What makes a book rare?
The books in our Rare Book Room are not necessarily old or expensive, but they are all, to one degree or another, considered rare. Taken literally, the term rare is misleading. To be considered rare a book must be more than just scarce; it must be scarce relative to the demand for it. Often, beginning collectors assume that because a book is very old it must be worth a great deal of money. But there are many, many books printed in the 1700s that have no real value; they are scarce, but not rare in the book collector’s sense of the word. Though just what does make a book desirable to collectors is much more difficult to answer, there are some common variables that often factor into the equation. Sometimes only a particular edition of a book is rare, such as the first printing of a work, known as a first edition, a true first, a first issue or, sometimes, just a first. In some cases it is the signature of the author, the artwork contained in the book, or the typesetting, layout, or bindi
