Excerpt from Book-Prices Current: A Record of Prices at Which Books Have Been Sold at Auction

The auction season 1903-1904, the detailed results of which are reported in this volume of book-prices current, cannot be considered entirely satisfactory, except from a purchaser's point of view. For some reason, books of an ordinary character, and these are always in a large majority, have failed to maintain the position in the market they aspired to during the last three or four years, and a very great depreciation in their current values is noticeable. This is, of course, to the advantage of those who have bought them, unless indeed the next season should witness a still further depreciation - an event that is not at all impossible. For the present, however, it may be said with every confidence that many of the works that appear in the auction rooms repeatedly year after year, and are regarded at all times as valuable contributions to the subjects to which they relate, show a falling off of from 30 to 40 per cent. Compared with the amounts they used to bring in days when commercial and other surroundings were less unsettled. It may also be said with equal confidence that inferior books, which must at all times constitute the great mass of those which come to the hammer - inferior by reason of their unimportance per se, or because they belong to editions of little repute, or are in bad condition - have fallen away to such an extent that comparisons are almost out of the question. On the other hand, what may be styled the Aristocracy of the book-shelf, those really valuable boolcs which have been sought after with increasing energy as they became scarcer and more difficult to acquire, has, if any thing, become more aristocratic still. The market value of these is distinctly increasing, and bids fair to reach a point that will be regarded as prohibitive by all except the very few to whom a matter of money is of no importance.

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