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You’ve been hanging onto that box of old books in your basement for years, meaning to find out if they’re worth anything. Or maybe you’ve got an antique leather-bound volume of Tennyson poems nestled into your bookshelf. You treat it carefully because it looks valuable, but you really have no idea what it’s worth. Wednesday, June 6, you’ll have the chance to find out.
Ken Gloss, the proprietor of Boston’s storied Brattle Book Shop and a regular guest on PBS’s “Antiques Roadshow,” will be visiting the John Jermain Memorial Library in Sag Harbor to talk about his experiences in the antiquarian book business and offer free appraisals.
Mr. Gloss grew up in the book business, taking over from his father, George, who purchased Brattle Books in 1949. The shop itself has been a Boston fixture since 1825.
“We’re a three-story building,” he said. “We have two floors of general used books, and a third floor with rare books, autographs, documents. We also have a display outside with [2,000] to 3,000 books that sell for anywhere from $1 to $5.”
Keeping that volume of used books flowing has been a lifelong commitment for Mr. Gloss, but he said there’s nothing else he’d rather be doing.
“One day we’re moving 6,000 books that aren’t terribly valuable out of a fifth-floor walkup in 90-degree heat, and the next day we’re going to Cape Cod to look at letters from Abraham Lincoln that might be worth tens of thousands of dollars. That’s what keeps it fun—the people and the stories. You never know what’s coming in.”
Curiously, he said, people are sometimes relieved to find out that a book they’ve been wondering about is relatively worthless. “If you say it’s worth tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars, that can change their world. But if you say it’s worth $50 or $100, then it’s a problem. More often than not, when you say it’s not worth anything, people are absolutely thrilled. They don’t have to take care of it anymore. They can read it, they can give it to the grandchildren and not worry about it.”
Occasionally, Mr. Gloss happens upon a genuine rarity. “A woman brought in a box of papers from her attic—documents, broadsides, that kind of thing. I unfolded one and it said Declaration of Independence. It wasn’t from the first printing, but probably a couple of weeks after the first one was published. It was worth around half a million dollars.”
Another time, a woman brought him a letter that had been in her family since the Civil War. “It was a four-page letter from a soldier in a hospital in Washington, telling his family he loved them and asking them to please write, telling them what the hospital was like.
“It was nice, but nothing really special. But then, at the very end of the letter, in little parentheses, it said, ‘Written by his friend Walt Whitman.’ So all four pages were in Whitman’s handwriting.
“During the Civil War, Whitman volunteered to help with nursing in Washington. And one of the things he did—if a soldier was illiterate or too sick to write—he would write out the letter for him. Those letters are particularly rare because even though Walt Whitman was famous in his lifetime, there was a better than even chance that some soldier writing home wouldn’t have known who he was, and the letter wouldn’t have been saved. I think that letter appraised for [$10,000] to $12,000.”
During one memorable taping of “Antiques Roadshow” in Kansas City, a man came in with some religious items—rosary beads, some other odds and ends. “It turns out he was the pilot who flew the pope around the United States back in the 1970s. He pulls out this photo of himself sitting in the pilot’s seat, and the pope, in full vestments, literally leaning over the pilot’s seat, with one foot up in the air, sort of really leaning over to sign this man’s Bible. It was great—usually when you see pictures of the pope in his vestments, it’s posed. This guy had stories about the entourage, and what everyone was doing, and I said, ‘Great, let me see the Bible,’ and he said, ‘Oh, I didn’t bring that.’ By that time, Pope John Paul had been made a saint. If he had the Bible, it would have been a great appraisal to get on TV. From an appraiser’s point of view, it’s a great story about what could’ve been.”
Sometimes the surprises come from the store’s own employees. “Years ago, I hired an employee, a young guy. He had worked at the store for a week, and I was helping a customer, an older man. He asked for an author, an obscure novelist. We didn’t have anything, so I asked if he wanted to leave his name. He said, ‘No, I’ll check around.’ So the man left, and I took almost no note of him. When he left, my new employee asked, ‘Does that guy come in here often?’ And I said I didn’t think so. He said, ‘That was J.D. Salinger. I used to date his daughter.’”
Mr. Gloss never tires of the business.
“I’m getting to an age where a lot of my friends are getting ready to retire,” he mused, “but I have absolutely no desire to stop. I don’t know what I could do that would be as much fun as this. Almost every day we go out to estates, to houses; someone’s moving, or someone’s died, and we never know what we’re going to find, who we’re going to meet.
“We have one customer who comes in every day. He calls in sick if he’s not coming in because he’s always afraid we’re going to put something out he wants that day and he’ll miss it.”
Even on the bargain rack, customers sometimes hit the jackpot. “I got a large collection of cookbooks in, about two boxes of these old manufacturers’ pamphlets—how to make Jell-O molds, how to cook with a blender. They weren’t worth my time, so we just put them all out on the dollar table. About two hours later a customer comes running in with one them. ‘I’ve been looking for this for years—I’m so excited!’ I look at the thing and the title is ‘Coconuts and Constipation.’ So you just never know.”
To hear more stories and have treasured books, manuscripts, notes, letters and autographs appraised, register for the free event on Wednesday, June 6, at 5:30 p.m. by calling John Jermain Memorial Library at 631-725-0049.
on May 25, 2018