TBO.com - Tampa Bay Online
Rare Reads
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Published: December 23, 2007
TAMPA - You can buy a Hummer and a Prius for the price of some rare books.
But price doesn't seem to faze the truly driven bibliophile, the collector who values a book above any kind of car.
Every week, a New York Times advertisement touts rare finds from Bauman Rare Books, one of the most prestigious rare-book stores in the country.
In recent weeks, Winston Churchill's "History of the English-Speaking Peoples," issued along with the first editions from 1956 to '58, was selling for $16,500; a first edition of Dwight D. Eisenhower's "The White House Years," signed by him, was going for $3,600; while a scarce first edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" from 1883 was priced at $26,000.
Mike Slicker, owner of Lighthouse Books in St. Petersburg, has sold these hard-to-find tomes for more than 30 years. An author's signature can raise the price by thousands of dollars, he says.
And that leads to forgeries, which have shown up on eBay and other Web sites. Keep from getting taken by only buying from reputable book dealers, he says.
"I would be very careful, and I would go to reputable people and get guarantees," he says.
An organizer of the annual Florida Antiquarian Book Fair in St. Petersburg (the next one is March 14-16), Slicker says books that have been made into movies are especially collectible.
That's true of even newer books, such as Cormac McCarthy's "No Country for Old Men." The first edition, published in 2005, jumped to $75 at abebooks.com after the movie came out this year (you can buy the paperback for $8.40 at amazon.com).
Older books that became movies bring even more. A first-edition of Rudyard Kipling's "The Jungle Book," from 1894-95, was on sale at Bauman Rare Books this month for $6,000.
Slicker says rare books have become pricier - and more desirable - in recent years, a fact he attributes to the Internet.
"Most of your regular books are available online," he says. "So it is the unique item, the book with a story, that people are looking for these days."
Karen Haymon Long is the Tribune's book editor.
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