It is said there is a private stable in Syracuse, New York, which has cost several hundred thousand dollars. The owner is regarded as perfectly sane and the building is viewed with great pride by the public, but if the owner had expended as much on a private library his neighbors would have thought him a lunatic. If a man in business wants to excite the suspicion of the sleek gentlemen who sit around the discount board with him, or yell like lunatics at the stock exchange with him, or talk with him about the tariff or free silver, or any other subject on which no two men ever agree unless it is for their interest, let it leak out that he has put a few thousand dollars into a Mazarine Bible, or a Caxton, or a first folio Shakespeare or some other rare book
No matter if he can afford it, most of his associates regard him as they do a Bedlamite who goes about collecting straws. Fortunate is he if his wife does not privately call on the family attorney and advise with him about putting a committee over the poor man.
ut if we must regard book-buying in a money sense, and were to admit that books never sell for as much as they cost, it is no worse in respect to books than in respect to any other species of personal property. What chattel is there for which the buyer can get as much as he paid, even the next day? When it is proposed to transform the seller himself into the buyer of the same article, we find that the bull of yesterday is converted into the bear of to-day. Circumstances alter cases. I have bought a good many books and “objects of bigotry and virtue,” and have sold some, and the nearest I ever came to getting as much as I paid was in the case of a rare print, the seller of which, after the lapse of several years, solicited me to let him have it again, at exactly what I paid for it, in order that he might sell it to some one else at an advance. I declined his offer with profuse thanks, and keep the picture as a curiosity
So I should say, as a rule, that books are not a good financial investment in the business sense, and speaking of most books and most buyers
Give a man the same experience in buying books that renders him expert in buying other personal property, the mere gross objects of trade, and let him set out with the purpose of accumulating a library that shall be a remunerative financial investment, and he may succeed, indeed, has often succeeded, certainly to the extent of getting back his outlay with interest, and sometimes making a handsome profit. But this needs experience