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Most booksellers when evaluating their business assets will consider the cost and potential market value of their inventory, the cost of computer equipment, and maybe even the replacement cost of their reference library, but it seems that the value of their book-selling database is often overlooked. A database is far more than just a listing of books which you have for sale and the price you are asking for them. If that is all you need, you can simply input listings directly

“Is it a first?” “What are the points of…?” “I can’t find a price guide for…?” “No copy on the net, and need to know the value of…?” Such are the daily, ubiquitous questions found on the various bookish listservs to which many booksellers & collectors subscribe. Most such queries are asked by novice booksellers, or the o.p./used bookseller who has what is thought to be a [potentially] valuable book. And in fact, upon examination, all these questions have in common this last a

All of you have gotten the phone call. The person on the other end has inherited or been given or found at a garage sale a book/books which he believes may be the next record breaker at a Sotheby’s auction. “What’s it worth?” he wants to know. That is not the type of appraisal this article is going to address. Those appraisals can be handled with a few simple sentences such as, “That copy of Tarzan’s Revenge published in 1952 missing the front cover and the last three pages i

How A press release has a standard format and should be as brief and to the point as possible. Think of how long it takes you to decide whether to read an e-mail or not. That’s about how long an editor will give your press release before deciding what to do with it. Your press release should be written on your company letterhead if it is typed and should be double-spaced. The sentences should be short, and the word count should be no more than 300-500. At the top of the page

Tell us a little about yourself. Bookselling is my second career. As a ’74 graduate of the US Coast Guard Academy, I spent the first 23 years of my professional life as a “Coastie.” In the mid-80s, I discovered collecting first editions, Charles Dickens specifically. Knowing that someday I would be pursuing something other than Search & Rescue as a career, I looked at antiquarian bookselling as a possible pursuit. I established the business in 1989, home-based, and found I en

Seeing Shelley Plain: Memories of New Yorks Legendary Phoenix Book Shop, by Robert A. Wilson. New Castle, DE: Oak Knoll Press, 2001. Sell me a book tonight, Larry. You havent sold me a book in weeks. Why dont you buy all of them? Okay, how much? Thus begins both this book and the author’s adventures as a novice shop owner in the late glory days of Greenwich Village bookselling. Wilson left his job at a cuckoo clock factory and scraped together the necessary $12,000, which was

Table of Contents Foreword Extra Binding and The Mosher Books—An Overview from the Bishop Collection Bookplates: Thomas Bird Mosher Philip R. Bishop of Mosher Books

The Standard usually comes out on the first of January, April, July, and October, but here we are dropping the Fall issue down your chimneys in the last week of December. We are doing two things with this slimmer special issue. One is pretty obvious—catching up on getting our online journal out on time. Shouldn’t be long now before that happens. We are also taking a very close look at the ethereal connection between an extraordinary fine press publisher and the somewhat bibli