Originally Posted by
webstar1000
I appreciate your take in this but again I have to disagree.... literary works hold MUCH more promise than movie icons, sports player's "great games of past" etc... I do agree there are a TON of signed books out there but as posted by Needfulthings... only the signed limited will have true value. It is like saying that books written by J. R. R. Tolkien are no longer valuable cause he has passed.... we all know that are very valuable. I do love collecting but any person who collects... looks at value. I see it time in and time out here. People buy and sell for more here all the time. There is nothing wrong with that either. To me... there are many books by King that are "works of art". Shinning, It, Dark Tower to name but a few... Art increases in value with time, especially when the artist has "moved on". I mean no disrespect, just wanted to give you my take on it. Cheers
I shouldn't have used sports examples, because they aren't really what I meant.
The reason Tolkien maintained/increased value is because people were NOT buying the book as an investment AT THE TIME - so they're legitimately scarce. Most copies were read, treated badly and discarded, because nobody in 1958 was thinking "I better save a copy of this Elven fantasy." So they disappeared, THEN pop culture decided they had value - thus, the increase. Same with Hunter Thompson - his first couple books are rare because they were just counter-culture nonfiction that was interesting but not culture-shifting...then all of a sudden they were, and so demand got big, and stays fairly healthy because the supply isn't that big.
Which is why SK's first five first editions (Carrie-Dead Zone) and Gunslinger, and many of the pre-1995 s/l editions WILL always maintain a fairly high value...because they really are scarce.
But most of the recent s/l editions people are buying today are bought with investment in mind, and are treated carefully and don't just disappear - so the inventory we have right now will never really decrease. Go back 25 years and someone might think "oh, neat, a signed SK book," but they wouldn't treat it with white gloves like it's their kid's tuition...but now they do. So in the present times, people are more aware of SK's "value" while also being aware that they should keep a hold of it at all costs.
So the supply doesn't drop - and when the day comes (many years from now) when pop culture interest has moved on to somebody else, that supply will remain the same but with much less demand. It's happened before, and will happen again.
Back to your point, though, I do agree that s/l editions should maintain some decent value because of that credibility. But it's not as "limited" as we think they are.
We don't even disagree - in the shortterm, the market is fine - but I think there's a difference between pop culture enthusiasm driving the hobby/collecting/investment market, and true high-end collectibility that drives the big ticket prices necessary for longevity. Other than his early books and a few of the early s/l editions, I think most of his books fit into the pop culture collector's realm.