A passion that's bound up in riches

People collect books because they love them - and sometimes because they can be valuable. A literary obsession can be quite profitable, writes John Connolly.

There's a game that many readers of this newspaper can probably play at home. Wander over to your book shelf and take a look for a hardback copy of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (and don't tell me that you don't have one, because somebody is buying Harry Potter books and I suspect that it might be you.) Found it? OK, now open it to that boring page that contains the copyright notice and the year in which it was published (1997) and all the stuff that nobody reads very closely. Does it have "First Edition" written on the page? It does? Great.
Underneath those words, you'll see a sequence of numbers. Does the sequence start with one, or with a higher number? If it starts at one, then congratulations! You are holding in your hands a rare first edition, first printing, of J.K. Rowling's world-conquering novel, and you're €5,000 to €10,000 richer than you were when you started reading this article. What's that you say? It's signed? Well, you're now €45,000 richer than you were when you woke up this morning. Go out and buy yourself something nice, because you haven't earned it.

Unfortunately, most of us don’t have in our possession a first edition of the first Harry Potter novel in its original dustjacket. The print run was small and in 1997, few could have predicted that Rowling would go on to become the world’s most famous living children’s author. Remarkably, a hand-written 93-word teaser for the fifth, as yet unpublished, Potter novel was auctioned for almost €50,000 in Sotheby’s earlier this month, leading one to suspect that Pottermania may yet become a recognised mental affliction.

Yet the whole Rowling phenomenon proves something quite interesting: books can be extremely valuable commodities, and book collecting can be a very profitable business indeed. Should you have bought a copy of Graham Greene's Brighton Rock in 1938 and kept it in fine condition, with its dust-jacket intact (the dust-jacket is very important, as many readers simply threw the jacket away in order to maintain neat, uniform shelves), you now possess a book worth in the region of €80,000. A first edition of Casino Royale, the first Bond novel by Ian Fleming to be published, in 1953, should be insured for about €40,000.

Closer to home, anyone wise enough to have bought a first edition of Roddy Doyle's The Commitments, self-published under the King Farouk imprint in 1987 and priced then at just over three punts, now owns a book worth some €500, if it's signed by Doyle himself. A first edition of Bram Stoker's Dracula, meanwhile, is probably worth about €5,000 if it's in fine condition, and considerably more if it has Stoker's signature. Even books of more recent vintage are accumulating value at a frightening rate: Wexford author Eoin Colfer's Artemis Fowl was published only last year, but a signed first edition is already worth over €100.
"It's hard to say why some writers become collectable and others don't," says John Baxter, who has just published A Pound of Paper, the story of his obsessive pursuit of collectable books, sometimes under what the more faint-hearted among us might consider to be ethically dubious circumstances.

"I suppose that some writers just make their names with a single book and the rest just aren't worth collecting, which may be why, say, Aldous Huxley is not collectable apart from Brave New World. You also can't pick what is going to do well. The very valuable items become valuable because nobody knew that they were going to be worth something when they were originally published."

Baxter has been collecting books since his youth. "I grew up in a little Australian country town where there really were no books," he says. "The only source of books was a library that belonged to the local Railway Institute, but even when I was borrowing from the library I was already a collector, in a way. I just couldn't afford the books. The first book I bought was a copy of The Poems of Rupert Brooke, which I still have. Some books just fulfil a need in you when you first read them. They stick to you like burrs and it was like that for me with Brooke's poems. Once you have one book that you've sought out, then you're a collector."

Yet the whole concept of book collecting as we understand it is a comparatively recent development. True, people have been creating collections of books since monasteries first began producing manuscripts to order, but it was a pursuit limited to the wealthy. Baxter traces the beginnings of modern collecting to the 1960s, and to the new wealth created during that decade.

"It wasn’t only books. It was a lot of things that we had taken for granted all our lives: vinyl records, Dinky toys, bits of furniture. I mean, who would have thought that toy cars would become collectable? In the 1960s, books joined that group of collectables. The reason, almost certainly, is that a newly wealthy section of lower class and lower middle class guys - musicians, movie stars -  who weren’t elitist about such things, began collecting items that they had valued as children: comic books, the adventures of Biggles, or Raymond Chandler novels." (That tradition continues to this day. Sarah Michelle Gellar, better known as TV’s Buffy the Vampire Slayer, has used some of her new-found wealth to feed a serious book habit, while Steve Nieve, Elvis Costello’s keyboard player, has a collection that consists exclusively of first editions of Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange.

Mealy's auctioneers in Castlecomer, Co. Kilkenny, has been specialising in the sale of books and manuscripts for almost 40 years. According to Fonsie Mealy, one of the firm's managing directors, the growth in Irish book collecting can also be traced back to the 1960s, in particular to the dispersal of the old ecclesiastical libraries in the wake of the Second Vatican Council.
"There was a handful of collectors before the 1960s, but the general Irish public probably didn't begin collecting until then," he says.

It used to be only clergymen and professionals, but now it’s all walks of life.

"The appeal is that they don’t take up a lot of space and you can get a good return on them. People tend to collect in their own field: surgeons will collect surgical books and economists will gather books on economics".

Or, if you are Michael Hetherington, Emeritus Professor of Archaelogy at University College Dublin, you accumulate antiquarian works from the 18th century, some of which contain illustrations of treasures now lost to us or represent, as in the case of the histories of Irish counties assembled by the English apothecary Charles Smith, early detailed attempts to collect a range of evidence - natural, geographical, archaeological - about the counties of Ireland.
"There is a pleasure in handling a book that is well designed and in good condition, but the greater interest lies in what is written in it," says Professor Hetherington.

Sometimes, there can even be an unexpected bonus arising from a book's previous owners. "My copy of Smith's history of Cork was annotated and the handwriting is that of a civil servant named Austin Cooper, who built a home called Abbeville, or Kinsealy, in Dublin (now, of course, home to former taoiseach Charles Haughey)." In a similar vein, Dublin's Cathach Books once had to hastily re-price a 1922 facsimile of The Book of Kells after it was found to be inscribed by one James Joyce as a gift to Nora Barnacle's uncle.
Then there are those who collect some very strange books indeed. Dangle a piece of rare erotica in the dark waters of the Internet and shifty types will converge upon it like pirahna. More unusual still are those whose tastes veer towards "anthropodermic bindings" - book bindings made out of human skin - although such individuals typically tend to keep quiet about their particular tastes.

James Allen, the author of The Highwayman, was jailed in 1833 after shooting John Fenno Jr during a botched robbery in Salem, Massachusetts. A buckle on Fenno's suspenders deflected the bullet.

Allen was so impressed that he asked that Fenno be presented with a copy of The Highwayman bound in his own skin, a wish that was duly granted after Allen died in 1837. The book is now in the possession of the Boston Athenaeum.
Ordinary book collecting could be seen as a natural progression from the pleasure of reading: we start out with paperbacks, then progress to buying the hardback editions of our favourite authors because we can't wait to read their latest work. Maybe that hardback is signed and we decide to keep it a little more carefully than the rest and not lend it to friends who might use it as a beer mat or a cat scratcher. From there, it's but a few small steps to full-blown obsession.

"There is a difference between collecting for fun and collecting for profit," says John Baxter. "The two are quite distinct, because a serious collector probably won’t want to sell the books on to someone else. If I were in Ireland, I would collect people who were accessible: Seamus Heaney, for example, or the writers of the Irish Renaissance. In a way, building up a collection from your recent past is simple, but if you’re going to make money, then you’re going to have to go for Joyce. Everything from Joyce will sell. You can never lose on him."

Last year, Mealy's auctioned a single, printed sheet of paper containing Joyce's draft of The Holy Office, along with two of Joyce's letters. They were expected to make in the region of IR£20,000 to £30,000 (€25,400 to €38,000). In the end, they went for £70,000 (€89,000). Meanwhile, a signed first edition of Ulysses will leave you with little change out of €500,000.
The Holy Grail for Joyce collectors is Et tu, Healy, a pamphlet written while the author was at Belvedere College and published in 1891 or 1892. No copy of it has ever been found. "If we turned up one of those," says Enda Cunningham of Cathach Books, "we'd just call it a day and retire to the sun." He advises would-be collectors to start with a writer that they like and enjoy, or a period of history in which they have a particular interest.

"Pick one author that you like and read and stick with that author. Look for first editions and inscribed copies, remembering that dustjackets are increasingly important, and pay what you can for them. Good quality items will never lose their value." And in the case of authors that you meet personally, don’t ask them to inscribe the books to you unless you’re very famous. A signature will usually suffice, although John Baxter advises asking for the writer to add something extra, like the name of a favourite book or a well-liked quotation from the work itself.

But be warned: book dealing can be a tough business. Baxter's book contains details of some slightly suspect goings-on, including the purchase of rare collections for a fraction of their cost because the sellers didn't realise the value of the books in their possession, raising the spectre of Crimeline-style stories of little old ladies being duped out of antiques.

Less controversially, Baxter himself speaks fondly of the time that he found a first edition of Sylvia Plath's The Bell Jar in a Dublin bookshop in the 1980s. It was priced at 10p, a tiny fraction of its real value. With that in mind, I pose Baxter an ethical question at the end of our conversation.

Suppose he were to walk into a charity shop and see a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone on the shelf, priced €1. Would he tell the charity? Baxter nearly falls over in horror at the thought.

"No, of course I wouldn’t. I mean, if you found 100 on the street would you report it?" Well, would you?

A Pound of Paper is published by Doubleday, priced 23.70. It may even be valuable someday. You never know.