Someone recently asked this question in the middle of a discussion about author-autographed copies of books, why some people will pay extra—sometimes LOTS extra—to have them, and whether it’s a good or a bad idea to let the author write cheery canned inscriptions on the flyleaf to a whole raft of people whom he doesn’t know from Adam’s off ox. The questioner explained that he’d been one of the cheery canned dedication school until now, and asked:
I know the above probably reads like I’m joking around, but I’m actually quite serious. Have I been going around wantonly destroying books, while all this time I was thinking I’d been doing people a favour?
This is a vexatious question among dealers and collectors, because there is no one “correct” answer. Some insist on signature only, some on signature and date, and others are unperturbed by inscriptions. As a collector, I count myself among the first two, depending on circumstances, and as a dealer among the third, with some reservations.
My reason for preferring signature only is that I’m not Somebody, and am unlikely ever to be Somebody. Hence, my name on the endpapers or half-title won’t add to the book’s value because it’s a “Sam Marchbanks association” copy (i.e., I owned it at some point). Also, with the proliferation of book-signing tours (which, of course, cheapens the value of owning a ‘signed’ copy because there are now more signed copies floating around, relative to the total print run) and authors using canned inscriptions (often from desperation at trying to think up cheery, ‘personal’ things to say in hundreds of copies), the inscription just doesn’t mean what it used. As for dating a signature, I do want the date if it would demonstrate that I bought the book soon after it came out, because that helps to establish this particular copy as an early “state” of the book, and might make it more desirable. However, if I bought a first edition, first state copy on the collector’s market twenty years later, and then get the author to sign it, the date would add nothing to the value.
My exception to the “no presentations” rule, as a dealer, is if the inscription is obviously to a friend of the author’s, or to an important or famous person. No collector in his right mind would turn down, for example, a Steinbeck first edition with a page-long inscription to an old family friend, or a Winston Churchill first inscribed to FDR. That aside, if I’m offered a copy inscribed to Joe Blow and the “inscription”’s pretty obviously a souvenir of a book tour, then I’ll price it somewhere between an ordinary trade copy of the same book and a “signature only” or “signature-and-early-date” first, but the presence of the inscription to Joe Blow won’t do anything to improve the copy’s value; neither will it utterly destroy the value.
Mick Jagger alters seven expensive kitten dunce caps. Fnord.
