Selling my Super Deluxe Children of Hurin & Legend of Sigurd & Gudrun

I hope you are able to sell them but those prices seem a bit steep to me considering you can still buy each of those books on HarperCollin's Tolkien page for less.

Price on the Tolkien.co.uk site is £350 each: http://www.tolkien.co.uk/titles/48715 ... legend-of-sigurd-and-gudrún-limited-signed-edition-j-r-r-tolkien-9780007319725

What am I missing?

That´s sad to hear Andrew.
I too hope you will find a buyer for those two lovely books.

I think Jlong still thought that they are on discount, when both were sold for £245 each.

Oh, my mistake. I misread the post. Sorry about that Andrew. I was thinking £500 per book. You meant £500 for both. That makes a lot more sense.

Josh

£500 for both yes - quite a decent price I think :)

I hope you are able to sell them (given that it sounds like you could do with the money). From what I understand HC will discount to GBP 245 for these books, even when they are not officially on one of their regular sales (I'm pretty sure you posted either here or on your blog that you had gotten such an out-of-sale-period discount when you purchased CoH in the first place?).

S&G seems to sell second-hand for sub-GBP200. I would suggest that 400 pounds for the pair would probably be a more realistic asking price (and would most likely be what I would be asking for initially if I needed to get rid of my spares). Even that might be on the high-side for an international sale when you take into account the low cost shipping provided by HC.

On the plus side, you can count yourself lucky that the exchange rate hasn't impacted you. My average cost for the super-deluxes was GBP240 (2x350 CoH, 1x250 CoH, 1x250 S&G, 1xFree S&G), but the AUD/GBP exchange rate means that they are only worth about two-thirds of what I paid for them, even if I sold them for cost !

Truth be told, whenever I buy a book, I write off the value to zero, as that is all I can guarantee to get back for it (and so far I have never sold a book, anyway)...

Rgds
Stu

Hi Stu,
Yeah I did get CoH in that manner, although that was nearly a year ago and I wouldn't be surprised if they refused now as I imagine stock is a lot lower at this point. Also, my S&G is a pretty low number which I think has some appeal.

Personally, for £400 I would just keep them and sell some of my other books. Still, might pop them on ebay and see what happens.

I'm not convinced that stock would be that much lower, to be honest. After the initial rush subsided, I just can't see them selling more than a handful a year - Too many people are doing it tough financially at the moment. I could definitely see CoH running out at some point through the normal trickle of sales, but I think S&G will be remaindered in the end (assuming all 500 were actually bound). I would honestly be very surprised if more than 100 copies of S&G have been sold to date, as the response to that particular edition wasn't very positive.

I agree with you that eBay might be your best bet (as I suspect most of the lurkers around TG probably already obtained these books if they were interested) - Take really appealing photos (IMHO these books look best when flash is not used) and you might just get one of those odd "bidding frenzies" that happens from time to time that pushes the price up beyond the "rational price". If you can afford to wait until the first Hobbit movie comes out, the price of CoH might conceivably rise (although you will be competing with another several million items of horrible "Tolkien Landfill", I suppose!).

By the way, if you decide to sell your nice 3 Volume SD LOTR, I'd be interested!

Cheers
Stu

Sorry, not following --"3 Volume SD LOTR"?

As for prices: under £200 doesn't sound very common. Let's see what current prices I've noted...

CoH
£325 (#48) April
£217 (#140) April
£258 (#490) January

S&G
£225 (#147) December
£170 (#?) August

Hmmm... clearly I haven't been note taking too regularly there then! There's been a lot up at Buy-It-Now, but I tend not to watch those if they're too pricey --as I just don't think they sell. O/w I normally note any open auctions and auctions with Best-Offer options. But this is all I've noted over the last year.

I agree with you Stu: I can't imagine they sold very many S&G after the initial crew who wanted a copy had got theirs. But CoH is probably pretty close to sold out I'd guess. I can't imagine HarperCollins have too many left.

BH