Week 6: Do you know how much Dr. Seuss shouldn't cost?

a science anecdote and artificial scarcity

Part 1: science!

We begin this week with a science-related follow up, courtesy of my friend Jeremy, to last week’s aside about Charlton Hinman, our bonkers Shakespeare scholar who designed the Hinman Collator so that he could study each Shakespeare Folio letter by letter:

At first I thought [the Hinman Collator] was the same method they used to discover Pluto, but that was actually a precursor. Pluto was discovered using a blink comparator. Clyde Tombaugh spent a year using a blink comparator, which rapidly switches between pairs of photographs, looking for any moving objects against the otherwise-stationary celestial background. This probably could have worked for Hinman too (and honestly I think would have been easier on his eyes) (that might just be me though - I wonder what it's like to have two equally good eyes).¹ Anyway the Hinman Collator is linked in the "See Also" section on Wikipedia and vice versa, so there you go science and books coming together to let people stare at minutely different images for hours on end.

This factoid is brought to you by a few quick google searches and my space phase/project on the Kuiper Belt in eighth grade.

Look at this funky hoozeewhatsit. The blink comparator. Image: Wikipedia Commons.

Thanks, Jeremy! The relationship between printing and planet technology reminds me of another overlap between the history of textile weaving and computer coding that is summarized in this Tumblr post. I comment at the end about the similar links of textual and textile print history: textiles are often categorized as art, and art and texts use similar but different cataloguing vocabularies (do not get me started, it’s a headache and a half), sometimes hindering potential scholarship on print history. But as one of my book history faculty members emphasized time and again, if print historians broaden their view on how print technologies are used on what we may now consider different disciplines, they reveal links in unexpected places.

Part 2: scarcity!

This week I’m thinking about artificial scarcity: my Reference Sources for Rare Books course covered British Books to 1800 and British Literature, and one of the reference books our professor introduced was the Grolier One Hundred. What is the Grolier Hundo? The Grolier Club is a book collector club in New York City, and in 1902 they held an exhibition called “One Hundred Books Famous in English Literature.” Criteria for the featured items was twofold: they had to be owned by a current member of the Grolier Club (so that they could borrow it for the exhibition. I respect streamlined logistics. This was a good call) and they had to be famous (but not famous famous to the general public. Just well known to bibliophiles. Remember how I’ve said that book people like to just ~know~ things? This is an example of that). With this exhibition, the club published a two-volume set on the 100 books: a list of the featured books (which isn’t really useful, each entry has a quotation from the text and a facsimile of the title page) and a second volume filled with bibliographical notes.

The Grolier One Hundred is not a definitive ranking or genre-specific evaluation of literature. It’s barely exhaustive, and it leaves out a lot of important books. It’s 100 (which could be any 100!) significant books in the English language. But because the Grolier Club was (and still is) so influential, the release of the list shaped collecting interests, artificially inflating the importance (and the price) of the books on that list for the decade or so after it was first published.

Pride and Prejudice is, of course, on the Grolier Hundo…but the Keira Knightley or the Jennifer Ehle edition? I have firm opinions on this and could write a whole book about it. Image: Google?

Very few (if any) people ever achieved the 100, partially because there are only a few known copies of some of the books on the list in the world, and we know where they are, and they aren’t going to market. Also, this is a super expensive way to collect.

Notably, however, we still see instantaneous and artificial spikes of interest in books that inflate prices. For those of you who blessedly avoid the news and Twitter, you might be unaware that one such spike occurred a few weeks ago, when Dr. Seuss’s estate announced they were no longer going to print six of his less popular works, five of which have racist imagery and language in them. Laughably, a haphazard coalition of ding dongs decided to buy up as many Dr. Seuss books from the interwebs as some sort of…protest(?), thereby driving the prices of later printings of Seuss books into the hundreds or thousands.² The books bought weren’t necessarily first editions or fine copies, just your run-of-the-mill 1980s glossy hardcover printings. Yahoo!finance reported that sellers on eBay priced these books from $1,000 to $5,000. These books are not worth this much money! They’re not rare or valuable or otherwise notable, they just got a lot of attention really quickly and were aflame in false controversy. Hence, cash.

I don’t quite know what this proved except confirming yet again that if you say the words “cancel culture” to me, I immediately know not to take you seriously. The money these knobheads spent benefits secondhand booksellers or returns to the coffers of the private estate that has unilateral power over the printing of their property. This buying spree didn’t redirect government attention or power, because neither government attention nor power was wielded over this situation to begin with.

Whatsmore, no one thought to ask any librarians what they thought, even though libraries are most likely to have and retain copies of these oh-so-desirable books that no one has thought of in five decades. I searched on WorldCat, which aggregates library catalog data (technically worldwide, but it’s not perfect, and who among us is), to see how many libraries hold copies of the following books that Seuss’s estate are retiring:

• And to Think that I saw it on Mulberry Street: 2079

• If I Ran the Zoo: 2249

• McElligot’s Pool: 2129

• On Beyond Zebra! Scrambled Eggs Super!: 2231

• The Cat’s Quizzer: 255, but the catalogue record for this one was split up, so closer to 315.

Dr. Seuss is fine, people! He’s also dead and wouldn’t appreciate your Twitter tirades, so please stop the hysteria.

Seuss himself. Is it just me or does he kind of look like Sam Waterston from Law & Order/Grace and Frankie?? Image: Esquire.com.

This is also a good moment to tell people not to ever speculate on books. Do not join a Ponzi scheme on books. It will end badly. Books do not appreciate in value the way art does, and for two main reasons:

1. authors do not really trend in and out of fashion the way artists do, and

2. we tend to know where the books are and can keep tabs on them, stabilizing a baseline market value.

Sometimes, there might be momentary price hikes for special or signed editions when an author dies (I’m thinking of John Le Carre, for example), but antiquarian booksellers are pretty savvy! They are playing a long game and will hold onto a nice signed edition until someone old kicks the bucket so that they can price a volume at market instead of artificially hiking it up. Or, sometimes they won’t hold onto these books and they miss out on a tidy profit. Eso si que es, life moves on.

A client once asked me which edition of a book (a first versus an illustrated, the latter of which happened to be the more famous edition) would be the “better investment over time.” She was kind of angling for me to explain how it would appreciate, but, again, books don’t appreciate as steady investments. Books will depreciate, though, as condition wears, so as long as you don’t smear them in gel pens or chuck the things through a woodchipper, they should be worth about as much as you bought them for (give or take what a bookseller needs to make a profit). But honestly, if you’re a private collector and you’re collecting books so you can sell them at a profit, you are actually a bookseller. The real value of a collection is how the amassed books build off of one another, what the works say about themselves and others, and the story they tell about a person, moment, event, or movement. I told this client as much (including the woodchipper bit) and encouraged her to purchase the copy that had more meaning to her.

Which brings me back to the Grolier: those 100 books were significant in that moment. A lot of them are still significant now, but some of them were total question marks to our class. Again, the most compelling collections are ones that tell holistic stories with all of their contributing pieces, not just the ones that have high market values. Just because something is scarce doesn’t mean it’s good. And it definitely doesn’t mean you should spend $5,000 on it.

Housekeeping and Birdseeding

house

• I realized I was mistaken about the Goncaleuz frontispiece situation last week when I double checked my (Google’s) translation: Germao Galhardo did not make three copies of the same piece of type, he printed three editions of the Rules and Statutes of the Order of Santiago. Galhardo used the disfigured type on the third edition, and Goncaleuz inherited the piece of type from him, linking the two volumes. Slightly different genesis. But you see how many degrees of investigation goes into this stuff? Wild.

• What I read this week: I did it, kids! I finished The Priory of the Orange Tree! I forgot the momentum of high fantasy novels (whole books happen in 100 pages, but Shannon paced it well overall). I churned through it and will get my books back to the library on time!

• What I’m currently reading: There are things more beautiful than Beyonce, a short collection of poems by Morgan Parker that my friend Molly gifted to me last year.

• please share the newsletter with your farflung associates and friendly acquaintances

bird

• the finches’ coats are turning and their bright yellow feathers are a welcome change during this cloudly, rainy week.

More later.

1. Jeremy has extraordinarily bad vision, this is a good joke.

2. I told my parents I was referring to this group of people as “ding dongs” and my father said that “this is an insult to ding dongs,” i.e. the Hostess chocolate-and-cream treat from the 1970s that was enjoyable “before we knew how bad everything was for you.” This lead my parents down a rabbit hole of googling Hostess products until my mother yelled from the dining room, “A Ho-Ho!” and my father exclaimed, “A HO-HO!” I’m convinced that Twinkies are made from reduced nuclear waste coated in woodchippings and will survive the apocalypse, which is why Woody Harrelson covets them in Zombieland.

Update, the next day: my parents have now read this issue and my mother was aghast that I misremembered the Hostess treat. “It wasn’t a Ho-Ho!” she said.

“Oh my god, she got it wrong? She got it wrong!” my father responded.

“It was a Yodel.”