Interest, beauty and rarity: book collecting, the passion that (still) escapes the clutches of the art market

Of the first edition of

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

, printed by Juan de la Cuesta, at number 87 Atocha Street in Madrid in 1605, it is estimated that around 31 copies remain today. Most of them are found in public institutions, such as the Royal Spanish Academy or the National Library, although some are in private hands. Its value? The first answer would be “incalculable.” After all, what price can you put on getting your hands on the princely edition of literature's first modern novel? Well that.

The second answer, the one that every reader wants to know, is offered to us by two experts, the sisters Belén and Alicia Bardón, third generation behind the counter of the Bardón Bookstore (Plaza de San Martín, 3, Madrid), since their grandfather founded it in 1947: “A copy of the

First Folio

by Shakespeare [the name by which scholars refer to the first publication of the English playwright's collection of 36 plays, dating back to 1623] sold for almost $10 million. And this work, today, can still be found [234 copies are preserved in England and France]. If we look at those parameters, the first Don Quixote is infinitely rarer... it would be worth much more.” “Rare” is a word that is frequently repeated in the world of bibliophiles and antique bookstores. According to José Martínez de Sousa, honorary president of the Spanish Association of Bibliology, the three criteria that determine the bibliographic value of a book are: interest, beauty and rarity.

More information

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Let's go back to 1605 to exemplify this. The success of

The Ingenious Gentleman Don Quixote of La Mancha

, whose first print run was between 1,500 and 1,750 copies, was such that pirated editions of the novel soon appeared in cities such as Lisbon or Valencia, whose printers did not wait for publication permission to release them. for sale and take advantage of the great success of Miguel de Cervantes. Today, any of these unofficial,

pirated

editions also have enormous value among bibliophiles: in the end, the historical interest is undeniable, in addition to constituting, in itself, a strange and original object.

An inacunabula (book printed during the 15th century, at the beginning of the printing press) from 1493 that the Bardón Bookstore has. Pablo Monge

The Bardón sisters know a lot about these matters, current owners of one of the oldest bookstores in Spain — a space with books from floor to ceiling, majestic wooden shelves and an elegant red carpet, which could also function as a stage for a detective mystery novel from the late 1800s—, with a collection of around 50,000 copies ranging from incunabula to copies from the 19th century and somewhat (although less) from the 20th. They define book collecting as a passion: “A curious passion, because it borders on illness,” Alicia Bardón acknowledges. They say that those who start collecting books usually don't stop: “Once you get into it, you start to appreciate things that you didn't appreciate before; a good print, good paper, a beautiful binding or a special provenance, such as a book that belonged to a monarch or that was a gift from one writer to another writer and comes dedicated.”

Manuel Sánchez Llorente, president of the Madrid Guild of Old Booksellers, in his bookstore in Madrid.Samuel Sánchez

“Customers are as varied as the books,” explains Manuel Sánchez Llorente, owner of the Santiago Bookstore (6 Valenzuela Street, Madrid) and president of the Madrid Guild of Old Booksellers, who also acknowledges that he would prefer to be a “rich bibliophile.” ” to be a bookseller. Unfortunately he doesn't have that much money, and he notices that there are books that he likes so much that he prefers not to part with them, even if it is detrimental to his business. In his treasure cave, a ground floor in the imposing stately neighborhood adjacent to Retiro Park, there is a collection that forms the interest of Sánchez Llorente himself: marine navigation, economics and contemporary literature in first editions. “There are very knowledgeable bibliophile people, more generalists, who are looking for that unique and special object: they do not buy just any book, or any edition, or at any price. And then we have another type of client, a collector of very specific topics, such as chess, hunting, medicine or even whales, for example,” says this bookseller. There are collectors of books about the city where they were born or about the profession they practice or practiced. There are search engines on topics such as astronomy or navigation. And there are collectors obsessed with a specific period (say, the Golden Age) and even specific authors: “We had a client who was looking only for original editions of Cervantes from the 17th century,” the Bardón sisters comment, without judging.

A handwritten note by Federico García Lorca, with some verses from the 'Romancero gitano'. One of the treasures that Manuel Sánchez Llorente keeps.Samuel Sánchez

Clients are also no strangers to current trends: “Of course there are literary fashions! Every time a writer dies or every time the centenary of his death is celebrated, there is a

boom

. The last one I remember was Galdós. Suddenly, everyone wanted a Galdós book,” explains Belén Bardón. Other fashions are given by the social interests of a time (currently, many more female writers are in demand than years ago) and others are the result of chance. For example, on November 6, 2003, the current Kings of Spain, Felipe and Letizia, made their first public appearance during the royal request. They both mentioned what gifts they had exchanged for the special occasion. The then Prince of Asturias said that he had chosen “a family jewel.” Doña Letizia said that her gift was “a literary gem”: “It was

El doncel de Don Enrique el Suliente,

a romantic novel by Larra, with a chivalric plot set in the 15th century... you can't even imagine how many times they asked us for it. in the bookstore,” says Belén with a laugh, who admits that it doesn't seem like a very special work. Some topics of high

millennial

interest such as gastronomy or magic and spiritualism are other booming trends in the world of ancient books.

“When they gave Cela the Nobel Prize, everyone wanted a first edition of Cela,” explains Sánchez Llorente, “but the book is somewhat more alien to trends than other artistic objects; “My clients, in the end, go about their business.” In this she agrees with the Bardón sisters. Within this type of collecting, there are few clients who get into it for investment.

Outside the art market

A notice for customers of the Bardón Bookstore. Pablo Monge

“When I was young and came to New York, people talked about the art world. Now everyone talks about the art market. I think that with this I have said everything,” the unclassifiable Fran Lebowitz explained to the camera at one point in the documentary about bibliophiles

The Booksellers

(Libreros de Nueva York, 2019). It is in this documentary where they tell a curious anecdote: a first edition of

The Great Gatsby

by Scott Fitzgerald without the dust jacket sold for about $5,000. With that same dust jacket worn and with some tears, 15,000 dollars. With the perfect dust jacket, it sold for $150,000. “Look, the dust jacket or the sash, the first thing you throw away when you get home,” the Bardón sisters comment with a laugh. This would be a clear example of collecting as an investment: “Personally, I don't think you can give a financial character to an artistic object,” says Alicia Bardón, “and it is something that we advise against this new type of client, the investor, who in the In recent years we have been receiving.”

Sánchez Llorente is of the same opinion: “I have been in this business for more than 30 years and I think that, finally, now I am beginning to have an idea of ​​something, this is not a world in which you enter, buy and leave, but in the that you have to immerse yourself to be able to understand,” admits this man who, unlike the Bardón sisters, studied Law and does not come from a family of booksellers. “We can put a price on a book based on our own experience, because suddenly, in our years of profession, we come across something that we had not seen before,” admits Belén Bardón. Books, for these three booksellers, have a sacred component: “A book is not like a painting that you are going to have on display, it is something that you are going to have on your shelf and in your bookcase... and, perhaps, it has "It takes a century for it to revalue," says Alicia Bardón, "there are faster ways to make money."

According to Sánchez Llorente, in Spain there are around 20 antiquarian bookstores, most of them are in Madrid. “There is usually no generational change, the customer profile that previously came to wander around this type of business has also decreased, many people do not even know that we exist,” he laments. An old book can be a very expensive object, but not always: a lover of these objects could be interested in a particular period (in the United States, there are people creating their collections with the authors of the Beat Generation or New

Journalism

). “Salaries are lower and young people live in increasingly smaller apartments,” explain the Bardón sisters, “we do not compete with large bookstores, nor with the Internet or with Kindle... but we do compete with not having a good space for books at home.”