To correctly judge the value of a particular book, you need to have many years of experience as a collector, bibliophile or professional second-hand bookseller. If you ask someone who is experienced in the book business to give some useful advice, then the procedure for a rough assessment will be reduced to the following steps.
Instructions
Step 1
Find out more about the content of the book, or at least about its approximate subject matter, even if this book is in a foreign language or poorly preserved. Based on these data, it can already be concluded that the overwhelming majority of natural science works of the 19th and first half of the 20th centuries (especially medical ones) are hopelessly outdated, collectors are not interested in such specific literature. Works of fiction (especially by Russian authors) are of much greater interest, and the chances of a book being “rare” in this case immediately increase.
Step 2
Try to determine the edition of the book and find out the years of the author's life. The first editions of many works, as well as lifetime editions, are usually of much greater value than subsequent or posthumous editions. It's also a good idea to find out the circulation of the book - if it is less than ten thousand copies, and the content seems to be interesting to you, then it is very likely that you are dealing with a real rarity.
Step 3
Examine the book for completeness and preservation - see if all the pages are in place, does not the title page say about attachments (lithographs, inserts, maps) that you do not find in the book. The condition and quality of the binding is very important - whether it is "native" for a book or made by a modern restorer, whether it falls away from the book block. The cost of an antique book in good and bad condition can differ at times, so you should not create illusions about the high cost of folios, eaten by a bookworm, half of the pages of which are missing or missing altogether.
Step 4
Finally, determine whether the book you want to rate was released on its own or is part of a series (collected works, "multivolume"). If one of the volumes is in your hands, and the rest of the set has long been lost, then its value is sharply reduced - the collector does not like to put scattered volumes on the shelf and then look for the missing books for many years. However, any of these rules is not absolute, and only a specialist can make a more accurate judgment about the value of a particular old book.
