A Longfellow Signature

We get our share of calls from folks who're sure their quite common book is certainly a valuable collectible. The most numerous subset of this delusion is the turn of the century tome SIGNED by Mark Twain, or Rudyard Kipling, or Charles Dickens, or some other literary luminary of the time. And this is always the result of a book design habit popular at the time, binding an engraved portrait of the author with a reproduction of their signature into the front matter.

But as always with the 'rules' of bookselling, there are exceptions.

This morning a fellow called with a very typical spiel, he had these old books signed by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and what would those be worth? I gave him my standard response, we'd be happy to appraise the book if he brought it in but we can't do anything over the phone.

Usually that's the end of it, I think because people suspect their book isn't what they want it to be and would rather live in hope than know the score. But this guy actually wanted to know and made the trip.

I inspected the books, fully expecting to find a mass produced reproduction signiture, but instead found what was definitely a contemporary fountain pen inscription. Genuine script of that vintage has a certain look about it, once you've been exposed to a few samples you can tell what's legit and what isn't.

Back in the day verifying the signature itself was sort of a tedious process involving getting a stepstool and gathering up a small stack of reference volumes. These days, a few keywords entered in Google and voila, page after page of samples to compare with.

The internet verified the signatures, happily for all- it's always more fun to deliver good news than to disabuse folk of their illusions. Valuation was problematic as the books themselves were nothing special- later printing, sort of beat up bindings, anyone wanting to milk maximum resale value would be looking at investing ~500 or so dollars in rebinding both volumes.

As I was giving the bindings a thorough going over, I found that the FFEP of one volume was stuck to the cover. Working it loose, I discovered another Longfellow inscription, beneath a couplet of poetry also in his hand.

!!!

That's the kind of thing we don't see much at this level of bookselling, it's more of a big city rare book dealer happening. And it could potentially take the value of the books into the stratosphere, far beyond what the autographs themselves would be worth. If it's an original poetic thought, the sky would be the limit for a hardcore Longfellow collector, or a library with a collection to bolster.

So not only good news for our curious owner, but great news.

It's always fun to see things like that and research them a bit. It really is a valuable service, which I don't think most people realize. Businesses offering 'free' appraisal services nearly always have ulterior motives, but we do it from nothing but a desire to share our very specialized knowledge with people who may find it useful.