Collecting for Profit

It's a good job none of us here are planning on retiring on the sale of our collections.

It would be a bad retirement plan :)

When I buy a book I write down the money I spent on it as lost. It isn't to say it isn't possible to make a little money buying and selling Tolkien books through buying low/selling high, but as an investment they are casino-level gambling. There is a reason why book dealers often tell you "this will go up in value", yet are keen to move the item on quickly.

For me the pleasure is primarily in the chase to find things in nice condition and reasonably priced. Anything else is a bonus.

With regards to rarity, there are only a handful of really rare Tolkien items, I think. I'd personally buy such an item only if it was something that resonated with me, not just because it was rare.

I think Stu makes an excellent point - if rare books were such a good investment, there would be more rich booksellers in the world...

In the literature of book-collecting, the classic essay on not collecting for profit is "Dollars and Cents", chapter 7 in A Primer of Book Collecting by John T. Winterich and David A. Randall (first published 1926, by Winterich alone; we have the third revised edition, 1966). "Unless a person feels a definite urge to collect books as books, he had better collect something else. He should not collect books as merchandise. There are so many less wieldy things to gamble with, and will be while Wall Street endures and fifty-two cards constitute a deck."