Library Books Returned 50 Years Later Only Worth $10 Each: the Abebooks Search Engine in Action

As a bookseller I am always drawn to any Yahoo! News notices that deal with books. Recently they posted a story about someone returning two overdue library books to a high school library in Phoenix (Camelback High School) checked out in 1959 and enclosing a money order for $1000 to cover the fines. Such generosity and attention to civic duty is extremely rare, I think we all agree, and such a story deserves to be highlighted. (Even more so with the donor asking to remain anonymous.) You can read the story in it's entirety here.

As a bookseller, I, of course, wanted to know: "What books were actually returned? Are they valuable in themselves? Should the librarian really return them to the high school library collection?" But the titles of the books were not included in the story. Ah, but Yahoo! News did provide a somewhat blurry picture, and the librarian Georgette Bordine is quoted as saying that they were Audubon Society books. So, I peered and squinted at the books in the picture and finally was able to pick out "Forest and Woodland" on the left and "Field and Meadow" on the right. Now, it was time to do a little online research.

Using the very powerful book search engine at Abebooks I first searched by "Forest and Woodland" in the title field, then narrowed in further by searching for "Audubon Society" in the keyword field. Four listings came up and that's when I realized that the small unreadable letters at the top of each book in the photo was the phrase "The Community of Living Things in". This book, I could also see from the listings, is probably only worth about $10, even though it is over 50 years old.

Now I knew when I did the search for the second book, I could put the complete title "The Community of Living Things in Field and Meadow" into the title field of Abebooks' search engine. Hmm, 18 copies. Let's narrow this further by limiting by publication date. The librarian says this book was checked out in 1959, so by selecting the "More Search Options" link we see we can search by date. I put "1959" into the max date field and this time we end up with three copies, ranging in price from $3.50 to $14.99. Without knowing much about the book's condition and just going off of this data, I'd probably price it at $10.

So, what's the moral of the story here? I think there's four "takeaways":

The person who returned these overdue library books deserves to be honored for his/her integrity and character.

Return your library books on time and save yourself hefty fines.

Abebooks can be a valuable online research tool, even for people that aren't currently interested in purchasing a book.

Don't assume that just because a used book is old (and most people would agree over fifty years is pretty old for a book) that it is necessarily valuable.

Blessings!

Source:
Yahoo! News