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<p>[QUOTE=&quot;afantiques, post: 12723, member: 25&quot;]<i>Af, the definition has evolved.</i></p><p><br /></p><p>I&#039;m not all that surprised I have the &#039;traditional&#039; view of them.</p><p>When I first started to sell antiquarian books on ebay, supplies of anything from the 16th to 18th Centuries were quite plentiful at book auctions, because of the pickiness of British book dealers.</p><p><br /></p><p>This was the early days of ebay and international selling and I imagine I was the only one at the saleroom who did not have a dusty shop somewhere full of pristine ancient books where a bumped corner or a missing spine label would relegate the volume to the cellar. Lord knows what they did with anything with a detached board or missing endpaper, use them for the cat&#039;s litter tray, possibly.</p><p><br /></p><p>Anyway, the copies that had come out of Lord Whatsit&#039;s country house library and had been untouched for 300 years fetched prices I was not going to pay, but there was treasure indeed in the mixed boxes under the tables, typically &#039;Lot 256, 32 antiquarian and other bindings, etc, as found&#039;</p><p><br /></p><p>The box would contain anything from a coverless breeches Bible</p><p>through 16th C&nbsp; Amsterdam printed religion and history, some shabby 17th and 18th C books, mostly not very interesting, but by no means always (first edition Adam Smith, Wealth of Nations, spine cracked and front board&nbsp; missing) odd volume of Johnson&#039;s Dictionary,&nbsp; early edition, almost invariably volumes through the 18th.C. of the Spectator and similar weekly magazines topped off with some dull 19th C books in fancy presentation bindings.</p><p><br /></p><p>The serious book dealers simply turned up their noses at these heaps of &#039;trash&#039; (but they&#039;d have said &#039;rubbish&#039; ) which most have been why, when there were what I at least considered potentially valuable books, I&#039;d get the whole boxful for maybe £100 or so. I might come away from a sale with ten&nbsp; boxes of what the auctioneer and the pros must have considered floor sweepings.</p><p><br /></p><p>BUT this was a time when US ebay sellers were selling single pages of 16th C books for $10 or more a time (there was only ebay.com in those days) and my vital discovery was that the US market was not snobbish about condition. My early stuff sold very well whatever the condition, maybe $100 for something that cost me the equivalent of $10 and into the higher hundreds for the more famous scruffy volumes. The number of US clergy who had good money to spare from feeding the poor to buy early bibles was surprising.</p><p><br /></p><p>The result was that I&#039;d have most of the contents of those scorned boxes sold long before the next quarterly auction, with the books I considered not worth the effort piled up around the house.</p><p>That was how by exploiting a niche market that the traditional sellers did not have I managed to learn a bit about antiquarian books. The snag was that pretty well all the profits went into building my famous shed to store all the unsalable ones. (Or, more accurately, any I thought boring)</p><p><br /></p><p>Then along came the online bookselling sites, and my near monopoly was broken, and everyone wanted anything however scruffy, prices soared, and switched my spending to other stuff.</p><p>However, I cut my teeth on books published from maybe 1550 to 1800, so anything later than that I tend to think of as shed material.[/QUOTE]</p><p><br /></p>

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