Here’s a nice little newspaper biography about Wayne Kee, a rabid book collector in the Northwest.
He tells a good story about passing up on a chance to buy an1814 edition of the Lewis and Clark journals for around $6,000, something he could sell today for $200,000.
But he seems to have mixed feeling about the Internet’s impact on book collecting and selling:
Before the Internet came along, it was a wonderful world out
there, finding books. Now that the Internet has come along, everything has come up now, and you have a true market in books. Now you put them on eBay, and you can no longer find something at a decent price. But the one thing that it has
done is brought out a lot of books that people didn’t know about before.
OK, who’s going to tell this guy about Amazon?
One Comment
Thanks for the story, Steve. I love hearing about collectors, and bibliophiles in general. I was even more tickled when I checked my postage log, and it turns out I sold Wayne Kee a book in Dec of 2007: OREGON GEOGRAPHIC NAMES. Cool, huh? I have just begun making a log of the folks I’ve sold very specific topics to. My goal for the future is to not even buy a book, unless I already have confidence in who is going to buy it.
Lahana