From First Editions worth thousands, to long-lost manuscripts worth millions. Rare Bookseller Tom Ayling takes us inside the world of rare books. We talk the most expensive books in the world, forging counterfeit books, starting a book collection, lost books, banned books and what makes a book truly unique. Then, we countdown the Top 5 Collectibles.
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Pointless: 54:55ish
Top 5: 01:18:04ish
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Interview with Rare Bookseller Tom Ayling
Nick VinZant 0:11
Welcome to Profoundly Pointless. My name is Nick VinZant. Coming up in this episode, the rarest books and the best collectibles,
Tom Ayling 0:21
not many things that are 500 years old, have survived to the present day. But there are plenty of books that have, say we were very quick to say, we'd love to see it, can you bring it or send it to us and the book arrives, and I opened it and immediately said, that's not right. A copy a complete copy has not come up for sale for some time. But when it does, we're talking 10s of millions of dollars, I have no doubt, book collecting is really a pursuit of love. If you don't enjoy what the things that you're collecting, that I doubt, it's going to do much for you.
Nick VinZant 0:58
I want to thank you so much for joining us. If you get a chance, subscribe, leave us a rating or review. We really appreciate it, it helps out the show and more than anything, we just like hearing from people. So our first guest is someone that I've wanted to talk to for a long time. Because I think this topic slash industry is just fascinating. Because not only is it interested in terms of how he finds these things, how much they cost, the lengths that people will go to, to counterfeit them. But it's really a journey back into our history. This is rare bookseller Tom ailing. So what what makes a book rare.
Tom Ayling 1:46
So in the in the book trade Rare Book is a relatively modern moniker that we use to describe a book. And it's conferring not just a sense of, of scarcity, that something is hard to find, or doesn't exist in many copies, but also an element of it being sought after. There are many, many books in the world that people aren't interested in. And, you know, you might have the only copy of a book in the world. But if there's no one that wants to buy it, then it's it might be in, in absolute terms, a rare book, but it's not going to sort of fall into the category of a rare book when we talk about what books are sought after, and what books are, you know, highly collectible. So, in our sense, a rare book is, is anything where you've got a base level of scarcity, that is going to in some way drive, you know, value and interest, and then, you know, a level of a level of demand for it alongside that. And that could be because the author's famous, that could be because the content is is hugely important in, you know, to our history, or our literature, or to a contribution of a field like science and medicine. It could be that it's a book of extraordinary beauty, beautifully illustrated, beautifully bound, beautifully designed. So it's the sort of overall moniker of rare books is is quite a broad church. And certainly, the trade itself comprises not just printed books, but anything from fully blown illuminated manuscripts to, you know, little scraps of paper that a professor left in a cupboard 200 years ago.
Nick VinZant 3:36
Is this a big industry? Like, I can't imagine there being a lot of people who do this, I would
Tom Ayling 3:43
say it's not a big industry, but there are probably more booksellers out there than you think. You know, there was a time 100 years ago, where you could drive through Britain and every single market town would have a antiquarian bookshop of some description. What's happened to the trade in the last, you know, in the last sort of 30 years, is, is a decline in those bricks and mortar shops. And these businesses selling sort of a more broad, general antiquarian stock. So there's lots of people still dealing in books, but they might be sort of one one man or one woman bands dealing from home selling books online, working with a small very niche group of customers with say, a special interest
Nick VinZant 4:26
where our books kind of in the collectibles hierarchy, right, like if one is baseball cards and 10 is gold diamond rings worn by the queen, Queen herself, right? Like, where is kind of books on that collectible hierarchy?
Tom Ayling 4:45
Well, I would say that extraordinarily good value compared to other objects, but I might say that, you know, they are, I would say, they're quite awkward objects to deal in. Because often they're they take quite It's a lot of hard work to work out exactly what they are, and need quite a lot of expertise to be able to deal in them. If you come to our shop, you know, there are books on the shelf for 1015 20 pounds, and there are books for hundreds of 1000s of pounds. So even within one specialist business, you have quite an wide, you know, wide range of prices. But there aren't, you know, printed books tend not to reach the sort of 10s of millions of pounds price range, you know, that, I suppose might be an argument that, you know, a fine Shakespeare first failure, or a complete Gutenberg Bible would now get into the, you know, not nine figure price range. But they're the exceptions rather than the rule, for the most part, you know, the vast majority of a specialist book dealers stock is going to, you know, maybe average out it a few 1000 pounds with a wide range from, you know, 10s of 1000s to 10s of pounds to 10s of 1000s.
Nick VinZant 6:04
So, how does the kind of the process work in the sense that, like, Are you going out and finding these books are people bringing to them?
Tom Ayling 6:11
Yeah, it's, well, it sort of works differently for, you know, whoever you're, whoever you're dealing with. But for the most part, we look to buy books that that we know about, that we're specialists in. So our specialism in the broadest sense is English literature, from Chaucer to just arrived about Harry Potter. So that's a wide scape of several 100 years. That comprises a lot of printed books, we deal in other areas as well. But that's the broad specialty. So we know what we're doing with those books. And where we see a book, you know, a first edition of a famous work of literature, we know what we're looking for, we know what it's worth, and who wants to try and buy it for stock, whether we have a customer immediately to sell it to all or not. That sounds quite simple. But what it actually involves in practice is an awful lot of looking, my time has probably spent 90% of it looking for books, and only about 10% of it actually sort of selling books, we probably look at maybe 10,000 books for every one book that we purchase for our stock or for a customer. So it's an awful lot of you know, rifling through huge libraries, massive auctions, things that come into the shop house visits that we go out and do to then select not just the right book, but the right copy of the right book.
Nick VinZant 7:45
Why is that such a disparity between what you look at and what you buys? Because the books not good enough? Not going to sell it not rare enough? Not exactly what you want? Like, what's the reason that you're usually ruling them out?
Tom Ayling 7:58
Well, there are an awful lot of books in the world. And not many of them are valuable. And certainly not many of them are rare. You know, if I was buying 10,000, in every 15,000, I looked at then one could hardly consider them Rare Books. For the most part, I mean, it could be that it just isn't what we what we do. But for the most part, it's a question of quality. So what we're looking for in a book is originality. So is it the first printing integrity? So is it complete? And as issued on publication day, whether that was 20 years ago, or 250 years ago? And very much related to integrity is condition. So that counts for completeness. But also, is it an is it an attractive copy? Is it in nice condition? Is it sound? Is it about fall apart? Or is it you know, still in the original publishers binding from 1820. And then there's a whole slew of slightly unquantifiable things that a book can possess that might make it more interesting. So it may have been owned by somebody significant, it may have their marks of provenance or their annotations, it might be a presentation copy that the author has given to somebody significant. If it's a if it's a very early book, say from the 1400s or 1500 words, it might bear the marks of an early reader. Now, even if we have no idea who this reader is, seeing their annotations, and underlining and marginalia, in a book of that age is telling us how people interacted with a book for 500 years ago, and that's hugely valuable to to historians to collectors in building an idea of the history of a book and and really that list of unquantifiable things of that nature is is as long as you like, because you don't know what you're going to find when you open up a book or look at it closely.
Nick VinZant 10:08
How difficult is it to find something in good condition? Right? Like, I would imagine it had to be preserved already, if we're talking about books that are hundreds of years old. Yeah, I mean, the history of beauty even find one that's still good. I mean, the history of
Tom Ayling 10:21
book collecting is a long one, people have collected books for centuries, if not millennia, they may or may not have collected them in the same way that we do. Now, they certainly didn't. But book collecting in its current form. Collecting say, important copies of important books, has been a factor in the book trade for for a couple of 100 years. And as a result, there are books that, you know, I can track if I if a book reaches me, often, I can have a look at the ownership records that I can find inside the book, marry them up with auction records, and I can see each of the 5678 owners who have owned the book in the last few 100 years. So there is some way you've got that solid chain of provenance, there was a wonderful example of a manuscript I was working on. Not all that recently, but relatively recently, and which was a manuscript by the poet Thomas Gray, who is most famous for writing and elegy and a country churchyard. And after he died, somebody inherited all of his things, he didn't have children. And after they died, someone inherited all of his things. And then all of his things were sold at auction. So we have the auction catalog of that sale. And we can read an annotated copy of that catalog that you can find online for free. And you can not only see what everything sold for, but you can see the names of the purchases. And then you can follow that again to another book sale a few years later, where the person who bought all of Thomas graves manuscripts, which were which were sort of separate scraps of paper, had them bound up into one single book, and had it sold as a single book. And then there's an auction a few years after that, where that book is broken up into individual pieces of paper, and sold again, each manuscript being sold individually. And that collection, the person who bought the manuscript from that sale, it went to their house on the River Thames, quite near to our bookshop, and stayed there for 100 and 150 years, until we bought their library a few years ago, and it was this thing, and going off nothing but the title of the poem written in Thomas Grace hand, we can give this one piece of paper, you know, a history spanning a few 100 years.
Nick VinZant 12:46
That is, I would imagine they write that book is interesting, but the history of the book is probably just as interesting. A lot of circumstances. Yeah. How, how can you tell if it's real, is that a huge kind of factor in that world,
Tom Ayling 13:00
we are less exposed to fakes and forgeries than other collecting areas, say, certainly, it's far less common than painting. But we do encounter it, you encounter it mostly, I would say with forged signatures, you know, if you've got a copy of a book, and then you've got a copy of a book signed by an author, that can increase the value, you know, it can add one zero to the end of it, it can add a few series to the end of it. It can in some cases, if the author was particularly prolific at signing books had no value whatsoever. So one encounters forged signatures, not infrequently, I wouldn't say most weeks, but certainly every couple of weeks, I'll be looking through, say an auction catalog. And there'll be a picture of a signed book and immediately say, No, that's wrong. But in terms of forging an entire book, that's a very difficult thing to do. And it has been done, there's been a couple of very famous and high profile cases in the not too distant past, where people have literally forged an entire book by essentially using 3d printing to recreate a form of time and then print on treated paper to make it look like old paper, bind it up and and fake an entire printed book from the 16th century. That's an awful lot of work. And you've got to I suppose I don't know much about the the economy of criminals but you've got to forge a jolly expensive book to for it to reward the time, the time it would take and the risk of being found out and in that case, it it was found out but not before it it had already changed hands for a large sum of money.
Nick VinZant 15:03
Yeah, that would be Yeah, it's not like you're going to spend all that time forging books that sell for like 100 pounds or $200, or something like that, right? Like, you kind of gotta go big. But then if you go big, everybody knows exactly what that thing is supposed
Tom Ayling 15:14
to look like, because you'd have to replicate it was explained what the sort of same printing processes that people were using hundreds of years ago. And that's tough. It's really, really tough. And, you know, print, if you think about printing itself, that have what we would call the hand press period, which is a period where to print a book, you have to arrange every single piece of type, every single letter is an individual piece, and you have to arrange that in a frame in reverse, so that it prints the words the right way round, and then print every single sheet. If the book, this whole process would take a year to print an addition of, you know, 500 copies, and then have it bound up. It's a hugely involved, involved process. And part of the the beauty of collecting books is that that remarkable process, and that remarkable innovation, produces things of great beauty. But it's it's a lot of work to do.
Nick VinZant 16:23
When when you have customers come in, are they usually? Are they looking for kind of the next big thing? Right? Are they looking for a book that is rare? And that is going to be valuable? Or are they usually looking for a very specific book,
Tom Ayling 16:38
there are people who are trying to predict the future. I tend to counsel against that, because it's very difficult to know. Speculating is, is a dangerous game, I think in in most fields, but in a field, where you're essentially saying, Will, this author or this book be popular in, you know, 50 100 years, that's tough to know. But the other thing that's tough to know is, will this book be rare, in 50, or 100 years, because a book published today by a very famous and popular author might have a print run in the hundreds of 1000s of copies. And such a, an a book produced in that number, it's going to take a very, very long time for it to be hard to find, or an awful lot of wanton destruction. So for the most part, people coming into our shop. And what we advise people to do when they're building collections, is to have a look at the market that we're in today. And with with our experience, you know, I look at famous sales of great book collections, say that was sold at auction in the in the 80s, and 90s. And you look at the prices that they made them, and what people said about these prices, and people were saying, you know, it's ridiculous that someone's paying this sum of money for that book, you'd buy every single book there today at that price in a heartbeat. So what tends to be the best way of going about it is to is to take the market as it is. But also, rather than buying a book because you think it's going to be valuable tomorrow, buy a book because it's of interest to you that should be what's guiding book collections, you know, book collecting is really a pursuit of love. If you don't enjoy what the things that you're collecting, then I doubt it's going to do much for you. So always lead with that. And you know, when you're investing large sums of money in a book, it is important that you're not throwing money down the drain. And that's why buying say the right copy is important. So a copy in the best condition you can find it or a copy with the most interesting association say, and by association. I mean, it might have been owned by somebody important and therefore be significant. So you mentioned Lord of the Rings earlier, actually. And there's a wonderful example of this. That we have at the moment we a few years ago, well, actually in about nine or 10 years ago, the editor who published the Lord of the Rings died and his library was sold. And included in that library was his set of Lord of the Rings, in beautiful condition, basically pristine, and each volume was signed by JRR Tolkien. And even better than that, not only was the he the editor that brought the Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion into the world, but his father was a publisher and head of the same publishing firm, when Tolkien submitted the manuscript of a funny little book called The Hobbit. And one evening his father took the book home and gave gave it to him and said, we've just been given this do you think it's any good. And he read it, he loved it, and basically told his father that he had to publish this book about these funny creatures called hobbits. And that kind of copy owned by someone so significant in the whole history of the world that Tolkien created is an almost it, it makes the book more than the sum of its parts. Because its existence, and its ownership history, starts telling a new story about it. And that's really the sort of copy of a book that gets that gets me excited in the sort of thing that, that I I try to share that enthusiasm with my customers.
Nick VinZant 20:55
So then, how much would a book like that sell for?
Tom Ayling 21:01
An awful lot of money. I can't tell you what he paid for it, what the customer paid for it. But I mean, that I mean, signed first edition of The Lord of the Rings is a comfortably a six figure book. In whichever currency you want to choose,
Nick VinZant 21:20
is there any indication that the people who buy them actually read them? Yeah, I mean, I would be too nervous to actually read it to be honest with you. Like I would encase it in? Carbonite? Yes, Star Wars reference, but like I wouldn't. Do people actually read these books with a somebody like, Yeah, I mean, 1500 year old book, like, I'm not reading that thing. Yeah.
Tom Ayling 21:43
I mean, it depends on the book. And I suppose it depends on the collector. I mean, there is something wonderful about reading a first edition of a book, and experiencing the same thing that that books very first readers would have experienced. You know, when you are holding a copy of the first edition of A Study in Scarlet, the first Sherlock Holmes book, and you're reading it, you're experiencing something that was felt by someone who had no idea who Sherlock Holmes was, but books his objects faster earlier than we give them credit for. Not many things that are 500 years old, have survived to the present day, but there are plenty of books that have,
Nick VinZant 22:34
are you ready for some harder slash listener submitted questions, of course, start out with kind of the big ones, right? rarest book you've ever had, rarest book in the world?
Tom Ayling 22:46
That's difficult to say. Because there are a whole number of books and things that ideally that are unique. You know, there's only one of them. If you're talking about something we have in the shop at the moment, say like, we have Ian Fleming's final corrected type script for diamonds are forever. The fourth James Bond book, there is only one type script with his annotations that exists. So that's totally unique. You can't get rarer than one of one. And there are plenty of things of that nature that we deal in that are that are hugely exciting objects to work with. Again, rarest book in the world. If we're talking purely on scarcity, then then there are plenty of things that surviving only one copy, there are books, in fact that we know were published and were printed, but no copies survive. My old University Professor Andrew Patrick Green, who runs a program at the University of St. Andrews, called the Universal short title catalogue has a list of these lost books that we can track in auction records, or newspaper advertisements. But there isn't a single copy recorded in any library on the planet. So I suppose a zero of one is rather than a one of one. But there are things of that nature. If we're talking about what people normally mean, when they say, what's the rarest thing in the world? Or what's the rarest thing you've ever sold? Often they really want to know what the most expensive book in the world is. Oh, which which, again, is pretty much is a result of that. You know, when we use the moniker rare books, we're talking about scarcity, but we're also talking about demand, you know, it's a supply and demand game. So if you're talking about what printed books are the most valuable there Then once talking about the sort of great rarities, like the Gutenberg Bible, which is the first book with movable type printed in the West, from from 1455. That's a hugely valuable book. A copy a complete copy has not come up for sale for some time. But when it does, we're talking 10s of millions of dollars, I have no doubt. A book like The Shakespeare first failure, which is the first collected edition of Shakespeare's plays, published in 1624. Not a rare book, in absolute terms, there are some 200 copies in different libraries around the world. But the last copy of that to come up for auction, the last complete copy of that to come up for auction sold in New York a couple of years ago now, for a shade under $10 million dollars.
Nick VinZant 25:53
Do you have a personal quest? And I think what they mean by this is like, is there a book that like, Man, I have been trying to find this,
Tom Ayling 26:02
or there are a lot, that's what keeps you going, you know, that's what, that's what makes you do your, you know, your third house call of the week when the first two haven't brought any books. And occasionally, you know, one is one is satisfied, satisfied there. There are, you know, a few black tulips as it were, that would be wonderful to get get one's hands on one day things like the true first edition of Lyrical Ballads by Wordsworth, and Coleridge, which was printed in tiny numbers in Bristol, and then republished in London the same year. So copies with the Bristol title page, fabled rarities, I think there's one at the British Library, I'm not sure there are many others anywhere in the world, those those great books like Shakespeare, folios, and Gutenberg Bibles, it would be a real thrill to, to have to have a hand in setting them. But there are there are plenty of other things as well that that are perhaps less grand, but very difficult to find. I have a personal collection of books about the town in University of St. Andrews, which is the university that I went to, and it's where I fell in love with old and rare books and with book collecting and sent me on the path to be doing what I'm doing. And the printing press came to St. Andrews in the in the 1500s. And I would love to own a copy of the very first book printed in St. Andrews,
Nick VinZant 27:40
do you get that a lot of people that are just like, maybe it's not a rare book, maybe it's not a valuable book, but somebody who is just looking for this very specific thing for a personal or whatever reason.
Tom Ayling 27:52
I had somebody in the shop a couple months ago now. And their father was very good friends with Roald Dahl. And he was a doctor who I think, treated one of Dallas children. And as a gift darlin scribed him a book, I think it was a copy of Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. Now, these people came into the shop and said, Oh, we're looking for a signed copy of Charlie in the Chocolate Factory. But I sort of started on air. Are you looking for First Edition? Are you looking for, you know, the, the British Edition or the American edition? Because there's sort of two slightly different things. And they said, No, we're looking for the copy that he gave my father. And I was like, Okay, and so we, you know, take down the details of her father's name, and what was likely to be inscribed and the circumstances of the inscription and so on. And that is a book that, you know, I am desperate to find, it's not going to, you know, its selling it would not, you know, make our year financially, but a book imbued with such personal significance, combined with the fact that it's out there somewhere, and there's only going to be one of them. Is, is the sort of, you know, going back to what you said about personal quests, you know, that's the sort of thing where if I could pull that off, I'd consider that a about as good a day's work as I'm capable of doing.
Nick VinZant 29:35
How could you even find that? Is that just pure? Like, do you have skills that would allow you to do that or is that just going to be a pure luck? You made me sound like Liam Neeson in taking it, it has a certain set of skills to find rare books.
Tom Ayling 29:52
I will find it it's, it's it's a combination of things. I mean, we we happen to have Other big specialty in children's books, and dealing a lot of Roald Dahl first editions. So there's a certain case of, if somebody's going to find it, it's likely going to be us just with the volume of things we get through. There's also the volume of books that that we look at. I mean, I told you that earlier on that we look at maybe 10,000 books for every one that we buy. That's an that's an awful lot to get through when you're buying, you know, 1000s of books a year. So, so, with with that kind of hit rate, it helps but you know, it's it's no dumb thing. There are plenty of books in circulation, or tucked away on people's bookshelves in this country, that the book trade will never, you know, never have a chance to, to feast on. But in that case, you know, it would obviously mean an awful lot if if one could
Nick VinZant 30:56
best place to find them. Like, I think of garage sales or something, right? Like, are you just scouring every garage sale that you walked past? Or like,
Tom Ayling 31:07
I don't I don't mind a low success rate. But I going sort of door to door on garage sales is is probably casting the net too wide. today. Why don't I? Why don't I rephrase this. So rather than talking about me, let me talk about if someone wants to start collecting books, where should they go? And yeah, it's the easiest answer in the world. They should go to book shops. And they should talk to booksellers, about what interests them. And then booksellers will find things for you, because that's what they do. And they'll call you up and say, Hey, I know you're interested in this. Well, let me tell you about this amazing thing that I've just got in. That is by far the best way to to collect books. And in terms of where you know, where we look for books. It's frankly, everywhere. You know, we go to we go to house schools, we go to, you know, impressive private libraries and undistinguished private libraries. We go to auctions all over the world, we go to book fairs all over the world, we go to book shops all over the world. People bring books to us, we just we just don't stop.
Nick VinZant 32:11
This isn't another question that we got. But like, what is the one that stands out to you? Or like somebody just brought one in, like, I found this in my garage? Or like, Have you ever had situations like that, where somebody's like, Oh, my God, this person had this thing and didn't even know it.
Tom Ayling 32:31
We had it with a first edition of the hobbits last year. I mean, somebody knew knew they had it. But essentially, their grandmother was given it as a Christmas present in 1937. Because it was a book that had just come out in 1937. And so that's what she got for Christmas that year. And she'd read it once and put it on the bookshelf. And the book had survived various house moves and relocations, and going in and out of boxes is, as you know, life takes its twists and turns. And now, what would that be 85 years later, someone calls us up and says, Oh, I have this book of my grandmother's. It's called The Hobbit and I think it's first edition. And say we we drove over to their house and had a look at it. And sure enough, it was. And we have arguably a longer list of customers for a first edition of The Hobbit than almost any other book printed in the 20th century. It's certainly up there with our our most sought after book. And the the waiting list for one is a is a long one. So it was something we're incredibly excited to, to see and to and to manage to acquire on behalf of the customer of ours.
Nick VinZant 33:54
There's a potentially controversial one, how do you feel about people dog hearing pages?
Tom Ayling 33:59
I don't mind at all. I don't mind it at all. I thought you would. I thought that would anger. This is this is quiet. This is quite an interesting sort of misconception about about books. I mean, if somebody has a book in there, frankly, if someone has a book in their possession, they can do what they like with it. I mean, if someone comes comes into the shop reads 10 pages of one of my books, and then you know folds the corners to come back next week and finish off, then I might get a little bit upset. But certainly if it's just a book for personal possession, do what you like with it, because there was this kind of fetishism in Victorian book collecting that survived a long way into the 20th century, that books should be the sort of untouched objects, you know, to such an extent that in the in the Victorian period, the late Victorian Period, people would wash the pages of a book. So let's say that you had a A book which you know, an owner a couple 100 years before, had, you know, written annotations or marginalia in exactly the sort of things that are hugely valuable to scholars. Now the Victorians would would wash the pages to make it look kind of pristine and perfect and polished. So now I think people should leave marks of readership in books, if that's how they want to interact with books. And then the collectors and scholars and booksellers, you know, of 200 years into the future, can get an idea of what people in the 21st century did with their books, I think it's a valuable thing.
Nick VinZant 35:39
Um, most interesting stories surrounding a book Getting to you,
Tom Ayling 35:44
here's, here's one, I quite like this. So in 1987, there was a British expedition to the Antarctic, that is known as the Nimrod exibit expedition. And it was led by Sir Ernest Shackleton, who is famous for his exploits in the Antarctic. And the problem with exploring the Antarctic is you've got a long Antarctic winter, when there's no daylight at all, so you have to keep morale up. So what he decided to do was to bring a printing press on a ship to the South Pole. And they had a printing press there. And during the long winter, they made a book an entire book, printed, written, printed and bound in the Antarctic, and it was called the Aurora Australis. And it was the first book printed on the Antarctic continent. So all the paper had to come from London down there, the printing press came from London down there, they had to keep a candle under the ink so it wouldn't freeze in and in Antarctic temperatures. And it's a book of extraordinary beauty when especially when one considers the environment that it was made in. And they printed something between 70 and 90 copies of it, and it kept them entertained for a winter. And then the books came back to to London. And some were given away to patrons of the expedition. And others were sold in in book shops. And there was a copy of this book that sold from a bookshop called bumpers that had been signed by Ernest Shackleton, and heard spin sold and resold a couple times in the intervening period, before it ended up in the collection of a man called Steve Fossett, who was a famous explorer in his own right, who built up an extraordinary library of books. Before he he was particularly well known for exploring in balloons, and he died in a ballooning accident. And his book plate that still sits in that copy of the book is, is is a hot air balloon. And so when, you know, when his library was sold, we bought that for a customer of ours who at the time was building an extraordinary collection of books that to do with paler exploration. And it felt particularly appropriate that it had been through the hands of not just the great explorers and the heroic explorers of the Antarctic at the start of the 20th century, but also one of the sort of greatest and best known explorers of the second half of the 20th century on its way to us and then on its way to its, its current home.
Nick VinZant 38:41
Do a lot of those old books though, kind of when you get down to it have a story like that are there ever was a dislike this just sat on a shelf and John's bookstore, I found it one day, like is there always kind of an interesting story to a lot of
Tom Ayling 38:58
that often is, if you if you know where to look for it, I mean, in part of the part one of the talents of being a bookseller, is, you know, making the book interesting, not by making things up, but by doing the research on it. And often, anything that has been in the world for hundreds of years, has seen some shit. And you know, has has had interesting things happen to it. And may well have, you know, passed in the hands of interesting people. There are very, very few books that were just, you know, bought by some Jukin 1600 and have sat in his library have in his, you know, Memorial Library ever since. Most books are kind of scrappy, and they get out into the world and they pass through the hands of interesting facts and, you know, wherever there's that story to tell, it's always a joy to tell it.
Nick VinZant 39:51
This one just came in. Are there rare books that aren't old? What would make a book published recently A rare,
Tom Ayling 40:01
yes. Well, the same things that make a book that was published 200 years ago rare, you need a limited supply and an extraordinary high demand. And a great example of that is a book published in 1997. called Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, which was written by a totally unknown author. Publish in extremely small numbers. The first edition was published in hardback and paperback, there were only 500, hardbacks printed. Now that's a small supply, even for a book that's only 25 years old. And the that initial scarcity, or apparent scarcity, combined with the extraordinary popularity of those books, has made first editions of Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone extremely valuable books. And I mean, I'm talking about copies selling for six figure sums.
Nick VinZant 41:04
How can only 500 copies of that book be made? Because that seems like nothing.
Tom Ayling 41:10
Well, at the time, Bloomsbury, who were the publishers who took it on what a relatively certainly compared to where they are now, a relatively small publishing house. One has to be economical, in the first print run of a book, see if it finds an audience, and then go big on a on a second print run, especially when you're talking about a debut novel with with no track record. So that's not an uncommon thing to happen, an author's first book will almost always be their rarest. And it's for that reason, you know, publishers being uncertain of its of its popularity. What what also adds, I suppose, to the rarity in that case, is that a large number of copies of the hardback will have gone straight to libraries, rather than to be sold in bookshops. Because that was an easy way of selling a significant proportion of your print room in hardback initially, because often people just buy the paperback because it's cheaper in it might come out on the same day, or it might come out a few months later. So So in all likelihood, that 500 then becomes say 250, or 300. And there are certainly that many people in the world who would want to own a first edition of it and be willing to pay, you know, a large sum of money for it. But I have to say that is very quickly that is a unique phenomenon. In modern publishing, you know, there are very, very few books published in the entire 20th century, that should have an equivalent value monetarily. So if you were one of the very lucky people who happen to buy a first edition of Harry Potter, when it first came out, then all power to you. But you know, there might not be an equivalent phenomenon in the next 100 years.
Nick VinZant 43:14
Is there any could have been stories that you have, like this book would have been very rare, very valuable, but it just had, I was missing a page or anything like that.
Tom Ayling 43:30
I mean, completeness is is hugely important to, to a book. So if it's missing a page that kind of falls at the first hurdle. So one of the first things that I'm looking at when I'm while certainly when we take a book in for stock is we do something called collating it, which is in simple terms, making sure all of its there. So we go through every single book, page by page to make sure it's complete. And then we note any condition issues that might appear throughout it, maybe there's a tear to page, you know, 90 or whatever. In terms of could have been stories, there was I'll tell you about one that we came across a few years ago. We were offered by email, a first edition of Animal Farm by George Orwell that was purported to be inscribed by George Orwell for a woman with whom he had an affair. So a very interesting association in the scope of all wells, all wells life and, and biography. Say we were very quick to say, we'd love to see it, can you bring it or send it to us and the book arrives? And I opened it and immediately said, that's not right. something was off about the signature and the inscription. This, this is a book that where it cracked, would be worth, you know, 10s of 1000s of pounds, without even thinking about it too hard. And we did some due diligence on it. Because initially, you get this, this, Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called Blink about your sort of initial reaction to things and how often that sort of Blink instinctive reaction is the right one. But sometimes you have to do a bit of digging to find out why you think that and that's exactly what we did. I looked at it. And I thought, it's not right. But then you look closer. And the, to Elena, from George had actually been copied very, very closely from a letter that we had sold a few years before, that was addressed to Elena. And then at the end of the letter signed from George, and it was done in the exact same way, as the letter was. So when we put two and two side by side, it was clear that someone had with, you know, a relatively good hand, copied it. But then if you really look closely, and get it, you know, get it well photographed. And zoom all the way in as if you're looking at it under a microscope, you can see that the the way the ink gathers on the paper is unnatural. When you're signing your name, usually it's a fluid process, right? You if you're signing, you know a letter from neck, you just right neck, whereas you could see it the way the ink had gathered on this paper, it had been done really slowly and deliberately. So and when you go into that depths, you discover the what was a book, you were, you know, willing to write a check for an awful lot of money for is despoiled and worthless.
Nick VinZant 47:06
Was it actually a first edition? Could you tell if that's actually a bachelor's? Right?
Tom Ayling 47:09
Yeah, it was genuinely a first edition, which is a which is a you know, 567 1000 pound book on its own. So some fools, they've made a mistake.
Nick VinZant 47:28
Ah, so they basically instead of, they tried to double their money and then said they lost it. All right. And then now it's Yeah. But then can that book become if it turns out it's the master criminal of the world, the Moriarty of the whatever century we're in now, then is that book suddenly like,
Tom Ayling 47:49
it doesn't become it doesn't. I mean, it can become a curiosity. There was a famous bookseller called Thomas Wise, who was operating in the in the late 19th, early 20th century, who became a master forger of of books to the extent that someone can be and would, you know, run off prints of of pamphlets that people have thought will last forever and forge signatures and mixed books to gather to. To sort of fake up copies. And he was he was found out in a in a sort of very scholarly paper that was published. And those sorts of famous forgeries have a certain cachet, and is an interesting thing to collect. Because the history of forging things is an interesting history. And it's part of rightfully a part of book history. But it doesn't make it anything, like the real thing in terms of in terms of monetary value. And if we're talking about I mean, why it was interesting, because he was doing it with, with sort of entire objects, you know, like a whole pamphlet or something. If we're just talking about a sign signature, it just makes the book total nonstarter. It doesn't mean that someone went by it thinking it's the real thing.
Nick VinZant 49:22
Is there a holy grail there, like everybody is looking for this? We know it somewhere. If I find this, I will be the coolest person at the antiquarian book dealers convention.
Tom Ayling 49:37
There are a few such things. I can actually what I can tell you something that actually I'll tell you a real story about something that that happened recently, and it made someone the coolest person at the antiquarian booksellers convention. So in New York, every winter in Do I sort of in March or April, there's the New York antiquarian book fair. And I was a couple of weeks out before the fair, I saw an article pop up from the New York Times, saying that a, an American in London bookseller had between them acquired the final lost manuscript of Charlotte Bronte, who, who, when she was young, would produce these tiny little books, of poems and little stories and things. And these were sold at auction in the late 19th, early 20th century, and who truly been scattered to the four winds. And over the intervening 100 years, they have slowly made their way back to the Bronte parsonage Museum at the house where the Bronte sisters lived. But there was this one that everyone knew existed, because we can see in the auction catalog from from sort of 1914 1917 that it had been sold, but no one knew where it was. And then it appeared in a booth at the New York antiquarian book fair, this April. And that was a very, very cool thing to see in person. And particularly since there's a happy ending to the story, which is to say that the Bronte parsonage museum with the quite significant help of a fabulous organization here in the UK, called Friends of the national libraries, managed to acquire the book from them and return at home. So that sort of thing, and there are equivalent lost manuscripts for a whole series of authors. That would be wonderful to find writers like Jane Austen and say that it would be wonderful to to uncover
Nick VinZant 52:08
that's pretty much all the questions we got man, is there anything that we you think we missed? Or people want to know more? How can they find you? How can they find the shop all that stuff?
Tom Ayling 52:17
Okay, well, the shop I work for is called Yonkers read books. In Henley on Thames, we have an open shop, so anyone is welcome to come and visit. And we also have a website where we have all of our stock listed. That's yonkers.k.uk. And if you want to keep up with what I'm doing, then I'm on Tiktok, and Instagram, and my ad is Tom W. ailing.