Wed 18 Apr 2012
When I went looking for cover images to include with Bill Deeck’s recent review of Death Paints the Picture, by Lawrence Lariar, the first thing I discovered was that there wasn’t a single copy of the Phoenix Press hardcover up for sale on Abebooks.com, not one. There were five copies of the paperback edition up for grabs, which isn’t too surprising, but the lack of hardcover copies reinforced a small realization that is obvious in many ways, but one which I’ve been slow in coming to and putting into words.
And that is, there is only a small finite number of hardcover mysteries from the 1940s that still exist, and the number that are in the hands of dealers and not already in collections is rapidly decreasing. Endangered species, is what they are.
Deciding to investigate further, I decided to look into the availability of all of Lariar’s mysteries published under his own name, the hardcover first editions only, thus excluding paperback reprints, British editions and the occasional hardcover reprint from the Detective Book Club.
I don’t know what the following data tells us, if anything. The numbers depend too greatly on a lot of different factors, none of which were controlled. I’ll have some comments after the following list. If you find any of this interesting, you can leave any insight you have as well, as usual.
Death Paints a Picture, Phoenix Press, 1943. No copies available.
He Died Laughing. Phoenix Press, 1943. Four copies, two in jacket.
The Man with the Lumpy Nose. Dodd Mead, 1944. Twelve copies, seven in jacket.
The Girl with the Frightened Eyes. Dodd Mead, 1945. Four copies, two in jacket.
Friday for Death. Crown, 1949. Two copies, two in jacket.
You Can’t Catch Me. Crown, 1951. Six copies, five in jacket.
The Day I Died. Appleton, 1952. Seven copies, five in jacket.
Win Place and Die! Appleton, 1953. Six copies, four in jacket.
I kept a record of the stated conditions, but I decided not to clutter up the presentation by including them here. Suffice it to say that they ranged from Good to Very Good, with only two (Lumpy Nose) being described as Near Fine. If you wished a complete set, price generally shouldn’t be a problem. Lariar is not a mystery writer in high demand, so even though the supply is low, the asking prices (with a few exceptions) were pretty much $20 or less.
But if the Internet did not exist (and you were not even reading this) think of the difficulty you’d have in putting a set of Lariar mystery novels together. How many bookstores would you have to travel to with want list in hand, from one end of the country to the other, to obtain them? Of course there’s slow mail, and I remember pre-Internet days of scouring fanzines for ads of various dealers who specialized in mysteries and asking for catalogs.
With a maximum of 12 copies available for any one book (Lumpy Nose), getting a set together would be a long slow process. The 1940s were 60 to 70 years ago – a lifetime in fact. The number of survivors is getting fewer and fewer.
April 18th, 2012 at 7:08 pm
Did you try Ebay or the independent dealers at Amazon?
I used to schedule my vacations home to visit family around a major local book fair. I would always end up with several gems for little money. Then Ebay was born and people sold their books themselves rather than donating them to the book fair. Prices at the book fair rose because people actually knew what their books were worth.
I have always believed Ebay delivered the fatal wound to used bookstores, not Amazon which gives those bookstores access to more customers.
April 18th, 2012 at 7:31 pm
No, I used only abebooks in this little exercise. I should have pointed out that I’m well aware of all of the other online places you can find books. One site that does searches of most — but not all — of the online bookseller sites is http://www.bookfinder.com. My contention that old books are getting scarcer still holds, I’m sure, even without doing the larger mega-search I might have.
For those of you who don’t know bookfinder.com, it searches not only ABE, but Amazon, biblio.com, Alibris and several more. I do not think it searches eBay, but I might be wrong about that.
eBay is not a place I would go to first, if I looking for a particular book. It was at one time a site to find great happenstance bargains on old books which were posted by people who didn’t know their value and set the starting price low. (Of course you had to hope that no other bidder would notice it too.)
I sell books on Amazon but no longer bother with eBay. The latter has too many fees, you have to have photos and write up great descriptions, and the number of bidders seems to have dropped off considerably.
I agree with you that one factor that can keep used bookstores in business is that not only do they have walk-in customers (who also often bring books in), but they can sell the better stock on Amazon.
As for eBay, it has practically eliminated book fairs, paper shows and the like, no doubt about it.
April 19th, 2012 at 12:04 pm
To follow up on my last comment, I used Bookfinder this afternoon to search for a hardcover edition of DEATH PAINTS A PICTURE up for sale on any site anywhere in the world. Nada. Not a single copy showed up.
I also checked Amazon for copies of any of Lariar’s other mysteries. They had a small number of each of the others, but it would take quite a while for me to be able to add them to the original totals, as I recognized many of the ones I’d seen before.
Lots of dealers offer their wares on more than one site, and in this case, the duplication was obvious.
In any case, even if the additional Amazon copies were added in, the number of Lariar mysteries left in the wild are few and far between. There are, I’m sure, other copies to be found in old bookstores, just sitting there on shelves no one has browsed through in ages, but more importantly, never listed in catalogs or for sale online. If anyone happens to be looking for them, at the moment they might as well not exist.
April 20th, 2012 at 5:18 am
I’m hesitant to give away my personal book searching tool but here goes: vialibri.net. It will turn up more copies of scarce books than you will find using bookfinder. In addition to the usual sites in UK, US and Canada, it searches European bookselling sites. I have learned that dealers in Germany, Sweden, Denmark and France often have obscure tiles of US and UK editions I am looking for. Sometimes, not always, at affordable prices.
When looking for images of books you would do better to search using Google images than searching the bookselling sites. If I don’t personally own a good copy or I borrowed a beat up or rebound copy from a library I use Google images to help me find a photo or scan of the book. The books being sold on eBay will turn up towards the top of the list. I have also rather craftily asked booksellers to send me images hinting that I intend to buy their book just to get the photo. Done as a last resort, I admit, and only done three times this year.
April 20th, 2012 at 1:36 pm
Thanks for the tip about that other booksearching site. It’s one I didn’t know about before. Generally speaking, though, if I’m looking for a particular book for myself, I don’t usually look at European sites. Even if the book itself is inexpensive enough, the cost of shipping here to the US often makes the total cost more than I want to pay. But any aid in locating books is always welcome. Hope releasing your secret doesn’t cost you a book that someone reading this nabs out from under you just before you can!
For books I want to include cover images of, I generally go to ABE first, then Google Images. ABE is more specialized toward books, obviously, and it avoids a lot of unwanted clutter. For movie reviews, it’s always Google first, although there are websites that specialize only in movie posters, which are always nice to have.
I haven’t done it in a while, but in cases when an book cover is pretty much demanded, I have asked booksellers if they could send me a cover scan. I’m upfront about it, saying that I’ll give them online credit and a link to their site if not the book itself. Almost all have been happy to oblige. I wouldn’t do this for a three dollar paperback; only a scarce, hard to find book that I need.
April 21st, 2012 at 11:09 pm
As the global economy continues to tank, more and more hard-to-find books will start surfacing as folks finally open their “biblio-wine cellars.”
I’ve finally found books that I have, literally, been looking for for about half my life–and they’re coming out of the woodwork!
Sad that it takes a bad thing to help us collectors get ahold of the good things.
Tex
(doesn’t stop me from pouncing like a vulture, though)
April 22nd, 2012 at 12:07 pm
Tex
There are a few ways that “fresh blood” can enter the old mystery marketplace, and one of them as you say is from collectors who can’t afford to keep them any longer. The other bad way, of course, is from collections whose owners have passed away — assuming that the books don’t simply get trashed by heirs who haven’t any idea that they might be worth something.
Either way, a single collector has to depend on dealers who can spend the time going to estate sales or tag/garage sales to come across these books and make them available on the Internet. On the other hand, thanks to eBay, anybody can become a dealer, if they decide they want to. Which has another side to it, as Bill Pronzini pointed out to me in a separate email discussion he and I have been having. I don’t think he’ll mind if I quote the following from his most recent one:
“Your e-mail and M*F comments on the drying up of vintage crime fiction FEs are right on. Hardcover mysteries of all types published prior to 1950 are becoming increasingly difficult to find in collectable condition, and for affordable prices when they do turn up. EBay is the primary reason for this, certainly. They’re a two-edged sword: I’ve added quite a few books to my collection by winning auctions, and up until the past two or three years have gotten some surprising bargains; but eBay’s proliferation has been a death knell to secondhand bookshops (there are only a tiny number of good ones left in the Bay Area), and with everybody and his aunt is gobbling up old books from thrift stores and library and estate sales and selling them on eBay, there are no other venues for acquisition except occasional trades with other collectors. Plus the competition on eBay for the few really good items has gotten fierce, and a handful of collectors with unlimited funds have driven the bid prices up to a level where most of us can’t compete. I find myself bidding on fewer and fewer books, and winning only a tiny percentage of those I do bid on.”
February 8th, 2022 at 8:58 am
There are a few ways that “fresh blood” can enter the old mystery marketplace