Iwatts00:
I was going to list and someone asked me what I wanted for all eleven books. How should I value these?
Well, this puts me in a quandary - as the question of what you wanted for the set was asked by - me!
So really, I’d have to say that they are probably worth next to nothing… ;-)
Seriously, the reason that I didn’t e-mail you back immediately (apart from the fact that it was the middle of the night here) was you raise an interesting question here about worth and value.
In the normal scope of things, I’d say that they are worth somewhere between £25 and £45 each - you’ll see higher figures bandied about, and dealers on sites like abebooks will list them at over £100, but in the scheme of things they tend not to be very rare, and come up quite a lot, but between those figures seems to be where they fall on eBay. It would be up to you to decide if a “job lot†approach would work - normally the buying of a quantity would not be the multiple of buying all the individual items.
However, the biggest wrinkle is that you are in the States. This means that the postage angle may make them less attractive to a European audience. They may be more attractive to a U.S. collector, because Methuen books were not that widely available over there - but then there are probably fewer collectors to begin with.
Add to this (and my biggest surprise) is that the albums new today are $40 more or less in the U.S., and it makes it harder for me to advise what the best figure would be. Obviously that’s more than new books cost here in the U.K., and is closer to the collector value I’d expect for the old Methuens.
That something may cost more (or as much) as something “second-hand†in some ways is to be expected - yet in others seems to be odd too.
Feel free to e-mail me again off forum, as I’d still be interested in them if the postage wasn’t too huge an obstacle.
