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| Industry View |
Investment Tomes
Thomas J. Healey
02/01/2007
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Like most investments, however, literary classics offer little in the way of
long-term predictability. Consider the dramatic changes in “winners” and
“losers” that the study uncovered from one decade to the next. For example,
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—one of the five poorest performers in the
first decade under review—boasted the top percentage return and the second
highest dollar return in the second decade. Ernest Hemingway found himself in
the highest return group in the 1980s with The Sun Also Rises, only to suffer
the ignominy of sliding into the lowest return slot in the 1990s with For Whom
the Bell Tolls. Indeed, with the exception of The Maltese Falcon, absolutely
none of the top five literary performers in the 1980s repeated in the following
decade. (Click image to enlarge)
What are we to make of this discontinuity? The study hardly
began to pinpoint specific reasons, but my own theory as a longtime collector is
that it underscores the fluid and opportunistic marketplace that exists for rare
books. It is a market in which underachievers can suddenly grow wings—and in
which past performance is no guarantee of future success.Ernest Hemingway found himself in the highest return group in
the 1980s with The Sun Also Rises, only
to suffer the ignominy of sliding into the lowest return slot in the 1990s with For Whom the Bell
Tolls. |
Yet another interesting phenomenon for investment-minded
collectors to consider is the appreciation potential of first books by emerging
authors, which tend to have relatively small print runs. There are no better
examples than ‘A’ Is for
Alibi and Tom Clancy’s The Hunt for Red October, first-time books that appreciated more than 50 percent each year from
1982 to 1991.The Genre Winners
There is another way to measure the investment value of rare
books, and that is by literary genre. In the 1980s, the books with the best
returns were adventure (20.4 percent), mystery (19.4 percent) and black
literature (19.1 percent). In the 1990s, the best-performing genres were mystery
(14.5 percent), black literature (13.9 percent) and children’s (12.6 percent).
Taking the broad 20-year sweep, the biggest winner by genre was black literature
(17.5 percent), followed by mystery (16.4 percent) and children’s (13.8
percent).  Is this study likely to touch off a groundswell movement
of rare book collecting? That would certainly be a stretch. But the study’s
results—limited though they may be—are interesting food for thought. Additional
research by others might help further illuminate the investment potential of
this medium, much like the attention that has been given to great works of art
as putatively shrewd investment vehicles. (Click image to enlarge)
In the final analysis, though, dependable yields and high rates
of returns are far from being the primary drivers of serious book collectors
like myself. The real impetus comes from perusing the book bins of some
backwater shop in an unfamiliar city, and stumbling across an original version
of a great literary masterpiece. That’s the real thrill—and payoff—for rare book collectors.
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