Rare Book Monthly
It's in the Mail
An appealing map, an appealing price
One can only wonder whether John Adams, second President of the United States, had any idea that each word in a single letter he wrote in 1813 to Elbridge Gerry would bring $138, in New York in 2010, for each of the more than 1,300 words it contains. The money is in the perspective of course. He revisits events and interprets them. This is lot 36 which brought $184,100.
Lot 10 is a letter written by Robert Barrie, a doctor, to his wife in St. Augustine Florida. It took a circuitous journey via Jamaica and Pensacola, evidenced by its post marks, and thereby became a coveted piece of postal history. It was estimated at $30,000 to $40,000 but the market viewed the estimator as lacking gusto and so more or less tripled the high estimate to obtain $115,100. The last time I looked you could buy a decent house in St. Augustine for that sum.
One other lot brought more than $100,000: lot 452, a letter from Junipero Serra written in 1776, to the Military Lieutenant Governor of New California. He wants to establish a mail service. This letter brought $109,350 against an estimate of $75,000 to $100,000.
The books also did well if not so well. What's interesting about them is that they were sold at a successful postal sale rather than at a book auction. One hundred and forty nine lots, that could fit loosely into a book sale were included. They, together, brought $589,958 and managed to be only 7% of the proceeds: 149 of 1,298 lots offered. The average lot in this bibliophilic group was $3,387, the average realization for all other lots $6,664. Books were in the caboose in this sale.
I've prepared a spreadsheet to compare these items, their realized prices and number of records in the AED. For many of these items there are numerous recent records and therefore it's possible in such cases to generally compare how such books in this stamp sale, albeit an important one, did in comparison with similar material in book sales.
And the answer please: Generally, the realizations were below what book auctions obtain but given that condition varies, that Mr. Risvold was a collector of postal history for whom books were resources, not collectibles, that one buyer expressed unhappiness with some descriptions he viewed as masking deficiencies, and that the audience was in the rooms, online and on the phones primarily to buy postal history, the printed material did acceptably well and might have done better in a book sale.
