cliffhangers.
But the US pirated the bejesus out of his works, so he had to do speaking tours in the US. Apparently as soon as his works arrived in the US there was a rush to pirate them and resell them.
I swear in my history class they said the publisher of his books sold shitty paperbacks and then came back around door to door collecting those paperbacks and rebinding them into hardcover for a markup.
He did. His literary concern with poverty came in no small part from his love for money and luxury and the fine things in life. He would walk around London making sketches, in writing, about expensive clothes and food and sights and smells of riches. The man worked like a madman to approximate a luxurious life where he could, and was terrified of not being able to.
Tbf he spent his teenage years with most of his family in debtors' prison and him working ten hour shifts to pay off his father's debts it's understandable he would have an extreme fear of poverty
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” David Copperfield.
Maybe the man who wrote that was cautious about milking it for every penny...
Maybe he even thought long and hard about being obsessed with money and came to the conclusion that there must be more to life. I mean, it is casually mentioned in the story if I remember correctly.
I'm a writer, and I don't think any book will ever be more fundamentally well-structured to maximize emotional approval.
It's about an everyman (you) who's overworked, and has to take care of the smallest most crippled boy ever (awww), and your greedy boss (boo) is tormented by spirits to see how awful he is (good), turn a new leaf, and give you a raise (yay).
Which is why it's under not infrequent legal attack from publishers who think they have a right to publish works in public commons to make cash, but they shouldn't be available for free.
We have a first edition that is a family heirloom, my grandmother got it as a gift from one of the ladies she sourced fabric for, this was probably more than a century ago at this point. She passed it to a cousin in her will who has continued to care for but, as per her request, use it as a book. She would always read from it every Christmas, both to make sure there wasn't anything wrong with it and because "Books are to be read", lots of good memories sitting around with the other kids listening to her read through it and call out the spelling/meaning of works to help us learn.
It has been appraised as being worth several thousand at least, probably closer to ten thousand or more at this point, but I think it would be the last thing considered to sell if it was needed. She had a lot of other rare books that got willed to said cousin, she and my grandfather weren't collecting them because they were rare though they just really loved reading.
Probably the multi-colored ink was one of the big expenses. Faulkner couldn't even convince a publisher to do The Sound and the Fury with a different color ink for each perspective like he wanted the better part of a century later with significant increases in printing technology and cheaper inks.
Kinda cuts against the pop info tidbit that gets shared about it just being a pulp thing he churned out to make some quick cash because he wife was spending too much cash.
I thought it was a serial. He got paid by the newspaper. But it makes sense he wanted archival quality printings for something he knew would outlive him.
Dam I bet those early editions are worth a lot though.
Just looked for first editions and yup, tens of thousands.
$75k for this one in mint condition. https://www.abebooks.com/first-edition/DICKENS-CHRISTMAS-CAROL-1st-Edition-Charles/22693856336/bd
Tbf he was right, it’s quite pretty
$3.00 for shipping?! Forget it.
That's how they get you.
you need to spend $100,000 for free shipping
You would be CrAzY to mail that for $3
“Yello- Yes I’ll take one first edition print of The Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens.”
“…”
“Certified freight crate?! Who am I, Croesus? Just shove it in a Manila envelope with bubble wrap lining.”
Bubble wrap!?
Well look at mister thousandaire over here.
Double layer Amazon plastic envelope is good enough for my coffee filters, theyre good enough here!
"Sign for it? No, please just pay a stranger to awkwardly place it on the ground in front of my front door. I would appreciate if they sent me a picture of it placed there, for assurance."
And the porch pirate will be like "ew a book".
That's worth a $200 flight.
Handcuffed to the delivery person with two keys for the briefcase, one with the delivery person and one shipped to the buyer.
Yeah, that really stuck out to me. Shipping should either be free, or $50-500 (I dunno what’s appropriate for shipping this but it wouldn’t be cheap.)
I'm guessing they just have 1 set price for all of their items, rare or no. But the shipping method for a $75k book would obviously differ from a $7.50 book!
Yeah, the latter would be shipped freight for $0.60.
That one is in mint condition....kind of. It's been rebound in a signed binding by Rivière & Son; it doesn't have the original cloth case Chapman and Hall issued in 1843. It was probably rebound by a wealthy victorian collector or something. So really that one is actually more expensive than it should be. It's kind of overpriced if you're a Dickens Collector; they'd want the original binding. But, if you're a collector that wants something in good condition and looks pretty, maybe you'd buy it.
So this is what it really looks like in its original cover.
That’s so pretty, what a lovely material
You can find facsimile bindings of the first edition. It’s the one I have and they’re not expensive. A beautiful little book.
ok i was going to say, im pretty sure my parents have one that looks like this at their home
oh jeez thanks for that. I was afraid my broke ass family missed out; as a kid I got it from the thrift store and it looked just like that original.
Huh... They kinda Tim Burton-ified the font.
Original. Reproduction.
I feel like I've been staring at every little squiggle of every letter for the past 5 minutes and they look identical to me.
Also gorgeous.
Most books in that sort of cover were intended to be rebound in leather or similar anyway, so I wonder why he was so adamant on it being perfect.
God if I had Stupid money I'd buy so many pretty books.
It absolutely kills me that the photographer is putting their grubby fingers all over the book in the photos. If you're holding a rare piece of literary history that I could get a mortgage against put some damn gloves on.
I know it seems counter intuitive, but it is proper handling technique to use clean dry hands on old books and manuscripts. From the Library of Congress website:
“Before handling any collection item, thoroughly wash and dry hands. Contrary to widespread belief, gloves are not necessarily recommended to handle rare or valuable books. Gloves (nitrile or vinyl) are always recommended if there is reason to suspect a health hazard (e.g., mold, arsenic). Clean gloves (nitrile, vinyl, or lint-free cotton) are also recommended when handling photograph albums/photographs or books with metal or ivory parts. Aside from those specific situations, it is generally preferable to handle your books with clean hands, washed with soap and thoroughly dried, rather than with gloves.”
Huh, wow, I genuinely didn't know that.
For what it's worth, I work in medicine and gloves are also not recommended as they are proven to increase infection risk rather than decrease it. Disinfect and sanitise before all moments of patient contact, but other than that, no gloves. It confuses our patients and we have been met with some hostility for it, but the average person genuinely doesn't know.
In the case of books I believe it’s mostly due to the higher chance of accidentally tearing something.
Gloves can make you clumsy and cloth gloves can snag on things.
It technically isn't worth $75k yet because it isn't yet sold.
And because it will never ever sell for anywhere near $75k. Anyone trying to drop tens of thousands of dollars on an original A Christmas Carol, is gonna want an actual original (not a rebound one) which they can easily find for less than half that price.
For an early edition of a book that beautiful, apparently crafted extremely well even for its time, that is also a foundational work of Western Christmas tradition with hundreds of adaptations over the years and continuing productions being put on to this day... $75k honestly seems pretty reasonable. Obviously out of range for the vast majority of people, but well within the reach of a "normal" rich person.
It’s so influential it basically killed the tradition of involving Yuletide spirits in Christmas stories. Everyone read it and said “well this genre has peaked.”
Books are made to last and mass-produced, they don't reach the extreme prices of some other collectible categories with unique items or very limited surviving examples except in the rare case of being individually produced or exceedingly rare + desirable. $75k is actually a ridiculous asking price for an unsigned copy, that's twice as much as a high end copy (which a rebound copy is not) will sell for.
Part of the reason books have a hard time reaching a certain plateau is because a popular enough title like A Christmas Carol is reprinted heavily and continuously for nearly 200 years. There are so many options on the low and middle end market, and very few customers willing to pay the premium for a first state copy when prices drop off by thousands for the immediately following printings where the difference is incredibly minor live it saying "one" instead of "1" somewhere and having slightly different endpaper shades.
That seems really low. If I were rich, I'd consider that a real bargain. A true treasure!
If I was a sculptor, heh, but then again no
Or man who makes potions in the travellin' show...
If I were rich,I probably wouldn’t have read Dickens.
That is very significantly overpriced.
That is gorgeous.
If thriftbooks ever issues me a $75,000 free book credit for my bday rather than $6 im all over it.
And it still costs 3 dollars to ship it.
With $3 shipping… are they mad??
But only $3 bucks for shipping your $75,000 book, that’s a steal!
That's beautiful. Is there a word for that pattern in the first page?
You mean the marbling on the endpapers? It's the same process you've probably seen videos of hydro dipping where they put dyes on top of water and dip paper into it.
Only $3 shipping. Not a bad deal.
Thats a good looking book.
3$ shipping what a deal!
3 dollars for shipping tho. Can’t afford that. Good deal if free shipping.
Yeah but shipping is insane
damn, $3 for shipping.
$9 shipping? I'm out.
$9 shipping tho… on second thoughts I don’t think I’ll get it.
Conditions not mint even.
That's asking price, not getting price.
Why don’t they make leather bound books with that style anymore?
That's a very basic custom leather binding, there are binders in every major city who still do exactly that kind of work today. Hell Riviere is still in operation (now Bayntun-Riviere) so that exact bindery is still binding books with that style.
$3 shipping kills that deal.
LOL, 75K selling price but only $3 for shipping
Plus the $3 for shipping!
if you wait til after Christmas it’ll be way cheaper 😝
Only 3 bucks for shipping on a 75k book. Savings!!
Only $3 for shipping too, that’s a steal!
... I'll just watch the Muppet one.
One of the most expensive items lost in the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, too. Charles Lauriat, a book seller, boarded with Charles Dickens’s own annotated first edition copy from 1844. It had handwritten notes, rough illustrations and other changes that Charles Dickens was making, as well as notes about his 1844 copyright legal battle.
Lauriat threw the briefcase containing the book into a lifeboat of women and children, then jumped in himself and helped lower the boat. Unfortunately, it got snagged on a davit as the Lusitania sank and almost everyone in the lifeboat was pulled down with the ship. Lauriat survived but the almost priceless book was lost.
His life was more important but DAM. That's like losing a Van Gogh painting.
Yeah he actually was up on deck, then remembered it, rushed down to his cabin to get it, the power went out so he had to use matches to find it, and finally he made it up on deck like 6 minutes before the ship sank. The lifeboat he boarded was almost level with the water when he jumped in. Lusitania sank in 18 minutes so that man was on demon time
That’s actually nuts. Like a crazy movie
I could see it making for a fun short. Play up the frenzied comedic angle. Possibly even done in real time.
A final shot as, after the entire ordeal, the briefcase sinks down below the waves. Lauriat, grateful to still be alive, is nonetheless only able to watch helplessly.
Another famous bookseller/publisher/writer Elbert Hubbard (and his wife), founder of the Roycroft art collective, however did not survive.
I believe quite a few other people also did not survive, but don't quote me on that.
Possibly, those are the only ones I know of specifically.
But importantly, a lot of people did survive the sinking of the Lusitania, including 763 who were on the boat and over 1.7 billion people who weren't.
Pretty much all books from that time go for a lot these days, hell even encyclopedias from the early 1900s go for a lot
Encyclopedias from 2025 go for a lot hahaha. They aren't cheap if you are getting a full volume set.
Encyclopedias are beautiful, fantastic books. I’m so glad they still exist, even if kids aren’t out there using them in schools anymore.
I need to get myself a physical set in the next few years, before some idiot decides to start writing them with AI.
Kinda regretting throwing out all my grandparent's World Book sets in 2005 now...
Agreed. If I was rich I'd buy some just to put on display on a bookshelf, but with the internet, there is no modern need for them. The only exception might be legal or medical encyclopedias. If you are in those fields, it makes sense to buy them.
My dad became a lawyer right before the internet took over, and he had dozens of those giant, legal books. I can only imagine the thousands and thousands of dollars that his firm must have spent on them. Eventually he got rid of them all. I just remember looking at them as I stood in his office, seeing them take up an entire wall of shelves, books from the top corner off of the room to the bottom corner on the opposite wall.
I worked for a library software company and a law firm, law firms still have huge catalogs of books.
Oh, I am sure they still do. I just haven’t been in his office in many years. And in his later years he has become a man of few possessions, so I’d be surprised if he still had more than 5-6 lying around.
I remember getting an encyclopedia from the grocery store as a kid. My mom would buy her groceries and every month another letter came out and we could get it when she had bought enough. I read each one all the way through more or less because what else were you going to do in 1983 at 8 years old.
I totally understand reading an encyclopedia like it’s a novel. It’s not too much different than looking up something online, then something else catches your eye then you go down a whole rabbit whole.
Definitely not all books. I work part time in a charity book shop, they regularly sell 200+ year old books very cheaply.
What’s cheap to you?
There was one from the 1790s recently that was about £8. A lot of the mid-19th century ones onwards sell for £3 or £4 (unless they're rare and collectable).
Damn I forgot about Europeans haha yeah I guess yall would have access to more history than someone from Texas where I live, but from other comments it looks like older books can go for cheaper than I thought
Perhaps less of them have reached Texas than where I am. Quite a few get bought by American tourists though, so they may end up there eventually.
I got a book thats 100 yeas old for like 20 bucks at a sci fi convention once, don't think the seller knew its age despite the old look.
Now that I think about it, the oldest book I own is in that age range. A Jules Vern book printed in the 20s. I am sure the big money is in the original editions though.
They didn't have movies or video games back then so the big portable, consumable media of the era was books. So they're kind of like DVDs of popular movies - they made so many of them that until the lifespan of the materials started to come up and they physically start disappearing, they are too common to be worth much because you can always find another copy in another attic, basement, or second hand store.
Or it's just one of the vast majority of 100 year old books that aren't worth any more than 20 bucks. If it doesn't have a very obvious date that's more likely than not.
I checked and it's a 1st edition version of Men Like Gods by H. G. Wells.
So then definitely no way to miss the 1923 printed in it.
This book has not been treated well, lots of faded things on the spine, so that's probably one of them. I had to look it up to figure out how old it is and it looks pretty close to the first edition ones for sale.
You could fill entire shelves with mid 19th century books without spending more than a couple bucks a piece without putting a ton of effort into it. This is well into the mass production era of books, there are infinite books of no monetary value still around. Hell I have signed 19th century books that were a couple bucks, and they're not worth any more than that. Even 17th and 18th century books aren’t inherently valuable due to age, just not quite laying around for a buck levels, you might have to break out a 20.
bout tree fiddy
Best I can do is 2 bees and an onion belt
Nah it absolutely depends. Go to a zillion second hand bookstores and you’ll see books from then and earlier that are obscure and bashed up and cost almost nothing.
They printed a LOT of books even then and it’s not like they’ve all been burnt or are all in high demand.
Same in thrift stores. I used to see late 19th century books at Salvation Army all the time for like $2.
Nah i have some books from the late 1800s/early 1900s that didn't cost me much. Most expensive one I have is a 1903 copy of the Thomas Jefferson Bible and it was like $50.
I have an early edition of Ulysses (not the Paris first print) I got for a fiver about twenty years ago. Found a train ticket from the 30s still in it as a bookmark as well.
How far did the previous owner get through it before giving up?
From memory it was relatively far, the newspaper chapter (7, I think)!
This isn't even kind of true. The vast majority of books from the 19th century or early 20th century aren't worth the cover price of a new paperback.
I sell old books for a living and that's definitely not true. We sell plenty 1890s stuff for under 10 bucks. Thinking age equals value is one of the most common mistakes people make with books. There's a ton of fairly worthless 1800s literature in circulation
Probably the most common mistake though is, amusingly, judging a book by its cover: people think pretty half- or full leather binding is automatically valuable. They're definitely pretty, but most of the time barely worth the paper they're printed on
Really depends on the book. There are encyclopedias from the early 1900's you'd have trouble paying someone to take.
People often don't realize how common old books are. You can buy books printed in the 1700s for much less than 100 bucks and even earlier for not much more because there are so many still around. Brattle in Boston has a whole wall of them for something like $15 per volume.
So what you are saying is, you have.. great expectations?
Even funnier when we see your username. Bravo!
Also, the book may not have been as successful if the early versions weren't bound so well. He may have known what he was doing.
No doubt. Kind of ironic there's a five figure price tag on the book about how hoarding wealth makes one feel guilty and all that
I thought A Christmas Carol was sold to a newspaper and serialised. Surely he'd already made his money and the book was just a way to ensure people owned a copy of the story, more about prestige than profit.
From a "Penguin books" article:
"Dickens turned in 30,000 words in six weeks, conjuring the narrative while taking 15 to 20-mile walks around London during the depths of night in the autumn of 1843. Still, his publishers, unconvinced by the lacklustre sales of Chuzzlewit, refused to cough up for the book, leading Dickens to pay for the printing himself. He didn’t make things easier for anybody by rejecting no fewer than two rounds of endpapers – first a drab olive set, then a jauntier yellow set, which clashed with the title page. The finished book was quite the luxury item: bound in red cloth, pages edged with gilt, it finally completed production two days before publication day on 19 December. Priced at the modern equivalent of £25, it nevertheless captured the hearts of the increasingly Christmas-hungry Victorian middle-class, who snapped up all 6,000 copies by Christmas Eve."
https://www.penguin.co.uk/discover/articles/charles-dickens-a-christmas-carol-story-of
£25 for a fancy hardcover isn't bad at all.
Yeah that’s crazy inexpensive. I’ve paid more than that for paperback smut. I thought that was the original price but that’s the modern day cost.
And that's why it sold out in just a few days. It was reprinted 11 times the following year.
But the first edition did have problems with the end papers.
In 1850, you could buy a horse for £25.
Modern day equivalent
In 1850, you could hire a bob cratchitt for 2/3rds of a year for that much!
Of course the book didn't cost that much. That's about how much it equates to today, which is crazy cheap when you consider the quality.
Looks like they pulled that from the Wikipedia page where someone has just applied the CPI index. Inflation indices don't work well over long time periods because the economy has changed so much.
The book sold for 5 shillings but that was a week's wages for many people. Bob Cratchit in the book was on 15s a week as an (underpaid) clerk/junior accountant.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Christmas_Carol
https://victorianweb.org/economics/wages2.html
Converted to Dollars and adjusted for inflation it'd be about $41.60 now.
The man new he had a hit.
All 6,000 copies sold in the first 4 days after publication, not bad for 1843.
Iirc A Christmas Carol is literally the only Dickens novel that wasn't serialized.
Eventually they did more than ok. Turns out there's an entire region of the Carolinas where a rather sizable number of his descendants are ALL living with a share of the inheritance.
I have a friend who revealed to me that she was taken care of. She was telling me about the estate and how all her relatives had a share of it, and then somewhere along the way she says what her maiden name is. And it takes me a few seconds and then...
"Dickens... you mean like the author?!"
Yup.
Odd, I used to work for the Dickens Museum - all his descendants are thoroughly mapped, he didn't die that long ago. We had no record of any in the Carolinas.
Additionally, the estate is long since dispersed. While his descendants are mostly well to do, generational wealth is powerful, there was no Dickens trust of that sort.
He had a younger brother who emigrated to America, but received no financial support from his English family as he abandoned his wife in England to take up with an American woman. He died in his thirties. Again, though, this was less than 200 years ago - not exactly ancient history.
And 'sizable amount'? He has dozens of living descendants, not hundreds.
Somebody lying on the internet??? How could they
They might have been lied to, to be fair.
But this isn't like claiming descent from Charlemagne. His last grandchild died in the 1960s. There are about 50 living descendants and they all know each other.
Yeah Dickens was all about that serialization and paid by the word. Which is why his chapters end with lame cliffhangers.
But the US pirated the bejesus out of his works, so he had to do speaking tours in the US. Apparently as soon as his works arrived in the US there was a rush to pirate them and resell them.
I swear in my history class they said the publisher of his books sold shitty paperbacks and then came back around door to door collecting those paperbacks and rebinding them into hardcover for a markup.
Wouldn't be too surprised if that's true. Printing was expensive it was the 1800s
The man had standards
He did. His literary concern with poverty came in no small part from his love for money and luxury and the fine things in life. He would walk around London making sketches, in writing, about expensive clothes and food and sights and smells of riches. The man worked like a madman to approximate a luxurious life where he could, and was terrified of not being able to.
Tbf he spent his teenage years with most of his family in debtors' prison and him working ten hour shifts to pay off his father's debts it's understandable he would have an extreme fear of poverty
Debtor's prison was no joke too
Getting Rockinghorse vibes here.
“Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure nineteen nineteen and six, result happiness. Annual income twenty pounds, annual expenditure twenty pounds ought and six, result misery.” David Copperfield.
And he was a total baller fighting those ghosts when the Doctor showed up.
I mean, nice things are nice.
Who doesn't like nice things?
Maybe the man who wrote that was cautious about milking it for every penny...
Maybe he even thought long and hard about being obsessed with money and came to the conclusion that there must be more to life. I mean, it is casually mentioned in the story if I remember correctly.
This is probably more projection than anything, but my guess is that he expected it to live forever and deserved to be presented accordingly.
Before the Blue Monday 12", there was Dickens
That dude was crap at managing his finances, just like Mark Twain.
Watch “The Man Who Invented Christmas”
Love that movie, underrated Christmas movie
I'm a writer, and I don't think any book will ever be more fundamentally well-structured to maximize emotional approval.
It's about an everyman (you) who's overworked, and has to take care of the smallest most crippled boy ever (awww), and your greedy boss (boo) is tormented by spirits to see how awful he is (good), turn a new leaf, and give you a raise (yay).
It's brilliant.
And to think, 160 years later, we'd watch the main character getting a blow job on TV.
The Chair Company? Fucking great show.
No one is singing songs or dancing on Dickens's coffin.
Shouldn't have paid for the coke in Scrooge money.
Here I am reading the ebook version from Gutenberg.org. (But at least I insist on serif.)
heyo for gutenberg.org - that project is amazing work
Which is why it's under not infrequent legal attack from publishers who think they have a right to publish works in public commons to make cash, but they shouldn't be available for free.
Capitalists gonna seek rent. Like the rain that falls or the sun that shines. Fending off torts is the modern way.
Dude was the Steely Dan of the 1800's
Im listening to Chain Lightning right now while reading this lol
It feeels sooooooooo
good
He also was already quite successful and had more on the way. He was set
Are they real leather?
They’re real Dickens.
Are they leather- bound pounds?
Dicken's great great grandson Gerald performs a Christmas Carol around the United States!
Over a century later his work would be improved with the addition of singing puppets
A lot like Miley Cyrus's tour for Bangerz.
i wish manufacturers were more like Dickens today tbh.
Worth it.
We have a first edition that is a family heirloom, my grandmother got it as a gift from one of the ladies she sourced fabric for, this was probably more than a century ago at this point. She passed it to a cousin in her will who has continued to care for but, as per her request, use it as a book. She would always read from it every Christmas, both to make sure there wasn't anything wrong with it and because "Books are to be read", lots of good memories sitting around with the other kids listening to her read through it and call out the spelling/meaning of works to help us learn.
It has been appraised as being worth several thousand at least, probably closer to ten thousand or more at this point, but I think it would be the last thing considered to sell if it was needed. She had a lot of other rare books that got willed to said cousin, she and my grandfather weren't collecting them because they were rare though they just really loved reading.
That’s why he licensed it to the muppets, in hopes that their star power could help him break even.
Edit: wait, this isn’t r/shittymoviedetails?
Quality over quantity.
I’m curious if more copies of A Christmas Carol exist than the average works of that time due to the way it was prepared.
Fastidious
going full-on 7th grade English
Many believe it was causef by his last name
Now you can pick up a copy for only $75K. https://share.google/lWCpYIboTfNra2kkA
Why's he looking at me like I'm the one that told him not to worry so much about the binding?
Gangster
So a man focused on quality over profit?
Probably the multi-colored ink was one of the big expenses. Faulkner couldn't even convince a publisher to do The Sound and the Fury with a different color ink for each perspective like he wanted the better part of a century later with significant increases in printing technology and cheaper inks.
Kinda cuts against the pop info tidbit that gets shared about it just being a pulp thing he churned out to make some quick cash because he wife was spending too much cash.
He made more money by touring and acting out his work all over the world
I thought it was a serial. He got paid by the newspaper. But it makes sense he wanted archival quality printings for something he knew would outlive him.
That kinda doesn't sound out of character for him. He knew what he had.
i can’t even imagine, i’m gonna look it up. how’d you even know about this?
Respect that
"It was the best of times. It was the worst of times..."
Money problems plagued his life. He unfortunately inherited his father’s money sense.