Old Is Not Rare

Somebody has died, and there are books.

Four boxes down from the loft, and everyone in the family has always said the leather ones in the front room were worth something.

They almost certainly are not. Victorian Britain printed Bibles, sermons and encyclopaedias by the million, and they survived precisely because they looked too grand to throw away. Scarcity is not created by age. It is created by things being thrown away, which is why the book that is actually worth money is usually a novel from the last fifty years that looks like nothing at all.

This book teaches you to tell the difference in an afternoon. It gives you the checks a dealer runs, in the order they run them, so that you reach the same conclusion before anybody makes you an offer.

Inside:

• How to triage a whole houseful down to a shortlist of fifteen in one afternoon
• Edition, printing and impression, and why "First published 1974" on the copyright page proves nothing about your copy
• Number lines, and the single rule that always holds
• Two real publishers whose conventions point in opposite directions, including the one where the absence of any statement is evidence FOR a first edition
• How to spot a book club edition in fifteen seconds, by feel, before a buyer spots it for you
• The grading scale, and the one word that traps almost every private seller
• Why the paper dust jacket is usually most of the value, and what price-clipped, married and facsimile jackets mean
• How to find what your copy actually sold for, rather than what somebody somewhere is asking
• The sentence in section 160 of the Inheritance Tax Act 1984 that stops an estate being valued at house clearance prices
• Why an insurance valuation is the wrong figure for probate
• The export licence you may need for a bundle of family letters, whatever they are worth
• What a dealer's offer actually means, and why the margin is not a swindle
• The do nothing list: the ways people destroy value while trying to help
• Four worksheets to work through with the book in your hand

There is no price list, because any printed list of what books sell for is out of date before it ships. You get the method instead, and it still works in ten years.

England and Wales, with Scotland and Northern Ireland flagged where they differ. Information, not advice, and not a valuation.