Ever dreamed of going to a yard sale and finding a rare treasure worth a lot of money? Ben Marks explores the world of rare books on the Collectors Weekly website.
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Needle-in-a-haystack stories are the caffeine of collecting. Who hasn’t heard a tale of someone finding a rare toy at a garage sale, a dust-covered antique in an attic, or a priceless document hidden inside a beat-up picture frame? “That could be me,” we are supposed to think, and right on cue, we do.
When it comes to book-collecting bonanzas, Rebecca Rego Barry has heard ’em all. As the editor of “Fine Books & Collections,” it’s actually part of her job to listen to such stories, and follow up on those that seem likely to lead to new tales of prize catches. Recently, Barry gathered more than 50 accounts of literary treasures discovered in unlikely places into a new book called Rare Books Uncovered, now available from Voyageur Press.
Barry was not always so interested in books. “I was actually more into rocks,” she says of one of her childhood passions. “I liked pretty minerals and polished stones, and there was nothing I loved more than going to the Museum of Natural History in New York and getting one of those kit
s with the rocks glued onto a piece of cardboard and some information about each one.”
“It’s only after you get it home and do your research that you know if you’ve hit the jackpot—or overpaid.”
A master’s in book history, which Barry calls “an extremely useless but really wonderful degree,” eventually gave her license to haunt the stacks of used-book stores and the aisles of book fairs. “I started out as a writer for ‘Fine Books & Collections’” she says of her transition from rocks to paper, “just doing a freelance article here and there. When they needed an editor about six and a half years ago, I tossed my hat into the ring and they took a chance on me. I’ve been doing it ever since.”
Unlike the subjects in her book, Rare Books Uncovered found her. “I wish I could take credit for it,” she says, “but it was really the idea of an editor named Dennis Pernu. He had done a couple of books in a similar vein on rare guitars. I guess he was brainstorming in an editorial meeting one day and said, ‘What about books? That could be really cool.’ I think he found me through my website and just figured it might be something I’d be able to do. I almost didn’t believe it when I got his email.”
Soon, Barry was mining her contact lists of booksellers and book collectors for good discovery stories. In the end, she spoke to everyone from the legendary rock guitarist turned book hunter Martin Stone—he reportedly sold Led Zeppelin’s Jimmy Page a copy of the I Ching that had been owned by occultist icon Aleister Crowley—to the author and book dealer Larry McMurtry, who typed out his book-discovery story before mailing it to Barry. “I found more people and stories than I could fit in the book,” she says.
Read the full post on Collectors Weekly
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