Book collectors tend to look you in the eye. They are passionately curious, in love with beautiful narratives, and generally undeterred by the shiny and two-dimensional. Unlike traditional art collectors, dyed-in-the-wool book people seek the whole story, scrutinizing every printed page. To the untrained eye, books on a shelf may appear unassuming, but to a book expert and lover, it’s a trove of treasures, sometimes worth millions.
Need proof? Consider the Codex Sassoon, the earliest and most-complete Hebrew Bible which was sold last month at Sotheby’s for just over $38 million. Dating back to the 9th century – and named after the renowned Baghdadi Jewish scholar and book collector David Sassoon– the Codex contains all 24 books of the Hebrew bible. The buyer was American attorney and diplomat Alfred H. Moses who snapped up the Codex after a mere 10 minutes of bidding and is donating the ancient bible to the ANU Museum of the Jewish people in Tel Aviv.
The Codex sale marked a record for a historical manuscript, besting the $31 million Bill Gates paid for Leonardo da Vinci’s Codex Leicester back in 1994. But it’s hardly the only marquee transaction in the increasingly lucrative world of rare books, bibles and other works on papers. Long the domain of private sales and off-market transactions, the rare books market has dramatically transformed over the past two decades thanks to both a rise in covid-era collecting and shifting industry demands.
Whereas once rare books were mostly traded sotto voce — directly between clients and private dealers — “books, maps, manuscripts and ephemera are increasingly being sold at auction,” said Bruce McKinney, founder of the Rare Book Hub, a bibliographic database and magazine. “That has been a very strong trend, and is frankly irreversible.” And, as the Codex Sassoon demonstrates, it can also be incredibly lucrative.
At a time when a ‘book’ has come to mean a cluster of words on screen, the art of bound texts has never felt more relevant for lovers of artistry, history, literature and provenance. The raw endurance of the book itself is undeniable: Indeed the original Amazon – aka Sotheby’s auction house – was actually founded in 1744 exclusively as a book auctioneer, disposing of great noble libraries and collections including books taken by Napoleon into exile on the island of St. Helena in 1815. Two centuries later, technologies such as ChatGPT can literally create literature out of nothing, leaving rare and historic books to provide a much-needed sense of continuity between the past, present and future.
“Digital content is not permanent,” explained Richard Austin, Global Head of the Books and Manuscripts Department at Sotheby’s. “But a well-made book is a thing of durability…and that’s not going to change.”
Although still far more modest in size compared to visual arts — which saw some $65 billion in total sales in 2022, according to a UBS/Art Basel report— the rare books market is having a moment. The category encompasses everything from books and bibles to prints, maps and other paper-bound ephemera. For most of its history, sales were largely private and conducted by a small group of dealers and antiques shops for an equally small and rarified consumer base. Connecticut-based William Reese Company, for instance, is a notable local private dealer with a focus on Americana, while Donald A. Heald Rare Books, on the Upper East Side, specializes in cartography.
But the last decade has seen notable shifts both in who is buying rare books — and how they’re buying them. A decade ago, most buyers were in their 40s or 50s, “but there’s a new generation coming in fresh; tech people with an interest in books and the money to buy them,” says Peter Harrington, owner of the eponymous London rare book dealer, which recently sold a First Folio collAction of 36 Shakespeare plays printed four centuries ago for nearly $8 million. “This generation has spent their lives attached to their tablets,” Harrington continues, “so books have become these sort of rare objects of beauty for them.”
The other major shift in the market has been that rise in sales by major auction houses rather than private dealers. According to a report by McKinney, the market for rare books at auction jumped to $1.15 billion in 2021, nearly twice the numbers barely three years before. Indeed, despite Covid-related shut-downs, auction sales surged 76.7% between early 2020 and 2021 – accompanied by a comparable increase in the number of pieces sold at each auction.
Indeed, the pandemic provided the ideal backdrop for the expansion of rare books sales, particularly at auction houses – which were quick to digitize their commerce efforts. “Fairs were shut down, so people were looking for new ways to buy and sell, and auctions became a place where those transactions could happen,” said Gretchen Hause, Vice President and Senior Specialist at Hindman Auctions in Chicago. With major mail and parcel services still operating, the lockdown proved “easy for existing buyers to fill holes in their collections,” adds Harrington, “while newcomers also began to explore collecting.”
At the same time, the shift toward auction houses has offered a much-needed level of formality and transparency to rare book sales. “Previously, serious collectors had to rely on serious dealers, there were no other options,” said McKinney. And this market murkiness often inflated sales prices by upwards of 30%, he adds. “The field was intentionally obscured for decades, and without alternatives collectors tended to pay too much.” Public in the most literal of ways, auctions have helped combat this opaqueness while making works available to far broader audiences.
When Hause took over the Hindman book department in 2017 following nearly a decade at Christies, sales averaged just $750,000 each year. Today, she says, that figure has surged to $5 million. “When I started [in 2010] at Christie’s, our minimum for a single consignment was $5,000, and that rose to $10,000 by the time I left [in 2017],” Hause explained about her early career. These figures have clearly grown substantially: An annotated copy of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s seminal “Scarlet Letter” auctioned by Christie’s on June 16 fetched almost $700,000. The seller was former Wall Street executive and one time Vermonth Republican gubernatorial candidate Bruce Lisman.
Richard Austin at Sotheby’s echoes Hause’s sentiments about the rise in prices secured at auction. In addition to watershed sales like the Codex Sassoon, his department regularly sells lesser works on paper for over $1 million, such as a map from the collection of American explorers Lewis and Clark that fetched $1.4 million at auction in January.
“It used to be that million-dollar or multi-million-dollar results were unusual in the manuscript market, but it’s become much more frequent,” Austin said. “I wouldn’t say every single auction sale would have one, but these prices aren’t as eyebrow-raising as they used to be.”
With its enforced seclusion and cultural slow-down, the pandemic also suited the browsing and buying patterns of bibliophiles, who move far slower than their art-world contemporaries. “Book collectors are slightly different, in that they take a longer view,” Austin explained. “When someone forms a collection, it’s done over 20 years, a lifetime…There’s not as much speculation as there is in other markets.”
Without doubt, the vast majority of the priciest works sold are ecclesiastic in nature, like the Codex Sassoon — mostly, as Harrington notes, because religious texts were the first true printed matter. In 2017, for instance, the Mormon Church paid $35 million to buy the original printer’s manuscript of the Book of Mormon which dates back to 1835. A book of psalms known as the Bay Psalm Book fetched $14.2 million a few years earlier at Sotheby’s; dating back to 1640, it’s considered to be the first-ever book published in what would later become the United States. “Even as religion has lost some of its luster in everyday life,” McKinney says, “their icons continue to be deeply appreciated” and extremely valuable.
But an increasing number of non-religious texts are now scoring big at auction – though nowhere near those bible numbers. In November 2019, for instance, Hindman set a world record for a first edition by Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species, which sold for $564,500, and this year, just one week before the Codex Sassoon triumph, Hindman sold five Jane Austen books for $300,000. Harrington’s recent multi-million Shakespeare sale also reflects the value placed on works by historical figures like Darwin, da Vinci or the Bard who, says Harringon, “established entirely new canons and new ways of thought.”
Hause is particularly passionate about books by Austen – and their potential to increase in value. Despite the widespread fame and adaptation of her complex characters in film and television, the actual number of Austen first editions is rare. Only 1,500 copies of Pride and Prejudice were printed. In her own time, Austen was an unknown woman writer. The author may never have imagined how ubiquitous her stories would become.
Harrington, for one, is hardly surprised: Books like Harry Potter — along with other fantasy or science fiction titles such as Dune, The Chronicles of Narnia and Lord of the Rings — reflect the generational shift propelling the rare books market today. “Buyers like to collect the types of books that they grew up with,” he says. “A generation ago, Boomers were after titles like ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ or ‘Catcher in the Rye.” Newly flush with tech cash, younger buyers have flocked to their childhood authors like Rowling – and willing to pay handsomely for her originals.
With an entire new series of Potter-related movies slated to arrive over the next decade, Harrington predicts the value of Rowling’s earliest editions will rise even further. After all, even though bibles and sonnets continue to score biggest at auction, the rare book market cannot escape the pull of pop culture. “Every time a new James Bond movie comes out,” says Harrington, “the price of Ian Fleming’s originals jumps accordingly.”
A similar sentiment could easily be applied to JK Rowling, whose early editions – despite her recent controversies — are proving lucrative. In late 2021, a first edition of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone sold for $471,000 at Heritage Auctions, a world-record for a work of modern literature. Just 500 of these books were published, with two others also fetching six-figure sums.
Alexandra Bregman is an arts and culture writer and the the author of The Bouvier Affair: A True Story
