what i do want to talk is the tarp will last forty five minutes or so i'll talk about what is an old book first editions of show on some of the things that i brought tonight give a little bit of my history back on the store and then tells me in a code stories about places they've been people i've seen the books and so on and then what i like to do in the next ten or fifteen minutes is question and answer because i can go on and on and on and on about all books at least with a question and answer i can go on about what you want to listen to the last minute or two of the talk i will appraise one of two books to the audience in detail to everybody after that i'll end the formal part of the ta but i'll stay only answer any and all questions i'll do all the appraisals of just do it a lot more quickly so we can get audience tonight i guess the first thing that comes up when you talk about old books is what is an old book and usually people fact the last time one sold half of it sold for five and a half million dollars single pages so between fifty and one hundred thousand dollars on average and some even more but any book printed in the  hundreds is valuable some more than others but anything in the fourteen hundreds after that it depends on what the book is you can have a book printed in the fifteen hundreds there was a relatively low in an interesting then and it's still relatively calm and an interesting book now and nobody will pay very much or will wonder on the other hand you can have some relatively recent folks the first edition of the first harry potter book in london which is not that old will sell for thirty or forty thousand dollars so it's all what people are asking for my also when you talk about old books we get loads of people who call and come in and say i have an old book and i know it's an old book and the way i know it's old is the pages are all brown and rambling acquired point out that's more lousy paper than it is on the book is now this is a page from a book called the nuremberg chronicle i'm actually going to pass this around some of the other things i showed tonight i won't pass around but they'll be up here at the prime and you'll see it's not terribly fragile the papers white the inks black it's one of the first books done with illustrations it was printed in the fourteen ninety s so this page is a little of a hundred years old and you sort of said to yourself well gee if they could make books like that then why don't they do it now where there was a big disadvantage to a poke like that first of all in the wiki not only he's going to be quite wealthy to get an education to learn how to read you want to be almost no be able to afford to buy a book like that nowadays maybe the books on point is well made but the word of praise thing can be distributed in the millions and the real value of books is the knowledge of the books and the dissemination of that knowledge and i think it's a very good trade off whenever you talk about book collecting somebody will come up and say i have a first edition how much is it worth and i point out that most first editions never came out of the second edition probably never should have come out in the first edition nobody wants them cares about them or would pay anything whatsoever a book has to be historically scientifically literally or for some other reason important that there's a group of collectors who want it and so on and usually when you think of first additions you think of literature dickens twain volcan fitzgerald anyway and so on and even within that there are a lot of things that can make a big difference in the primes the condition being one of the most important the people dust jacket under twentieth century book make all the difference in the world my father copy of will you paul the second book called mosquito edition but it didn't have the paper dust jacket had a few tiny little nicks and bonds are nothing terrible it took them a year to sell it at forty dollars is a lot of collecting is spending anything at all for something even slightly less other things it can add to the value signed by the author well once again if the author is unknown unheard of the fact that it's signed doesn't mean that much maybe one of your relatives wrote a book of poetry had fifty copies signed it gave it to family members it might mean an awful lot to your family but it doesn't add much to the price on the other hand if assigned by someone famous maybe ernest hemingway it could add hundreds if not thousands of dollars to the value in almost any time collecting that you get into there are nuances and add or subtract to the value and i use sign books to show that off a little there are some authors that are almost impossible to get their signature j d salinger for instance who wrote catcher in the rye was reclusive he lived up in new hampshire and other than to a very close personal friend absolutely would not sign a book thus his signature ad thousands of dollars to the value because they just can't get them now this is a little aside from that sometimes people ask me is there anything that you wish you were offered that you could have thought of that you didn't get oh you'd love to see joe up there is a letter one time and this was a number of years ago i'm in contact me had a group of letters from treaty salinger and he was interested in possibly selling them although i was question about that but there was one letter i put to kuli wanted it turned out he wasn't selling anything but this one letter salinger was writing to him and recounting what he was building his home in new hampshire and sound just that well you know there were a bunch of high school kids at the time they came in they helped with the build the foundation he said one of those kids actually was a pretty good athlete and became a good baseball player this guy cotton fi you know that are very hard to get on the other hand there are others who sign a lot of books there was an author a local off of maybe some of you numerous have his books were wonderful go see buried treasure pirate stories of the new england coast its name was edward rose snow now snow is a friend of my father's and i knew him and i remember one day he came into the store and he told us he had been just on cape cod he going to do a bookstore that he had never been in before snow went right up to the sexually his books were inscription when ts eliot wrote the book he made much of a load sanitations comments cross things out added things in to just about every page of the book that book now would be worth two three maybe even four hundred thousand dollars because of the great association one last story about autographs and sign books and so on it was an autograph and manuscript dealer in massachusetts who was one of the best in the world but when he was a young boy he used to collect books by robert frost and he knew robert problems and when he was thirteen years old he went to london to buy a copy of price first book called the boys well very complicated what is the first edition but he paid a very good price for it at the time came back to boston a few weeks later he met with prostitutes very proud of himself look what i've got for us looked at it said what did you pay for it and he told them cross it give me the book and frost open it up in the front to the point said now it's worth what you paid for it and any case let me to give grass a little give you a little bit of my background in the history of the store the history of the problem of shark was back to the eight hundred twenty s but for all practical purposes it was going out of business in one nine hundred forty nine by father was getting married my mother had five hundred dollars with that they bought half interest of the store and it's always been in boston people who are and have been square and  street saying where are you we tell them we're downtown oh my parents for a spot the store there was a little side street in what was called the square called brattle street and that's where the store started in to make it even more confusing the street doesn't even exist anymore it's where boston city hall plaza is now and my father built the store with his great love of books his hard work his knowledge he was a bit of a character a showman we've had seven different locations over the years mainly due to urban renewal but every time my father would move the store when it was a play and move he'd move the best books to the new location that he once sales have priced all in fifty cent quarter dime last year the seller low everything was free and like i said my father was a bit of a character the showman and if you can sort of picture this he hired a covered wagon with a cowboy and a horse team and on the cover of the covered wagon it said go west fork lovers go five prattled bookshop and they filled it up with books and he drove in from the end of washington street near boston city hall up chord street down from on by the boston common to where west street is and then back down washington street with my father sitting in back playing well and we were first there in a five story hundred fifty year old wooden building absolutely crammed full of books in february of one nine hundred eighty i got a call at four o'clock in the morning the building was on fire it had literally burned to the ground i mean it was one hundred percent gone but we wanted to keep going not go out of business we found a store for a few doors up the street people in the sold gave us donated books kevin white who was the mayor at the time came down with a carload of books we had rented folding tables and within a month we reopened it was a meager start but the main thing was just keep going and go over the next four years we slowly but surely rebuilt the stock four years after that we bought the building now which is again a few doors down on west street and it's sort of the old the indian style a store outside stands at a dollar three and five two floors of general used books and then a third floor with real books autographs manuscripts first editions leather findings and so on and that type of business allow your general second here in bookstores specially in the inner cities i all bookstores which are not the most efficiently run businesses in the world one right after the other have been going out of business in the last few years the internet has just speed of that process alone now like i say we bought our building in the early eighty's so i hope to do this for years to come i have doddering young adult daughters who were i don't think have any the interest in coming into it the way i did and i actually my parents say my first word was book i don't know maybe while i'm sure they were talking about books all the time and then i worked after school in elementary school junior high school high school summers during college i have a degree in chemistry from the university of massachusetts i was going to get doctoral degree of the university of wisconsin but in one thousand nine hundred seventy three i needed a year off my father's health wasn't that good that year now it's been over forty years and i don't regret for a minute that i'm doing this and not in a laboratory if you would ask me what's one thing i wish i could find it's a little pamphlet here called tamra lane by a bostonians on an eight hundred twenty seven i know it's small will be up here at the end if you really want to take a look at it but it doesn't look like much but the bostonian who did this was edgar allan poe it's a classic rarity in american literature and actually one of the first concrete step to really be found was in the eighteen nineties on a bookseller's table ten thousand dollars now i don't know if it was worth it they started opus to friends by the time they sold it they never spoke again but they got their ten thousand dollars and then about fifteen years ago  but i don't bring million dollar pamphlets but if any of you want to take a close look and then go home and figure out excel is basically and ok if you find one please give me a call for love to hear about it a lot of the fun of collecting is going out is learning about something and studying it it's appreciating i mean it's really good knowledge that makes something interesting and that's valuable i mean someone might look at something and say that's a scrap of paper someone else might say that's a broadside to lead to the boston tea party that led to the american revolution that led to our country's independence so it's really that knowledge and understanding in study that makes interesting and that's valuable now here's an item that on the surface i think is interesting but the story behind it maybe even more so this is on white house stationery david feely close now april eleventh hundred thirty three but it starts did jim i want to send you this note to tell you how happy i am that you are to represent the united states and poland it's a most important post eccentric cetera  matter of fact i think he thought roosevelt was trying to get rid of him which of course he probably was encouraged response was remember this was one nine hundred thirty three he said in poland with germany on one side russia on the other you should send your worst republican enemy to poland he said matter of fact if you think it's so important why don't you quit and go there yourself now curly's opinion of washington didn't change over the years we also have about ten letters that he wrote to his wife when he was in the end very prison now even though these were personal letters he was still very much the politician and there was one poet i particularly liked he just got into prison and wrote to his wife and he said many of the four legged material a firm rock here's a program from the nineteen twelve world series where the red sox play the giants the red sox won the world series in one nine hundred twelve one a few more times in the teens and then we had to wait but then it's been good well last year wasn't so great but it's been good there and we have hopes for this this year too matter of fact my wife's at the game tonight because i couldn't  it's also become very popular to go on cruises and crew ships i have a brochure here for a ship how's your wonderfully built we're a book passage and anyone who wants to get on that idea this is a brochure for the taken your almost anything you can think of there are people out there who are interested there are whole societies of titanic historians who do nothing but study the titanic there's also a tendency when you talk about old items collectibles and so on and all of a sudden everything seems to worth thousands hundreds of thousands millions of dollars and i like to point out not everything has to be high priced to be fun all life magazines for instance here's one with errol flynn on the cover another with the lizabeth tale of when she was fifteen years old and on large large majorit these solved for a dollar or two that very little there are a few exceptions but the large majority are feeling very reasonably priced there were a lot of them and we used to have buy a stairway at the store on a wall a few hundred of the more famous life magazines and people would sometimes stop and stare at that wall for half an hour even in our time lost in thought of memory they loved them for the covers the stories the articles the photographs they ma wonderful birthday or anniversary presence of you fell in the right tate's and matter of fact there was a customer came in a regular customer he got about fifty life magazines from world war two when it wasn't what he normally  so i said to him why are you buying these and he said well i want to teach my children about world war two and he thought a nice way to do it would be to get a few of the old wives look at a couple of the photos read a few of the articles and then discuss it with them are turns out by looking at him discussing the ads with them he could probably teach them more about what the united states was like during world war two than if they had read everything else anyways i have a lot of other things in my bag i have a cookbook from the seventeen hundreds some of the recipes are wonderful and then i have how to bake eels the common way i don't know if i want to bake them anyway but that one of the most interesting parts about the business for me is going out to hoess in the states that's how we get most of our books it's almost like being human hawkins and treasure island every day never knowing what you're going to see who you going to meet the people the places the books and i relate a few of those stories to you and then we'll see about some questions i was so when i got back in there was a message that a mrs fisher recalled and had some books i called her up and she said oh yes my father died in providence he has five hundred odd reference books we want to get the best price we can we're inviting a number of dealers down to fit on would you for your interested well five hundred out reference books sounds like quite a good library providence is only an hour away i was more than happy to go they lived on benefits street which is a nice old street up near brown university i got to the house who is a logical colonial i got le house into a courtyard into a garage second floor of the garage a five thousand books well it turned out her married name was fisher her father's name was john nicholas prawn family founded brown university one of the wealthiest families in the country and after about six months i brought about eighty percent of the books i wanted she was pleased i was happy and she said my mother has a lot of books most are being given to the universities some are being sold at auction but would you like to go to newport to take a look at the books they're well they're hosting newport is one of them mentions on the ocean and i mentioned this to my wife she decided to come with me on this to get one of the passing thoughts about it was being in one of those mansions there was still being lived in my family you know one point wondering from the basement to the attic all on my own with other tourguide saying come here go it don't add to this but just literally wandering through the whole place it was fascinating another time i got called to newport to do an appraisal now when i go to groups like this i do hundreds of free appraisals metric one of my goals is that whenever you think of an old folk you think of me in the bridal bookshop i don't care if you think of ten others just as long as we're one of the ten we have here we have a hundred numbers websites and whatever but they were one of the ways i feel i can do that and get people is by giving as much free information as reasonably possible but every once in while someone needs a very formal written appraisal for insurance estate taxes and so on and then i discuss a pee in a case another mention in newport not quite as big as the problems this was the perry family commodore perry all of a hazard perry and what they accountants of the ships and they were fascinating to read from they would sometimes capture a ship and realized tens of thousands of dollars profit in eight hundred twelve that was an immense amount of money then one day one of the ships going into a battle the ship got hit the captain got here he lost his leg three days later there was a tiny entry at the bottom of the page and it said captain five dollar bonus loss of leg and that was last year an a count or so a little now when my father was still alive and he died almost thirty years ago we got a call from a lady she was very very good about her name what she had who she was but it sounded there might be some interesting things she lived in share and so was fairly close we got out to her house it was a little rancheros paint was peeling weeds were growing is a sale of she was going to be here she answered the door she was quite elderly we walk in and there were jews who were jews in t x everywhere i mean really really beautiful antiques and she got to talking it turned out she was originally from the boston area but she had married the prince of the ukraine the cousin of the czar of russia to scape just before the revolution and she told story after story about being essentially russian nobility and europe and all the court intrigues and all the goings on how t v shows are used to stay at their house all the time how she didn't think he accidentally died on a motorcycle but there was a lot more to it t sharp of course was lawrence of arabia and she went on and on and on with these wonderful stories turned out of books were lousy  and when we first got into our house someone who was you ten watercolors about this size pastore all european scenes when i first saw them i thought they were nice and the more she talked and the longer we were there and the more i looked at them the nice very thought they were and i finally to see the people the places the characters and matter of fact speaking of characters about ten or twelve years ago we went to one of our customers hundredth birthday parties now when you go to the millions hundredth birthday party and he tells he just got back from barcelona he's going to give a talk in florida and he's been asked to lecture in tokyo and i finally said wait a minute you're a hundred years old don't you see tokyo is an awfully long way to go he said well when i used to work it took me well over twenty five hours to get to chicago says i don't think told us all a lot further than that nowadays and here's a man who can tell you about one day sitting down to dinner with him reported thomas edison he said he was a young man really looking forward to the learning and inside that that he was going to get from the street and he got to the table a little bit early so five minutes later poor came in and sat down next to him in about fifteen minutes later edison came and now edison was quite elderly had one of those big ones for a year and sat down opposite them he said the first thing ford turned to him and yelled mike fossum you look very good and edison turned to ford and yelled it's the cars little liver to this man said all night long all they did was ya'll bulk otter's little wiggle room and he said next time you want to learn something he went to the library i can go on and on around with these stories of tell one more and then we'll see about questions we get hundreds of phone calls at the store people wanting to know if you have a book can you get a book how hard is it to get the book does the book exist or what's it worth how much is it value and most of those questions either i or the people i work with we can answer off the top of my head some are a little more involved and occasionally you really have to do some research and that can be fun but every once in a while you get a call that really stands out and this was again a while ago but i enter the phone hello br it to sink in then she went on to explain that she had worked for the kennedy family she had been his nurse me when he was three and four years old he used to fall asleep in iraq so he did sleep with her but maybe not in what she had was a whole series of handwritten letters from the president and she wanted to get an offer on them i was skeptical about that but i thought she'd be fun to meet i went out to her house she was great the letters were fabulous i gave her what i thought was a tremendous offer on the moon much as i like i say i can go on and on and on but why don't i see if there are some questions and quite honestly anything you ask me i can go off on a tangent so does anyone have any on the back and the question is what was the most exciting find of the road show you know that's really a tough question in space there's been a lot of interesting things there are a lot of things that never make it to air  i mean a number of years ago i you praise to bunch of frank lloyd wright material that someone had a house built in omaha the the woman activists in general contractor the turn of the century she even told them that she didn't like design and to change it and he did it was early in his career another person had signed photograph of paper him lincoln there were a lot of things you can watch this week show an assigned  inscribed copy of to kill a mockingbird inscribed to her editor which was a lot of fun but i'll tell you one thing on the antics roach i'll tell you one item that when we do the show and i would talk about that a little bit more about that at the end but we don't get any pay at all they don't pay expenses they don't pay travel they don't pay hotel they don't pay anything so we want to get on t v when we go and it is no guarantee because if someone during the whole day that you praise doesn't come in with something good you don't get on t v but the ideal is sort of around eight eight or nine in the morning someone comes in with something really good you pitch it they say yes you get on you've been on at nine in the morning  makes the rest of the day go easily you're not worried at four or five or six in the that you're not going to get on anyways men came in and this was in kansas city and he had a few things a couple little notes signed by pope john paul but nothing special some he said the pope gave to him but you know how could you tell that they really were anyone but then he pulls out some photographs of him and the pope turns out he was the pilot who flew pope john paul all around the united states in the seventy's and so you know they're saying that's nice and then there's one photograph it's showing what you know normally when someone's with the pope and the pope is all in his  laugh you know he has his hand out you neil and kisses ring and you know very subservient but you know he's the pope in any case this means the pilot he's sitting in the pilot's seat the pope is literally standing on one  item that i would have loved that didn't get there but you know and sometimes it's even things i think it was last year the year before we were praising towards the end of the day i had already been on television so my colleague candidate we we share that way i before i get on to why it's so mark and put it down in front of us a letter of galileo i mean it's a real original authentic it's you know so you never know case like this i can go off on tangents i could even talk about some things that i've actually a couple of things that i've appraised that you sort of get excited about now these aren't things that are gone so but i got called by  historical society to do an appraisal they were loaning some things and i said to them i'll do it for free i do them a lot of favors but i don't want to do it from your website from a copy one holding a four page handwritten  description of paul revere's ride by paul revere i mean really there another time i got called and we had no idea what we were getting called to appraise but they said could you come down i said sure my manager and i will get you know an industrial type building get let into the basement there's a table like this there are three documents sitting on the table the mayflower compact the pilgrim charter and the bill of rights and i sort of got to go like this then now when the state archives museum there was just before they built a museum and they were having to take them up to get some restoration work they actually closed down route ninety three when the car was going up the new motorcade because they didn't want the really high end of things in line of grass manuscripts books the truly rare the truly is still doing very well but the mid value his dropped a lot partly because people who can afford to be in the middle value especially when the economy one goes down they're the ones but also even more so on the internet his made a lot of things that were quote rare a number of years ago they actually weren't rare they were just hard to get now you go with you you know where you might we used to find something now you go click click one hundred coffee show up there really not really the price is gone way down it's also interesting when you talk about the high end of books you know it's still even the best collections of books when someone spends one hundred twenty million dollars on a painting there's one book collector he's one of the really major book collectors and it's sort of you asked why did you decide on books he said well i figured i could spend ten fifteen million dollars on books and with that i could be one of the major book collectors in the country he says without money in a painting i could buy a sketch of some famous artist and really have nothing but i could be really important so you know books still but the really i mean that's that's like a guy asking you to give you an ad but you're absolutely right i mean i'm like i said at the beginning the most interesting part about the business is going out and i do it almost every day sometimes it's a good book sometimes it's just i mean the other day we fired three thousand cookbooks and lexington another time where you're called to buy sporting books or fishing books or just general books and then every once more you get called to by some really rare but that's how  what type of books and you know i mean are there a lot of books if you if someone called me and said i have two hundred books on the history of belmont and i know they're good books because nobody can have two hundred books on the history of belmont without really searching in going after everything they can find whereas if they say well they're a little of everything well then you know probably they are a little of everything with nothing precise so that now nowadays actually another thing that people do a lot of times they'll call their say we have a lot of books how do we give you an idea or if you have a lot of wall of books nowadays if you take a digital picture from here and it's in sharp focus i can probably tell what ninety percent of the books are and i can tell very quickly it's a great way to start the conversation but you know either through the web page the calling i mean that's what we do that's that's the fun part and yes we do go out all the time depending on how far it is if someone calls me from new york city i might ask more questions than someone called ten minutes away in belmont but we still will ask a little so yes we do it all the time do you have a question or wondering about magazine and their whole well or the question is what about magazines in excellent condition in their old depends on what magazine it depends on the fashion isn't in style in the nineteen teens and twenty's and thirty's they were the passion they had colored covers they were beautiful of the fashion from the twenty's and thirty's those people are dying for and they go for a big prices whereas the ones that are forty fifty years earlier they don't want it actually in many things now victorian style is out in mid century one thousand post world war two is in so i'd much rather sometimes to get that era than the victorian era so it depends on what's in the present what's all that depends of baseball mega scenes you know if you go back to the world war one turn of the second those are really really all but you can go up a lot further and still be good i'll tell you what at this point when i do your question i'll do one more so the question is do science books the merck manual that type of thing do they have any value some of them do some of them don't they have the one of the things the internet has also done any book that you bought purely and simply because you wanted the information you wanted in your book hero like a merck manual like an encyclopedia of chemistry and physics there was nothing a matter of fact they've barely used anymore but when you talk about science books you can look back i mean isaac newton you can get back but they don't all have to be that all you get into the nine hundred forty s during world war two and books on computers those are great and there are some titles in the science books you know the discussion of electronic polls done in the fifty's well that's the first box on transistors so there are many that can be of value but if there's sort of the pure text for someone probably the more that you read the title and have no clue what that book is about the chances are it's probably better than introduction to or introduction to or whatever so it really depends matter of fact one of the things that i'm looking forward to is in a few days i have to go out to a library might the books might or might not be good but the man well one a nobel prize in chemistry so i thought i would be really i meant a few nobel prize winners but since i studied chemistry but nowhere near that point but it would be interesting to me the table at this point when i do one or two appraisals did anyone bring a bible ok well this one even this fine did anyone bring a victorian style book with a decorative cloth cover really sort of pretty popping and someone has something a little more this i usually give a retail price the exact price that you would pay if you came into my store or a store like mine it is not what you would get if you're selling the box usually be selling a book you expect to get about a third to two thirds of the retail if you dealing with the low end the market might even behind you get to make some money and when you get to the very expensive the percentages can come down and number of years ago i bought a copy of audubon's quadrupeds not the birds for the animals but big huge hundred fifty or so here and colored plates at the time i paid one hundred thousand dollars for i sold it within two weeks for one hundred five thousand dollars it's only a five percent markup but it's five thousand dollars well worth the time and effort i spend  i pretty much better pre sold before i bought it so when you get into as much i have prices especially for things that are journals of quickly the percentages can come down just b c amounts of money involved a so much more also everything i say is subjective no is the fact that i say something is worth one hundred dollars doesn't mean a colleague of mine might not say one hundred in a quarter and another colleague say seventy five so if you know what you have you go to somebody get a price you're happy great if you're not sure get a second third fourth or fifth opinion there's nothing wrong with that it's almost more a matter of how much time and effort you want to put into one well a cruise book that was brought up is a fifty two hundred dollars because a lot of time someone might buy this for someone who's moving to rome someone who's been in rome someone going to rome but they want if it's mint it looks like a great gift if it's a little used it might look like something you just took off your shelf and sort of really gifted in a way but one of the reasons i wanted to talk about this in my earlier example actually in this one  had just characters widely used and they go back to the eight early eight hundred for the dust jackets as we know them go back to around the world will want it was a matter of printing but before that they used to have a lot of books with very decorative cloth covers in the realize real reason they had those decorative clarke covers is that the publishers figured if you walk into a bookstore in the book copyright but it changes by it and there are people who collect books like this just for the decorative covers yours was worn a little which is another reason why it would have been in mint condition that cover would have just popped out and all of decorations on the side but there are people  questions and you can go to the library book sale yard sales friends forensic groups and pick these up for relatively little than some money there are some that are very expensive but you can put together a collection that individually might not seem like that much but as a collection graphically it can be great in many fact i have a collection like this myself that started off as a bit of a joke i got a book in had a picture of a toilet on the cover and the title was flushed with pride the life of thomas crapper it was i brought it home i showed it to my wife she took one look at it and said we have to put this in the bathroom so we did a couple of days later i got another book had a big staring out of the cover title was we never sleep it was a history of the pinkerton detective agency but with the big guy staring at you i said i put that in the bathroom now this is a i like to do that is the bible is the most commonly printed book of all time always has been probably always will be and we sometimes get five and ten calls a week with people who are hundred two hundred year old family bibles and in most cases we have to say if this is your family bible and it's been handed down through the generations sentimental ie it's priceless but monetarily it might not be worth that much now there are exceptions there  gutenberg bibles there are others so always check in also those big old victorian bibles with the beautifully embossed covers in the class and so on mint condition those can sell hundred to three hundred dollars apiece to make wonderful gifts for ministers proof's divinity students but break one class have one hinge go they lose all acknowledgement many times in those bibles so at the beginning the middle the end there's a whole list of family history the births deaths marriages those can be invaluable to the local historical and she'll logical society but many times they just want to xerox out that page maybe the title page they don't want the whole bible now this one is this a family bible it it's not a family this is one early one thousand nine hundred slate eighteen hundreds it's worn nothing wrong with the bible being worn in use but there's really no real monetary value to yeah well that's the type of thing if we had it or not shop we put it out at ten dollars someone would buy it but it's not and it's not a valuable bond one of the things that i said that i'd talk a little about in that i can book bibles into this a little is  road show which i do appraise and i am on this week doing a sign to kill a mockingbird from birmingham last week i did a whole series of bill clinton letters where he was talking about  getting hurt and hopefully getting out of the draft and so on he was in college and there were interesting and and how difficult arkansas politics were and so on in any case but the way that  works is you do it at a convention center on a saturday you there's tables are in a circle there are three book appraisers next to music next to jewelry next to porcelain next to all the way around a big circle you prey's from about seven thirty in the morning till sometimes eight thirty at night pretty much straight through there are usually around five thousand people come to a show each person has two items so there's about ten thousand items and then t around fifty to sixty items a few get edited out for one reason or another and that's what makes up three hour was a television now course when i say that opens at seven thirty the appraiser's we have to be there even a little bit earlier  n one of the cities we were sitting there before open we said how many bibles do you think you'll see so we counted seventy five in one day in one city now a matter of fact now depending on who the other appraisers are has we have a pool going i but that's another thing i'll end on one last story i got called to a large old church well over one hundred year old church in boston to do an appraisal layout lives a library and just wanted to know over the years they had accumulated some books that were worth some money and actually they had some good ones and it was fun and a lot of interesting items at the end of the day the priest said to me cou stuffed with thousands of all bibles and i looked at the priest and i said what is this he says when you know people hate to throw away they feel it sacrilegious in this role a bible so what happens when a parishioner dies in the family doesn't want the bible they come in they presented to the church and he says what do we do we very graciously accepted we don't want to offend anybody and we go downstairs open the door to show you this is when we can't drive a dumpster up to the back of the church and philip for the bible but that just wouldn't be right so i use it as an example to say if you want to give something to a charity ask them if they want to first if they want to in can use it it's great but if all you're doing is taking your you're books and there are people waiting behind you i might do one or two of them and ask you to go to the back of the end of the line i'll do them all but it's not fair to keep people waiting i have business cards made hundreds of them never feel