New Life for “Forgotten Books, Remembered,” Part Two
Showcase interviews bookseller Howard Prouty
ReadInk, located in Los Angeles, specializes in “uncommon, obscure and interesting books with particular interest in American Culture (Popular & Unpopular), Art, Literature, Life and People from the 1920s through the 1960s.” Its motto and operating principle is: “Forgotten books, remembered.” We discovered owner Howard Prouty at this year’s California International Antiquarian Book Fair in Pasadena, then tracked him down for this interview.
Showcase left you cliff-hanging at the end of Part One with the question “Are all old books valuable?” We continue now.
Showcase: Are all old books valuable?
Prouty: In a word, no. A common mistake that people make in evaluating books is to equate age with value. My general rule of thumb is that 90% of the books in any large-ish accumulation will have little or no monetary value. And I use the word “accumulation,” rather than “collection,” quite deliberately, because even people with a large number of books tend to have books that they’ve picked up over the course of their lives for the most mundane of reasons, namely reading. I have nothing against reading, quite the opposite! But the way in which the average person acquires, uses and treats books generally doesn’t result in the building of a “collection” with any significant value. Ah, but you might be thinking: what about the other 10%? Well, that’s the trick: how to determine, out of a given group of, say, 5,000 books, which 500 might be worth some decent money.
Showcase: So how?
Prouty: There are resources, but for most people they’re not very practical. Number one, the information tsunami that one gets from “looking it up on the Internet” is very difficult to navigate and correctly interpret, especially if you have no background or experience in the rare-book field. Number two, that research is extremely time-consuming, and most people looking to offload a large number of books are under some kind of time pressure – they’re moving out of state, or they’ve inherited their parents’ books but they have to be out of the house which is going on the market next week, things like that.
Showcase: So how should people go about selling their books?
Prouty: The first thing they should NOT do is to make a spreadsheet or “catalog” of them. I probably get an unsolicited spreadsheet emailed to me every few months (I’m sure more prominent dealers get them more frequently), and the vast majority of them represent nothing more than a huge waste of the owner’s time. (Note again: 90% vs. 10%.) My advice would be to save yourself all that time and effort by just calling a reputable bookseller or used bookstore, and being prepared to give honest and accurate information. Mostly fiction or non-fiction? Roughly how many? Are they your own books, or did you inherit them? Don’t be offended if booksellers ask a lot of questions: they’re only trying to determine if it’s worth their time and effort to make a house call.
Showcase: How does someone go about finding a reputable bookseller or bookstore?
You’ll have to wait to next month for
magic answer in the conclusion
of our discussion
in Part Three of this three-part interview.