Jackson, Ian. The Price-Codes of the Book-Trade: A Preliminary Guide by EXHUMATION. Berkeley: Ian Jackson, 2010.
A few months ago sitting around the cataloguing table at work, I listened as a specialist from Sotheby’s held court, looking over a few new additions to stock. The man could date a velvet binding from Rome by means I hadn’t thought of: running his fingers over nail holes he could feel under the endpapers, he could tell they were much too narrow to have been made before 1600. Notes toward a History of Hammering? A book or two later he skipped through the text to scrutinize penciled-in letters in the back that seemed to make no sense: “Ah! King Alfred!” he said, “A Quaritch purchase in the 19th century!” At that point his enthusiasm when from shared to mysterious.
Fast forward to a few weeks ago at the San Francisco Book Fair: I noticed many fellow exhibitors (or ‘dealers’ which I prefer: ‘So are you a dealer?’ folks asked earnestly) carrying around a booklet with a jumble of words on its cover: MOTHERFUCK sticking out to me first, as well as THE PRICE-CODES OF THE BOOK-TRADE. Finally the time came when one was given to me, and since cursory searches on the internet have yielded no results for this book I thought I’d make it a small contribution.
Old prices never die: they advance to another astral plane, perceptible only to the initiate. Bookselling is, after all, a trade with a few ancillary pleasures, and not a philanthropic system of redistribution. Prices paid or charged are never entirely incidental, although one need not take them too seriously. Their elasticity ensures that one man’s retail price is another man’s wholesale.
