Thank you, Stu, for the interesting topic. As some of the collectors on this forum already know, I have a large collection of first British LoTR editions, as it was earlier my primary focus of collecting, especially in the years 2013 and 2014 (in the last 8 to 9 years I have diversified a lot more). What I can tell you from my experience is that there is a very large variation in prices, and even now I can stumble from time to time upon really good deals. These deals are rarer and rarer as years go by. I am 100% sure that a good percentage of purchases are by book dealers that resell later for higher prices, which partially elevates the whole market. Very important is the continuing demand for the books. Patience is a key virtue, as many of our veteran collectors already know. For new collectors, small advice: if you are not cautious, you can blow up your bank pretty quickly if you don't have very deep pockets.

Lokki wrote:

Thank you, Stu, for the interesting topic. As some of the collectors on this forum already know, I have a large collection of first British LoTR editions, as it was earlier my primary focus of collecting, especially in the years 2013 and 2014 (in the last 8 to 9 years I have diversified a lot more). What I can tell you from my experience is that there is a very large variation in prices, and even now I can stumble from time to time upon really good deals. These deals are rarer and rarer as years go by. I am 100% sure that a good percentage of purchases are by book dealers that resell later for higher prices, which partially elevates the whole market. Very important is the continuing demand for the books. Patience is a key virtue, as many of our veteran collectors already know. For new collectors, small advice: if you are not cautious, you can blow up your bank pretty quickly if you don't have very deep pockets.

If there was one thing I would teach new collectors, it would be "just because you can't see a copy on eBay this week, it doesn't mean it is rare". I think a lot of new buyers don't realise that even relatively common books aren't always just there to be picked up on a whim, and then when they see one being sold by a predatory dealer (and that's most - not all - of them in the Tolkien space), they end up paying three or more times what the item is really worth on the normal open market. We see dealers buying on eBay to flip at multiples of the original price almost daily at this point. This only works because the market is generally poorly informed and some of these professional sellers have fairly poor ethics.

The late Stu wrote:

We see dealers buying on eBay to flip at multiples of the original price almost daily at this point. This only works because the market is generally poorly informed and some of these professional sellers have fairly poor ethics.

I would agree with this, the market is not well informed at all when it comes to rarity of items, how often certain items appear for sale or auction prices (really true ways of telling the worth of an item) I see it all the time in other social media spaces. People asking for advice and getting wrong information. This is why we work so hard here at maintaining good auction and recent eBay sales records, as well as the flipping books thread, so collectors can see what is actually happening with the market.

Thanks to Aelfwine's "intersting auctions" post, I now have a cheapy ($28) ex-lib Philologie Moderne. Interestingly the pages aren't cut beyond page 12, so obviously was not one of their more popular titles! Happy to have this - Might be a binding exercise for me one day.