Do rare books ever go down in value?
Yes, they sometimes do. If a particular author falls out of favor, fails to fulfill some early promise, or the supply of his books suddenly dramatically exceeds the demand, the prices of his or her books might fall. Some authors who were particularly popular, and heavily collected in the early part of the last century (John Galsworthy, James Branch Cabell, Joseph Hergesheimer, and Louis Bromfield all come easily to mind) saw the prices of their first editions drop dramatically during the Great Depression, and the prices did not recover for half a century or more. More recently, the advent of the Internet has had the effect of lowering the prices of some lower value modern first editions. This has come about because the regional disparities that formerly existed for certain books are no longer relevant. Think of it this way: if there was only one first edition of a particular book in each of the United States, it might seem like we were talking about a pretty scarce book, wouldn’t it? H
