Even as independent bookstores struggle to survive, rare books and manuscripts have proven a rare bright spot in the industry.
“It’s almost like two businesses,” says Kenneth Gloss, the owner of Brattle Book Shop in Boston. “As far as the general used-book business, it’s been off.”
His third floor of rare and antiquarian books, though, is doing nearly as well as it ever has. “People are at home, the stock market is doing well, so people with spare funds are sitting home, bored and buying a lot of books,” Gloss says.
The same phenomenon has occurred in categories as disparate as jewelry and classic cars. Rich people are still rich, and they’re still spending serious amounts of money on things that bring them joy—and perhaps, a return on investment later.
The market for extremely rare books has been healthy for years, dealers say, but quantifying its ups and downs is difficult, because “if you’re talking about a book with many comparables over time, you’ve missed the top of the market,” says Darren Sutherland, a specialist in Bonham’s rare books department in New York.
“It’s so anecdotal,” agrees Christina Geiger, the head of the books and manuscripts department at Christie’s New York. “Everything depends on the quality of the material.”
Still, consensus among dealers is that the overall market has sustained itself even as the rest of retail has been thrown into turmoil, and that the peak of the market has soared past many participants’ expectations.
Take a recent folio of Shakespeare’s comedies, histories, and tragedies that just sold at Christie’s.
Known as the “First Folio” because it’s the first recorded compilation of the bard’s works to be printed, the volume was published in 1623, seven years after Shakespeare’s death. Christie’s folio had a presale estimate of $4 million to $6 million. After a bidding war between three parties, it sold for $10 million.
“I’m not surprised that we set a record for literature in the pandemic,” Geiger says. “It just does feel like that’s part of the trend of people retreating into their books.”