In today’s episode we’re talking about past appraisal customers who ended up being dramatically, confidently, and sometimes abrasively wrong about their signed books. Anyone can look at an inscribed title page and get excited—you want to believe that your book’s former owner was that A. Lincoln, and not just a Lincoln. This is why booksellers and appraisers have to be cautious, do their research, and consult with colleagues, especially when it comes to big, thrilling items. Occasionally your appraisee’s belief in their impossible inscription will persist in the face of pretty compelling evidence—that the signed book in question was printed decades after the death of United States President Abraham Lincoln, for example—and they’ll storm out or hang up on you, hopefully to seek a second opinion. Learn more about the shop’s least likely finds on this farcical new #brattlecast.
Brattlecast #81 - One Book Collections
Perhaps amassing 2000 copies of Walden isn’t exactly what Thoreau meant when he exhorted us to ‘Simplify, simplify,’ however, some collectors do simplify their libraries by collecting different editions of a single book. Books like the Bible, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, and the works of Mark Twain, Charles Dickens, and Dante Alighieri have been published so often, with such a variety of bindings, languages, and illustrations, that a collection of even one of these books would be impossible to ever complete. We’ll take a look at a few of these monomaniacal collections on this week’s brattlecast.