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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;2manycats, post: 4863324, member: 13761&quot;]As a dealer, I am interested in unopened books because it&#039;s proof they haven&#039;t been read - or marked up! Does it affect the value? Not in my experience. It&#039;s a hassle to open them, and has to be done carefully, and it can be difficult to explain to the modern reader that it&#039;s not a flaw.</p><p><br /></p><p>As to the limitation, for a while it was common in France (and, to a lesser extent in Britain &amp; the USA) to do a limited edition of a few dozen or maybe 100 copies on fancy paper - Japanese Vellum is a commonly used term for a fine, heavy paper, but there are others - often signed by the author, or maybe illustrated or in a special binding. The &#039;colophon&#039; is the part of the book that explains this, though not many books have them. A complicated one (and I&#039;ve seen worse) might say, &#039;of this book 25 copies were printed on Japan Vellum, each numbered and signed by the author and bound in full leather, reserved for friends of the author &amp; publisher; and 1000 copies on fine hand-made paper, numbered and bound in half-leather, of which 600 are for sale in Great Britain and 400 for sale in America; and 2000 on plain paper, bound in cloth, unnumbered. </p><p><br /></p><p>In France (and I think most of continental Europe), more than in England, for a long time most books were issued in &#039;wraps&#039;, as this one is, the idea being you would take it to your own binder who would put it in leather to match the rest of your library. Often in the binding process the page edges were trimmed, so the issue of &#039;opening&#039; the pages was side-stepped, but this DOES lower the value - one used to see listings in book catalogs of desirably untrimmed page edges fetching a premium - sometimes the binder got so carried away as to cut off parts of the text![/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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