1965 Cormac McCarthy's "The Orchard Keeper," 1st Edition with Fake Cover
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GUEST:
My grandpa's brother died and there were some boxes of books and some of the family members were allowed to, you know, take stuff; I got the books. I haven't read the book, so... don't ask me what it's about. But he had put some of the books in protective plastic. Some of the books had writing on the inside, and so I chose those.
APPRAISER:
It's an interesting thing. When you get collectors that are collecting the modern first editions-- and when I say modern, I'm almost talking the last 70, 80, 90 years-- their dust jacket is the be-all and end-all. You open the book up, and you have the title page. It's in good condition. It's a first edition. But, when you collect this type of book, the dust jacket is almost the whole value. So, one of the items I check for first is a lot of times someone will clip out the price. This has the price. That's very, very good. Another thing that I did is I looked at the jacket, and it's a little hard to see, but the book underneath this is green. And the color of the book bled through on this edge right here. And I opened it up and there's no color underneath here.
GUEST:
Okay, so it didn't bleed through.
APPRAISER:
It didn't bleed through. One of the things that you run into nowadays is where the dust jacket is 90% of the value, there are many people who, sometimes they do it purposely, and they'll copy a dust jacket. They can do it incredibly well nowadays, but it's a copy.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
Or people bought the book and, not trying to defraud anybody, not trying to fake anything, but they just wanted a nice dust jacket on the book.
GUEST:
Okay.
APPRAISER:
One or the other of this happened on this book because if the color had bled through, it absolutely had to be on the other side of it.
GUEST:
Right.
APPRAISER:
So this is a high-quality reproduction of the dust jacket. Also, the reproduction was taken from a library at some point because you can see that there was some type of library stamp here. So, the book, as it is, with a dust jacket that's not right, is worth, retail, $100 or so. It's not a terribly valuable book. But when you first brought this to me, and I looked at it and I saw this beautiful dust jacket, unclipped, I was saying, "That's a $3,500 book."
APPRAISER:
It was originally worth five dollars, it was free to me, so if it's a hundred-dollar book, you know, it's a hundred-dollar book.
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