Old Books? Dickens

[Jhohlfeld]

Greetings from Tampa, I do hate to bother you folks but could you suggest a site where one may get some info on old books? they were given to me by my late grandfather..and are dated 1857. one is Charles Dickens Barnaby Rudge, the second is also Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit. the covers say Petersons Uniform BOZ? they have very pretty black and white pictures covered in tissue paper. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Most sincerely, Jed Hohlfeld

[Chrissy]

Hello Jed.

 

I have no experience dealing with old books, but I put 'Old Books' into google, and it came up with a few areas that may be of help.

[BookJumper]

If you're looking for an evaluation, AbeBooks should be your first port of call I volunteer in a second-hand bookshop and when pricing books we always refer to Abe when in doubt.

[Nienna]

Greetings from Tampa, I do hate to bother you folks but could you suggest a site where one may get some info on old books? they were given to me by my late grandfather..and are dated 1857. one is Charles Dickens Barnaby Rudge, the second is also Dickens Martin Chuzzlewit. the covers say Petersons Uniform BOZ? they have very pretty black and white pictures covered in tissue paper. Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Most sincerely, Jed Hohlfeld

 

 

1857 is quite early for Dickens books. A lot of Dickens novels started out as weekly or monthly installments in the newspaper (namely the Daily News) and according to Wikipedia he finished writing Barnaby Rudge and Martin Chizzlewit for the paper in 1841 and 1844 respectively. The "BOZ" I would suspect refers to his editorial pseudonym (Boz). I was going to suggest AbeBooks as well, but I've just had a look there and can't seem to see any 1857 editions. Ebay has a lot of editions but not all are dated in the titles, so you might want to have a look through those. They probably also will only be estimated values.

 

You should check 2 important things in the book cover:

 

1. The publisher - this will make it easier to look up the exact edition you own and value it using the powers of the internet!

 

2. The edition - if you can find the edition number this will be able to help value the book, as 1st (and even 2nd editions sometimes) go for a lot of money. It may simply have "First Edition" or "Second Edition" printed somewhere within the first few pages, or it may have a number line (though I doubt it with a book this early). If the number line counts down to 1, e.g. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1, the book will be a first edition. If it stops at 2 it will be second, etc.

 

Hope this helps you a bit!

Edited May 17, 2010 by Nienna