Coveting photo books

Robin and I are both book people. Several entire walls in the house are floor to ceiling bookshelves, on which books are stacked upon rows of books. When she moved in with me, 15 years ago, she had to sell 600 books before her life would fit into my small house. I have been collecting photography books since college, and I’m very attached to the collection. I declared it off limits for the book purge we are conducting right now, but it gave me reason to reorganize and update the catalog.

As book collections go, my photo books form a modest group, under 200 titles. It’s a relatively narrow range, thick on formalist and landscape work. I have more Robert Adams than any other single photographer. Many are Aperture titles, but I have a number of obscure gallery imprint titles. Five years ago tried to assign a value to the collection by looking up my titles on abebooks.com. I repeated the exercise today. Here’s what I learned.

Inadvertently, I have amassed a few really valuable books. I bought a copy of Garry Winogrand’s "Women are Beautiful" at a used bookstore for $10. The one copy on Abebooks is going for $450. The Scalo reprint of Robert Frank’s "The Americans," from just 2000, now goes for over $300. Friedlander’s stock has really risen the past few years—all my titles are worth something now. These are the exceptions though. Most of my books are available for much less on the used market than I paid for them. Most are worth less than they were 5 years ago.

I didn’t collect books for the investment, of course. There are books that I have been looking at and learning from for 30 years, like "Weston: Fifty Years" or "Minor White: Rites and Passages." Aperture figured prominently in my consciousness back then, consciousness being the appropriate term for titles like "Octave of Prayer", "Light7," and "Be-ing Without Clothes." You can still get those books on the used market for about $10. My book habit got really bad in the late nineties. My favorite titles from that era are Kouldelka’s "Chaos" and Mickael Ackerman’s "End Time City". My most recent purchase was at the suggestion of Paul Butzi, Stuart Rome’s "Forest". Rome also works in dense, chaotic landscape environments, but with a different take than me, namely, he can make it work in contrasty, sunlit tropical forests.

I have been trying to add my own book to the stack for a number of years. I’ll tell that story in another entry.

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[Lawrence Plummer]

For anyone interested, Amazon now has the Scalo (98 version) hardcover edition of "The Americans" for $45 (I ordered it today)!