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Henry Toledano did booksellers and collectors a big, big favor indeed when he wrote
what's now accepted as the definitive Modern Library reference -
The Modern Library Price Guide (latest edition is
The Modern Library Price Guide, 1917-2000, 2nd Revised Edition, 1999). More than a price guide, it contains extensive information on all collectible focus areas of the Modern Library, photos and issue points of dust jackets and bindings - and even some good advice on book scouting and book repair. It is a resource that no serious Modern Library collector should be without. The first edition was published in 1993, a second in 1995, and the most recent appeared at the end of 1999.
Henry will soon be 75 years old - "I'll soon be collectible!" he said. Well, he's
a rare one indeed. As I learned through our conversation and as you can see from the photos, Henry
is one sharp and lively guy. He is also the author of Goreyography (San Francisco, 1996), a comprehensive Edward Gorey bibliography and price guide. He has been a bookseller (Books etc) for many years, and he currently resides in San Francisco, California.
BOOKTHINK: You mentioned that you came back from China a short time ago.
Yes, I went to China very recently. In our group was a gentleman who was 92 (I knew him because I played Bridge with him), and he did everything. What's more, he's been (in 2005) to Europe, Alaska, China, Canada, and in February, he's going round the cape of Patagonia, and 92 - fantastic. We had a great time.
BOOKTHINK: What were your impressions of China?
I loved it. I was really impressed. It's coming up so fast. The development is staggering. The roads are good - this is true of the east. I gather the west has enormous problems, but in the east the roads are excellent, the hotels were fabulous, the buildings and the construction were phenomenal. I don't think we (the U.S.) will be number one for many decades more. And, in my opinion, the price of oil will be going up. There's lots of smog. Things are really developing at an incredible pace.
BOOKTHINK: Tell me a little about your background. I know from some reading I've done that you've lived in England. I'm thinking you've had a pretty interesting life.
I was born in Egypt. I went to school in England, and before coming to the states I lived for ten years in the Bahamas. I started collecting Modern Library purely by accident. When I was living in England I frequently visited Paris, and it was there that I bought my first Modern Library. The series was not obtainable in England for copyright reasons, though a few Modern Library titles have been published in the UK. I liked the look of the books, and they were cheap. What's more, I bought them to read, and I read them all. Before starting to collect in earnest many years later, I had 70 or 80 regular editions - all bought in Paris, or maybe a few were purchased in Switzerland.
The Modern Library selection was really excellent, and most of the titles are still valid now. I'd say 95% were classics and still readable today. I repeat - a phenomenal selection.
BOOKTHINK: I've always wondered how they selected their titles for publication.
There's a book called The World's Best Books: Taste, Culture and the Modern Library. It was written by Jay Satterfield and put out by University of Massachusetts Press-Amherst/Boston. It's a very interesting book. It doesn't deal with the collecting aspect, but it does cover what you just asked - how they selected the titles and what they did to get them distributed to various booksellers.
(MEDIA EDITOR'S NOTE: As I mentioned in Part I of this article, this book is a fascinating
read about the development and marketing of the Modern Library. Titles were chosen to appeal to
"modern" intellectuals, including college students, middle management America and the
Bohemian culture of Greenwich Village. The aim was to publish books that would have more lasting
cultural value than the typical Book-of-the-Month Club selections or the popular "set
editions" of the early 20th-century bourgeois.)
BOOKTHINK: What do you like most about collecting Modern Library?
I like the search, the hunt ... and of course if you can get something at a good price, better still. When I first started, I noticed that booksellers charged about the same price for all Modern Library books, which of course was nonsense, as some are very easy to find and others almost impossible. That, I suppose, was the seed for starting the bibliography.
Ten years ago, you went to pretty well any store, even a paperback one, and usually saw a few Modern Library on the shelves. Most were priced at about $4, a standard price at the time. If you were lucky you perhaps found one for $3. That was incredible. You could start a collection, your first 50 to 70 books (as I did in Paris) without any difficulty. Now, of course, that's changed; you go into a bookstore, and you may not see a single Modern Library with a decent jacket.
BOOKTHINK: You must have a really great collection of Modern Library editions.
I've got probably the finest collection in terms of condition but not necessarily the largest.
BOOKTHINK: Do you have a particular focus area?
I collect everything. Anything to do with Modern Library - publicity pieces, Modern Library logos, pirated editions, Modern Library bound in binding classes, errors, you name it.
BOOKTHINK: Is there a favorite book you have obtained that has a good story behind it?
I did get Alice in Wonderland, the illustrated edition, which I obtained purely by luck.
But I actually sold it because somebody offered me an absurd price. I said, ok, if you want to
pay that, it's fine by me. It was a very high price, I thought. It was, however, an
exceptionally fine copy. Most people in the Bay area know I collect Modern Library, and
a fellow bookseller phoned me and said he'd bought a whole collection of
Modern Libraries from a Random House representative. He said he'd give me any
of the books I wanted at 30% off my indicated price in the Guide. Fortunately for me
he only had the first Guide (where the prices were slightly lower) and with
Alice in Wonderland omitted altogether, simply because, at the time,
I didn't know of its existence. So he actually priced it far too low.
BOOKTHINK: What inspired you to take on writing The Modern Library Price Guide?
My divorce. I wanted something to take my mind off my problems. And I also wanted to learn how to use a computer, and I felt there was no better way to learn something than to give myself a task. Plus, I liked the search, as I mentioned before. I used to carry a small tape recorder around with me, and if I found a book that was too expensive to buy, and I knew I didn't have it, I would just record the information I needed and make notes when I got home.
The initial guide said nothing about first state dust jackets. In the subsequent ones, I do make the distinction, because it became clear that many wanted First Modern Library editions with the correct first state dust jacket. I thought it ridiculous that they would pay four or five times the more to get a first Modern Library edition as opposed to just the regular edition. But if that's what they wanted, so be it.
But then I find quite a lot of things absurd. A couple of years ago I went to an auction
where there were two lots of Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath - a very good copy in a very good dust jacket, and the second identical in terms of condition except that its dust jacket was covered with a browned, torn, creased original tissue. The first book sold for $1,800 and the second for $2,800 plus, of course, the 15% buyer's premium. A lousy tissue for a $1,000 more! That's not my style.
BOOKTHINK: Your guide is a tremendous aid in the often difficult task of identifying Modern Library first editions.
In the earlier Modern Library there are some ambiguities, but I devised a method whereby you could tell the first from the catalog number at the beginning of the book. In the later editions (post 1925) the edition is usually marked. For those where it was not I used the number printed on the dust jacket, which showed how many Modern Library were in print when a particular book was published. This is not fool-proof, but adequate and helpful when scouting.
BOOKTHINK: I've read that with the more current editions, even if the copyright page says "First Edition" it might not necessarily be a Modern Library first.
That's right. In the recent editions, the price on the dust jacket is a better indicator, which should be corroborated by what is on the copyright page.
BOOKTHINK: What do you think about the more current Modern Library editions. A they are still producing good books?
I think initially the plan was to publish good titles cheap. Well, I think the titles are still quite good, but they are no longer cheap. Also, they are "perfect bound" where the early Modern Library books were stitched, so the newer ones are not as well made. They are better than the 70's series, which were still inexpensive but quite ugly.
BOOKTHINK: What are some of the more challenging areas of focus for collectors today?
Indisputably, the hardest to find are the Boni Liverights (that's for the Modern Library published between 1917-1925) with jackets. You're damn lucky if you find a dust jacket that is not in tatters. The dust jackets were very fragile, so they are very hard to find in anything like presentable condition.
BOOKTHINK: There are some editions that have some interesting forewords by authors who were prominent?
Yes. Some of them were unique to the Modern Library, which would often mean collectors of that author would want the Modern Library first edition because it contained the first appearance of a foreword, introduction or whatever it was, by a particular author. An example would be Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, where he wrote a special introduction for the Modern Library.
BOOKTHINK: Any advice to readers on collecting Modern Library today?
I think collecting Modern Library might be in decline. A lot of people try to buy from eBay, and there are a lot there. Many don't sell. The common titles are pretty plentiful, so you can still find them cheap. If you do, and they are in fine condition, I'd say they are probably still worth buying if you don't already have them. As for a rarer title, especially one published before 1940, if you see one, grab it. The chances are you'll never see it again.
The buckram editions, which were published for use in libraries, are very hard to find -
especially in giants. There are very many things you can collect: illustrated, first editions
only, paperbacks (excluding the College Series), regular series, giants. The paperbacks are
very cheap and there are only 76 of them, but most people don't collect them. However,
there is actually one paperback that is a first edition in its own right and in fine
condition fetches over $100. The Long March by William Styron.
I think to start with, unless you have very deep pockets and a lot of space, you should focus on a particular aspect of Modern Library. There are about 800 or 900 titles in the regular series. Most people collect these in jackets, and the more fastidious want only first editions in first issue jackets. But collect because you enjoy it. If you are doing it for the money, forget it. Things change. What appeals to one generation does not necessarily appeal to the next.
BOOKTHINK: Have you any advice for booksellers?
I must say that, as a seller, I try not to interject my own preferences into what I buy to resell. If other people want a genre or particular author, even if I think they are trash, it's none of my business.
But from the seller's point of view, it's a good idea to have a specialty - something you know well and buyers will come to you when looking for that specialty. If you don't do this, selling becomes almost entirely luck. If you specialize, the chances are you can see a bargain when it hits you, whereas if you don't, you won't know a bargain when you see it.
From a selling point of view, people want "information," so they go for art, history, science or something like that. Fiction is something of a lottery. Best sellers come and go. Fiction, however, has one advantage as far as a bookseller is concerned: it is often mis-priced. People don't know all fiction well, and they can't always identify a first. If an art book looks impressive, the chances are its price is too. You don't get the bargains in non-fiction that you do in fiction.
BOOKTHINK: Is there anything else you might like to share, perhaps your take on book collecting/selling today?
Before 2000 the people who were buying - anyway from me - were the computer nerds: (a) those with computer know-how; (b) they had plenty of money; (c) they liked reading and collecting first editions. Then came the 2000 recession and the collapse of the dot-coms. Those customers have gone and new ones are not replacing them.
Further, the whole field has become more competitive. There are over 70 million books on-line, 15,000 or more dealers or others selling books on the internet, and don't forget Ebay - another source of books. In addition, the bookseller now has to compete for the consumer's time in other fields like computer games, TV, collecting baseball cards, coins, etc. I get the feeling that fewer people are reading.
All collecting depends on what the younger generation is doing. It's like stamps. Younger people now are not collecting stamps; therefore, their value is not going up. Mostly, I think the older people are collecting Modern Library. I don't know. I have a few young collectors, but on the whole not too many. However, the books should maintain their value. I find it absurd to pay only $4 for a nice hardcover modern library in dust jacket when a new paperback costs $7, $8 or $9. I don't try to explain people's thinking: they do what they do. I personally prefer a cheaper hardback than a paperback, but then I find it impossible to read on a bus.
I believe 50% of bricks & mortar booksellers have gone out of business in California in the last four or five years, and the on-line business is pretty awful too, as far as I'm concerned. To make matters worse, it's something of a lottery whether your particular book appears when searched for. Often it does not. As for putting in specific criteria (first, with dust jacket, signed, etc.) forget it. You will, in all probability, get Book Club editions, previous owner's inscriptions, dust jacket missing etc. The servers, which act as intermediaries for the book sellers, take quite lot of money for all this and more often than not do not reimburse the sellers for sales tax, postage insurance for expensive books, and their provision for mailing it is often totally inadequate.
BOOKTHINK: Any plans for further books or price guides in your future?
I have no intention of writing any more bibliographies, though I have prepared a couple checklists for Robin Maugham and Christopher Isherwood, but for firsts only - UK and US. As for my fiction, I have a few short stories published in obscure or defunct magazines.
BOOKTHINK: How can readers obtain a copy of your Price Guide?
They can contact me at
BooksetcSF@aol.com. The first guide
was done in 1993, the second in 1995, and the last one came out at the end of 1999
and is titled The Modern Library Price Guide, 1917-2000. Four editions of the last one were produced: a paperback, a hardcover, a limited numbered edition, and there was a lettered edition which came with an all-color supplement illustrating dust jackets of the same title. The original prices were $17.95 for the paperback, $39.95 for the hardcover, $65 for the limited edition which comes with a dust jacket and is limited to 100 copies and signed by me with an inserted colored limitation page; the lettered edition is the same as the numbered edition, except, in addition, it comes with the all-color dust jacket supplement, and book and supplement are housed in a slipcase: original price $135.00.
BOOKTHINK: One of your other specialties is Edward Gorey. You published a bibliography and price guide called Goreyography. Can you tell us a little about that?
Goreyography was published in 1996. The paperback edition was priced at $24.95 and the hardcover at $45.00. There was a limited numbered edition (200 copies) which came out at $85 (they were signed by Gorey) which now usually sells for around $165, though I have seen copies up to $250. The lettered edition (26 copies) came in a slipcase, also signed by Gorey. That is difficult to find and now sells for between $350-375.
BOOKTHINK: Thank you, Henry, for sharing your knowledge with us. It has been such a pleasure talking with you.
Copyright 2003-2006 by BookThink LLC
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