“There’s less collectors and there’s less participation in terms of people coming to book fairs,” says Gannon. “Many [rare] bookstores have closed up and gone to online-only business, and the reason is that people come into the shops, then go online and search for an item and find it cheaper.”
The internet, Gannon concludes, “made a lot of books that seemed rare [feel] common now.”
Take, for instance, a first printing of the first edition of William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying.
A Faulkner fan comes into a rare book store and sees it offered at $11,000. Instead of simply buying it, the shopper pulls up Abebooks.com, searches for other first editions and finds more than a dozen examples at prices ranging from $1,500 to $12,500.
Not only does the $11,000 volume not sell, the potential buyer might question the logic of buying the book at all.
As a consequence, even before Covid, prices for super-rare objects had begun to rise, and prices for everything else had fallen off a cliff.
“When something is truly rare, you could justify that more,” says Geiger.”So you saw an overall trend of expensive books getting even more expensive, and mid-range books dropping in price.”
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“It could be a $20,000 manuscript that is important within its field, and it could be a $300,000 manuscript that’s important within its field,” Sutherland explains.
And while no single category has done gangbuster business, anything relating to science and math seems to have been doing very, very well during the pandemic. “Wittgenstein, Newton, Darwin,” says Sutherland. “Science has definitely been strong.”