Original Schindler's List Offered At $3,000,000

by Stephen J. Gertz

"Don't miss your chance to own a piece of history that has inspired many on the difference one person can make in the face of great danger. This exceedingly rare original Schindler’s List is the only one ever on the market. It emanates from the family of Itzhak Stern, Schindler’s accountant and right hand man (played by Ben Kingsley in the Academy Award-winning film). There are 3 others known which are in institutional hands. It is 14 pages in length and lists 801 male names, dated April 18, 1945. It is guaranteed authentic… Itzhak Stern typed up the 14 page list on onion skin paper. Up for auction is not a copy of that list, but the actual one. It was sold by Itzhak Stern's nephew to the current owner. It is dated in pencil on the first page, April 18, 1945."

An original of Oscar Schindler's list of factory workers to be saved from Nazi gas chambers was offered through an online auction that ended Sunday July 28th at 9PM EDT. On eBay. For  $3,000,000. That's three million george w's. It did not sell.

I, as most professional antiquarian booksellers, am customarily dubious about rare books and documents sold through eBay. Prices often appear to be calculated within a Martian atmosphere with little connection to market realities by sellers who are often amateurs, at best, and authentication can be a challenge. So, when I learned of this offer I simply shook my head: another wacko episode on eBay, the auction network at the bottom of the ratings.

However, when I casually mentioned this offer to a highly respected trade colleague here in Los Angeles he told me that he knew the seller. Not only that but the seller, Gazin Auctions/Auction Cause, was his next door neighbor.

Prior to the auction's end, I contacted Eric Gazin to find out if this is real or if I can share the opium pipe he's been sucking on.

SJG: How did you arrive at the offering price? Can you tell me something about the owner? How did the owner find you? I ask the last because I find it curious that it is being offered on eBay and not through Sotheby's, Christie's, or any other major auction house.

EG: The owner [in Israel] wishes to remain anonymous. This came to me through Gary Zimet, owner of Moments in Time, a document dealer. He is the one who arrived at this price. Contrary to conventional wisdom, eBay is a great location to offer these kinds of rare pieces. Our clients and buyers love the fact there is no 10% buyer's premium too, means more funds to spend on the auction item.

We sold the Rush Limbaugh - Harry Reid letter there for $2.1 million, the highest price ever achieved for a modern document. We have an active base of high net worth individuals who often make purchases from us.

SJG: At that price any serious collector will want to personally view it before committing to buy. What arrangements do you have for previewing the List?

EG: Yes, the winner will be able to see the List in person in Israel while his/her funds are in an escrow account and can bring along their expert.

SJG: If you have no bidders what's your next step?

EG: We have a few interested parties that may or may not bid, and if it ends without them bidding, we will be continuing the purchase discussions with them.

SJG: What sort of business do you have? What do you trade in?

EG: My company is a high profile auction management agency. We help mainly celebrities, charities, corporate brands, TV shows, and individuals with unique auction offerings which need design, promotion, bidder screening, logistic services, research, and consulting. Personally, I love historical items, rare books, and other paper pieces. We are always happy to assist a collector looking for a non traditional auction house alternative.

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So, there you have it. Schindler's Original List, yours for only $3,000,000, private sale pending upon negotiation. When you can sell a letter from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid to Limbaugh's boss, Mark P. Mays, CEO of Clear Channel Communications, excoriating Limbaugh for intemperate comments (read it here), and co-signed by forty-one Democratic senators for $2.1 million, all of a sudden $3 mil for an original of Schindler's List doesn't seem an insane price, nor eBay an inane place for rare books and historical paper from a respectable, high-end dealer..

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Images courtesy of Gazin Auctions, with our thanks.
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Pablo Escobar: Drug Lord & Book Publisher?

by Stephen J. Gertz

Quick - you've just been incarcerated in La Cathedral, a maximum-security prison in Colombia built to your exacting specs so your accommodations are deluxe. You were the world's most notorious cocaine trafficker, head of the Medellin Cartel, but now you're all dressed-up with no place to go. You don't want anyone to forget your infamy. What's a coke kingpin to do?

Publish a book.

Frontispiece.

In 1992 Pablo Escobar did just that. Pablo Escobar Gaviria en Caricaturas 1983-1991 is his self-published valentine to himself, a vanity publication containing 352 political cartoons, photographs, and drawings (four in color) that originally appeared in Colombian newspapers.

Printed on June 2, 1992, it was limited to a small number of copies, the exact number unknown. It's full calf binding was graced by Escobar's facsimile signature and fingerprint on the front cover. After Escobar's escape from the lap of penal luxury a month later, in late July, 1992, his family, for reasons unclear, burned the print run. It appears that only a handful have survived, perhaps ten copies at most. It has become quite scarce.
 

But in a reminder that price is tied to market demand and not necessarily an item's rarity, the offering price on this book has ranged from the ludicrously absurd to the possibly reasonable. Two sellers on eBay - a site that has legitimate and knowledgeable rare booksellers yet is tainted by so many amateurs who have little idea of what they're doing and no feel for the market - offered copies at $60,000 (November, 2012) and $107,000 (February, 2013). PBA Galleries offered a copy in June, 2012 that was estimated to sell for $10,000 - $15,000.

The market spoke and it said (with Jamaican accent), "Have you lost your mind, Mon?" No surprise: they did not sell.

The eBay sellers had no excuse. PBA Galleries' initial auction page remains online with results posted (the lot in question, #94, excluded from the list, indicating no sale). The eBay offers were pure fantasy based upon a crackpipe dream. With no prior auction sales to compare to, PBA's estimate was, if too high, at least serious and down to earth, professionally evaluated, and within the realm of possibility based upon its staff handling thousands of rare books each year and knowledge of categories and their collectors.

Sanity prevailed when James Cummins Bookseller offered a copy two weeks ago for $5,000 and it immediately sold. The market found the price. The eBay copies possessed either Escobar's signature or the original publisher's box (as did the PBA copy), which, the dealers claimed, merited their grandiose, coked-up to the gills prices. (Why $107,000? Why not $100,000 or $110,000?).

A  low ($5,000, Cummins) and high (<$10,000, PBA) value has now been established. We can safely presume that the bidding at PBA began at around $9,000 and there were no takers. The reserve was likely around the same and it was not met. The copies offered on eBay are now worth approximately $5,000 - $8,750, if, of course, there's someone else in the world who cares enough to fork over that sum. That estimate will rise, of course, if demand exceeds supply. It will decline, naturally, if collectors collectively shrug their shoulders.

What the eBay dealers didn't understand because they did not know the market, was that the one person in the world who was a keen collector of drug-related literature, a completist who wanted everything in his area of collection, and, significantly, possessed fabulous wealth, had died in 2011. But Julio Santo Domingo was no fool and would have laughed at the eBay prices; he knew the marketplace. Hell, he was the marketplace for drug-lit., dominating it for the last fifteen years of his life. Escobar's book is interesting but not that interesting, at best a bizarre curiosity, and most, if not all, active collectors of drug literature do not have the scratch necessary to buy at exorbitant prices no matter how scarce the volume. You can't price books in a vacuum; offers have to reflect market realities. There is no such thing as intrinsic monetary value to any collectable, only what collectors are willing to pay and they rule the market. If viewers of Antiques Roadshow have learned anything it is that the rarest anything in the world is well-nigh worthless if nobody cares about it.

Pablo Escobar, whose fortune was once estimated in billions of dollars, would have been thrilled to learn that his book was offered at $107,000. Then, after coming down from the coke high, he would have been depressed when a copy actually sold for only a measly five grand. The market spoke and it said, tu libro es agradable, pero no es para tanto, mi amigo. Lo siento.

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GAVIRIA, Pablo Escobar. Pablo Escobar Gaviria en Caricaturas 1983-1991. [Medellin, Colombia: Pablo Escobar,  1992]. First (only) edition, unknown limitation. Large quarto ( (9x7¾ in); 230 x 200 mm). [2] - 377, [1] recto-only pp. with 13 leaves of prologue and text, 8 leaves of photographs and portraits, 352 leaves of political and caricature, four in full color. Original padded calf with facsimile signature and fingerprint in gilt. Housed in the publisher's box.

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"Legitimate Contender for World's Most Expensive Rare Book" (Not)

“Legitimate Contender For World’s Most Expensive Book” ?
(Twelfth edition)

“Hiya kids, hiya, hiya, hiya!”

Froggy, the croaking - and long-croaked - gremlin, has risen from the graveyard of 50s television to pluck his magic twanger once more and bedevil a hapless victim. This time, a deluded "rare book dealer" is his prey.

Who’s the poor sap? Why it’s Milliondollarauctions123, aka Ebay’s most egregious example of sub-amateur rare bookseller, who declares, after stating his headline above:

“Far more important than $30.8 million Codex Leicester.”

A page from daVinci's Codex Leicester

The book in question? Alfred Thayer Mahan's The Influence of Seapower Upon History 1660-1783. What’s the asking price?

$21,000,000. No joke, folks. Oh, and that’s just the reserve. Good thing there's no buyer's premium. Time for Ebay to change its name to Oybay.

Milliondollardunce weaves one of the most astounding tales of rare book baloney we’ve seen in quite some time. A lot of helium was used to pump up this book.

“The sale of this book for over $30.8 million would deservedly break the record price paid by Bill Gates for the Codex Leicester. This book is far more historically significant than the Codex and is worthy of the the new price record. Historically, The Influence of Seapower Upon History was the successor to the Declaration of Independence and the Monroe Doctrine in the saga of human liberty. If no higher provenanced copy of this book exists, the offered volume is actually priceless.

“If America had not risen to the challenge of competing ideologies at the dawning of the 20th century, freedom as we know it today probably would not exist. Rising totalitarian empires almost certainly would have toppled an America that had chosen, instead, to be an isolated fortress nation. Through a century in which over 250,000,000 people were killed by their own totalitarian governments, The Influence of Seapower Upon History was the philosophical and strategic text that preserved life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

“In the 1940's, Mahan's prescient advocacy of a larger navy would narrowly avert global tyranny. The survival of liberty and democracy to this present day is attributable, in part, to the book now offered. Unless a more historic copy of this book exists, the offered volume ranks among the top documentary treasures in humanity's passage to universal human rights, suffrage, and liberty.

“Internet search results of this book generally devolve into pejorative statements about American ‘imperialism,’ while avoiding the context of the genocidal 20th century. The following keyword searches restore that key context in humanity's long dark passage to democratic peace: (Seller is not associated with any website.) R.J. Rummel, democide, photographs democide, Unit 731, 1848 Communist Manifesto, AHA Bemis address, 1919 War Plan Orange, 1919 political parties established, 1921 Washington Naval Conference, Russian Revolution 1917, totalitarianism, personality cult, political economy”

Are you sold? Wait.

There are presently four-hundred and seventy-two - 472! - copies of this “rare book” noted by OCLC in institutions worldwide, a fact unreported by Milliondollardufus.

Here’s an oh, by-the-way that Milliondollardingbat neglects to include in his 21-gun cannonade catalog salute: the basic and essential bibliographical fact, Boston: Little, Brown, 1918.

But this copy, according to Milliondollardunderhead, has magnificently marvelous, mama mia! provenance: “War Department Library, Library Office Chief of Staff, Pentagon Library, Army Library, Department of Defense Library.” It is suggested that it might, just might have been touched by Gen. George C. Marshall.

The Influence of Seapower Upon History 1660-1783 was, indeed, an important and influential book but this copy could have been signed and licked by every four-star general and rear admiral 1918-1945 and it still wouldn’t be worth more than $20,000 at auction - on a good day full of sunshine and fairie dust when everyone has lost their mind, know it but don't care. It's an ex-library copy, jeez, a pariah to collectors, particularly as it is an ex-library copy of a later edition - the twelfth - not the first edition of 1890.

OCLC/WorldCat notes 352 copies of the first edition in institutional collections worldwide.

A copy of the first edition recently sold at auction for £150 ($252).

The OCLC info you have to pay for to access. The auction price is available to all on the Net.

That anyone of sano mentis could declare this book to be of greater import than the Codex - the collection of manuscript leaves on scientific subjects written by Leonardo da Vinci - calls into question current standards of mental competence.

Milliondollarauction123 qualifies for his own personal entry in the DSM-IV; the man’s just plain kwazy!

But, when you’ve been plucked by Froggy’s magic twanger, anything is possible. You are compelled to behave like a fool.



So, don’t delay. This Ebay auction closes on November 19th. Current bids: None.

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The ABAA chat-board has wound up the chatter-teeth toy on this story. The consensus is that, should milliondollarauctions123 ever decide to join the American Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America, his initial membership fee should be set at $21,000,000.

The Miracle of the Two-Week Rare Book: A Nancy Drew Mystery

We rare book collectors and dealers have, apparently, been asleep. While we’ve been aslumber, the meaning of “rare” has undergone a radical transformation guaranteed to startle us to wide-eyed wakefulness.

“RARE NANCY DREW APPLEWOOD THE MESSAGE IN THE HOLLOW OAK Item #200366792295. FROM A SMOKE AND PET-FREE HOME, THIS IS A FIRST OR SECOND EDITION!!! HOLLOW OAK IS A RARITY- I DID NOT FIND 1 ON EBAY INCLUDING COMPLETED AUCTIONS!!!"

Once upon a time, Ebay provided auction records for the prior three months. Far from a reliable indicator of rarity at that short interval, not too long ago the time frame was reduced to an absurd thirty days. Now it’s a mere two weeks.

Hasn’t been seen in two weeks! Alert the media!

I’m not a friend of Ebay but I do know a few serious and savvy collectors who’ve picked up some good material through the site but only because they knew a whole lot more about the book being offered than the seller and asked important, key questions.

On balance, however, Ebay continues to be a rare book source where those who know little if anything about what they have sell to those who know little if anything about what they’re doing. It’s still caveat emptor-land in capital letters.

Now, as it turns out, The Message in the Hollow Oak, Nancy Drew Mystery #12 (1935) is indeed a rarity. But this Ebay seller’s complete description is strictly Earth vs. the Flying Saucers:

“FROM A SMOKE AND PET-FREE HOME, THIS IS A FIRST OR SECOND EDITION!!! THE NUMBER LINE IS "10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2". YOU ARE BIDDING ON HARDBACK "THE MESSAGE IN THE HOLLOW OAK" IN VERY GOOD CONDITION- COMPLETELY UNMARKED ASIDE FROM BOOKSTORE PRICE MARKED INSIDE, ONLY THE MOST MINIMAL EDGEWEAR. HOLLOW OAK IS A RARITY- I DID NOT FIND 1 ON EBAY INCLUDING COMPLETED AUCTIONS!!! COPYRIGHT 1999; 4 GLOSSY INTERNALS !!! INTERNALS ARE THE HOLY GRAIL- MOST NANCY DREW FANS HAVE NOT SEEN ALL 4. . IMPROVE YOUR SUMMER BY READING THE FURTHER ADVENTURES OF THE TITIAN-HAIRED INGENUE AND YOUNGEST DETECTIVE IN RIVER HEIGHTS! IMPROVE YOUR NDQ BY SEEING THE 4 RARE GLOSSY PICS INSIDE AND READING MORE ABOUT THE MOST CLEVER (AND PRETTIEST) TEENAGER THIS SIDE OF THE MUSKOKA RIVER AND HER DADDY LAWYER CARSON DREW'S DARLING! I'LL THROW YOU A TIDBIT: DID YOU KNOW THAT ORIGINALLY THE 16 YEAR OLD NANCY HAD A GUN? YES, THE PERFECTLY COIFFED, SUMMER FROCK-WEARING HIGH-SCHOOL GIRL PACKED HEAT! I BELIEVE THAT SHE KEPT HER WEAPON IN THE GLOVE COMPARTMENT (ALONG WITH SHORT WHITE GLOVES, JUST IN CASE) OF HER SPORTY BLUE ROADSTER! NANCY WAS MADE TO BE 18 AND BLONDE (SHE WAS ORIGINALLY 'TITIAN-HAIRED") IN MORE RECENT TIMES. SEE MY OTHER AUCTIONS FOR SIMILAR- ALWAYS CHEAPEST SHIPPING, IN THIS CASE FREE- NEVER ANY HANDLING!!!”

Having plowed through the seller’s all-caps, exclamation point-happy, smoke and pet-free garrulous paean to sixteen year old titian-haired innocent gun moll gumshoes with white gloves, the sharp eyed will have noticed that the copyright date for the copy in question is “1999.” Not even close to the first edition. But “always cheapest shipping, in this case free.”

Contrast the Ebay seller’s description for his copy of this book with the description provided by Tavistock Books, whose proprietor, Vic Zoschak, is a solid, reliable and trustworthy veteran of the rare book trade:

KEENE, Carolyn (pseudonym, here, of Mildred A. Wirt). The Message in the Hollow Oak. New York: Grosset & Dunlap., (1935). 12mo. 1st edition, 7th printing (Farah 1937A-7). iv, 218, [2] pp. Adverts last 2 pages. Light blue cloth binding with orange lettering (Format #3). Orange topstain. Orange silhouette eps. Dust jacket with white spine, wear & soiling). Frontis + 3 inserted plates by Russell H. Tandy.

Vic accurately provides all that the concerned collector needs to know without needless palaver substituting for knowledge. The most basic and important piece of info is offered, the bibliographical citation. Vic charges for shipping, a small price to pay for dealing with an individual who has invested decades into learning the trade and knowing books.

It’s the difference between peace of mind when buying and having to give a piece of one’s mind to the seller after buying.

If this Ebay seller wanted to know how rare the book actually was, all he had to do was log on to the great aggregator, Addall, where Vic's copy is listed for anyone to see, if he knew where to look. It doesn't get much more basic than Addall, which the trade has been using for years to get an accurate sense of the marketplace.

Ebay remains the wild, wild west. Keep a roscoe in the glove compartment for protection and take off the white gloves when buying rare books there lest they get soiled. That's the real message in the hollow oak.

Hat’s off to Jennifer of the Series Books for Girls blogspot for the lead.
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