Children's Books & C.R. Milne Letter
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GUEST:
I got these from an antique dealer near here.
APPRAISER:
This is a little book, which is by A.A. Milne, who wrote the Winnie the Pooh books, and it's called When I Was Very Young. The first of the Winnie the Pooh books was called When We Were Very Young, and this is actually an autobiography of Milne that was obviously called this way in order to sort of capitalize on the sale of the Winnie the Pooh books. And here's a letter, to your wife, I guess, from Christopher Robin Milne. Now, Christopher Robin Milne was, like me, a bookseller and your wife wrote to ask him about this book. And interestingly enough, he'd never heard of it and he wrote back to say just exactly that. These books are quite different. These are children's books. This is a complete set of the Uncle Wiggly books. Now, I had never heard of Uncle Wiggly and I expected Uncle Wiggly to be a pig as in piggly wiggly, but in fact, Uncle Wiggly is this rabbit here. And what is really interesting about this set of books is their condition, because children's books published 80 years ago-- these were around 1920-- should be all written in and grubby. Now, look. No writing. The books are absolutely as new. So somehow no child got their hands on these books, which, in a way, is sad, but from a collecting point of view is brilliant because they've survived 80 years in absolutely flawless condition. This book was done as a limited edition, kept in a box, and you'd expect it to be in this condition. It wasn't really done for children. It was more done for adults. So the fact that this is in good condition isn't anything to be surprised about. This one with this rather interesting letter from Christopher Robin, I would say is worth about $1,000. And this set, like this, could be worth $1,500 to $2,000 in the condition in which they are.
GUEST:
Okay, thank you very much.
APPRAISER:
Thanks a lot.
Appraisal Details
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Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
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