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`Go for the most expensive you can afford'
Independent, The (London), May 22, 2004
ROBERT NEWBURY began collecting rare books in the 1970s. He now owns Ardis Books in Hampshire.
"I got into collecting books by accident really. I started going to second-hand bookshops in the 1970s and buying up Giles cartoon books. Then as a kind of nostalgia thing, I went on to collect children's books by Malcolm Saville. That's how I started anyway, and I think you tend to start with things you can afford.
"As I got a bit older I started collecting more mainstream authors and personal favourites. I recently had a copy of Brideshead Revisited which was published in 1945, and has become a fairly major classic of 20th century literature. At the time it was published it was just another book, now you pick up the first edition with the dust wrapper on, and you think - well there it is how it was the first day it was published. There's some mystique in that.
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"The current thing - admittedly a slightly different branch of the book world - is for British comics, which until the past few years were not really thought very much of by collectors. Now comics from the 1950s and 1960s, and anything TV related is popular, probably because it reminds people of the past. Another author I've noticed has risen to great prominence is Eleanor Brent Dyer. I bought some first editions in 1983 at a jumble sale because they had nice jackets. They were worth between pounds 7 and pounds 10 each, which I thought was good. Today you'd pay pounds 100 to pounds 150 each. There is also demand for girl's comics now. They can go for pounds 10, sometimes hundreds, which wasn't the case a little while ago. I think women didn't tend to collect those kinds of things, but that seems to have changed and now there's quite a big demand for girl's comics.
"Anyone starting a collection should look for books with dust wrappers. It can be quite confusing why people are interested in these paper jackets, but it's like collecting anything. You want the complete version, as it was published, preferably on day one.
"Go for more expensive books because they tend to maintain their value."
Ardis Books, Hampshire
www.ardis.co.uk
BOOKS YOU CAN'T AFFORD
Claudius Ptolemy, astronomer and geographer, invented lines of longitude and latitude and knew the earth was round. In 1990 his Cosmographia, right, was sold in New York for $1,925,000, making it the most valuable atlas in the world.
The Gospel Book of Henry the Lion was sold in 1983 for pounds 8.14m. Today it sits in Helmarshausen, Germany.
The Birds of America by John James Audubon, is a collection of 435 hand-coloured engravings of every known bird in America around the 1820s. In 2000 one of the 119 remaining books fetched pounds 4.8m at Christie's, New York, to become the world's most valuable printed book.
The Tyndale New Testament was the first printed New Testament in English. In 1994 the British Library managed to acquire one of only two remaining complete copies for just over pounds 1m.
Created between 1400 and 1407, the Sherborne Missal contains the texts and music used in the Catholic Church service. Today the medieval book - worth pounds 15m - resides at the British Library, where it has been since 1998.
The Lindisfarne Gospels were written between 715 and 720 and are considered the greatest treasure from Northumbria still in existence. An artistic masterpiece, they can be found in the British Library.
A Christian book of private devotions, the Sforza Hours, below, was commissioned around 1490 for Bonna of Savoy. Today the priceless Renaissance masterpiece is housed at the British Library.
The Bible is the best-selling and most widely distributed book in the world, but most copies don't have great monetary value. But with just 48 remaining today, the Jerome Latin Vulgate version of the Gutenberg Bible - the first printed Bible - is one of the most valuable books in the world. A partial copy was sold in New York for $5.4m (pounds 3m).
AND SOME YOU CAN
CLASSICS
George Orwell, Animal Farm, 1945 In dust jacket, pounds 2000.
Thomas Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles, 3 volumes, 1862. Second impression, pounds 600-800.
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, The Hound of the Baskervilles, 1902, in original cloth, pounds 1500.
POETRY
Ted Hughes, Crow. 1973 Limited edition pounds 950
Philip Larkin, High Windows, 1974. In dust jacket, pounds 60-80.
TS Eliot, Prufrock and Other Observations, 1917, one of 500 copies, pounds 4000-5000.
CONTEMPORARY
Kate Atkinson, Behind the Scenes at the Museum, 1995. In dust jacket, pounds 20.
Frank McCourt, Angela's Ashes, 1996. In dust jacket, 1996. pounds 150.
CHILDREN'S
L. Frank Baum, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, 1900 First edition, second issue, pounds 4,950
Roald Dahl, The Witches, pounds 60.
J.K Rowling, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, first edition, pounds 16,000.
Richard Adams, Watership Down, 1972, pounds 500-700.
Copyright 2004 Independent Newspapers UK Limited
Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning Company. All rights Reserved.
