Harry Potter Among the Antiquarian Booksellers

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Olympe Marcelet, inspector of platforms, emphatic keywords and the priced miracles of the bibliophilic digital market.

Platforms hate publishing their figures. They love publishing their records. AbeBooks — the world’s largest marketplace for used and antiquarian books, owned by Amazon since 2008 — thus publishes, every quarter and every year, its list of “Most Expensive Sales”. A modest editorial genre: ten entries, ten prices, one sentence of wonder per lot. Nobody reads these lists twice.

I have read them all, or nearly: the annual reviews from 2021 to 2025 and the latest quarter published, some sixty documented sales, with prices, dates and particulars of the copies. It is little, it is declarative, it cannot be verified, but every line comes from the platform itself. And a platform that boasts is a platform that confides.

The lead character of these league tables wears round glasses and has a scar on his forehead. Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone is second sale of 2023 ($85,620 for a copy of the true first edition of 1997, printed in five hundred copies), number one of 2024 ($105,700 for a lot of four first editions, of which we are told the true first can be recognised by a misprint on page 53), and number one of the second quarter of 2026 ($29,900). The absolute record, all years combined, goes to a Thomas Pynchon collection of 246 pieces, sold for $125,000 in 2023.

Around them the cast is stable: Tolkien almost every year (The Lord of the Rings in a full-leather-bound lot at $40,300 in 2025, two Hobbits in the second quarter of 2026 alone), Oscar Wilde, Melville, Byron, Frankenstein, and an army of childhood books — The Velveteen Rabbit in dust jacket ($28,000), a complete Narnia ($40,000), the entire Swallows and Amazons series ($45,900), Dune, a signed Dark Tower, a print of the last Calvin and Hobbes strip ($35,000). Of the fifty sales in the 2021–2025 reviews, thirty-five concern works in English; in 2023, ten out of ten, and nothing earlier than 1778. I know neither these buyers nor their reasons — the platform publishes none. I merely note that, in these league tables, the books one reads at ten or twelve have settled into places one would have thought reserved for incunabula.

Let us now look not at the titles but at the entries, for that is where the market confesses its criteria. None of these prices pays for a text: the text of Dorian Gray has been readable free for a century. The entries stress something else — the complete number line, the original dust jacket, the “unfaded colours”, the copy number (63 of 250, signed), the signed binding, the box. In 2025, two copies of the same Constitutions of the Free-Masons of 1723 sold in the same year, one for $32,650, the other for $31,000.

Provenance, for its part, has changed in nature. The Harry Potter of 2023 comes from the Edinburgh public library, which had lent it twenty-seven times before disposing of it; the entry mentions a restoration. A lending-copy past, restored into the bargain, and the entry nonetheless details it as a title to glory.

Two details, finally, that I add to the file without superfluous comment. In 2021, a facsimile of Audubon’s Birds of America — a facsimile, of 1972 — sold for $36,635, more than the 1516 edition of Euclid’s Elements listed the same year. And two years running, the gospel of stockbrokers dominated science: Benjamin Graham’s Security Analysis ($29,000 in 2021), then Jesse Livermore’s How to Trade in Stocks, a speculation manual of 1940, signed ($40,000 in 2022) — $15,000 more, that year, than Bernoulli’s Hydrodynamica. The ranking grades books not on their contributions but on their promises.

And the French books? They exist, but count them: a small ten out of sixty sales. And their profile is instructive. They are not literary first editions — no Proust, no Baudelaire, no Romantic — but almost always fine illustrated books: Pierre Louÿs’s Les Chansons de Bilitis illustrated by George Barbier and bound by Schmied ($34,300 in 2025), the complete run of Derrière le miroir with its original lithographs ($35,000 in 2021), Dalí portfolios. France, seen from these podiums, is a workshop: it counts there for its engravers, illustrators and binders more than for its texts.

Two exceptions, which are not. The autograph letter of Leibniz of 1710, at the head of the 2025 review at $44,000, is written in French — but it is the French of learned Europe, that of a German writing to a Scot. And the only Jules Verne in the league tables, Around the World in Eighty Days, sold for $30,000 in the American first edition, autograph note enclosed: the only French novelist of these rankings sells there in translation. As for French first editions, I shall refrain from concluding that they are worth nothing — they simply do not pass through there. They have their sale rooms, their booksellers and their circuits, which do not send their figures to Seattle. The absence, here, measures no lack of love; it measures a platform frontier.

One last detail, discovered while checking the subsidiaries. ZVAB, the old German-language portal for antiquarian books, bought by AbeBooks, also publishes its “teuerste Verkäufe”. Since 2022 these are the same lists — same books, same order, prices converted at the day’s rate, the Pynchon becoming €115,000. In 2021, though, ZVAB still published its own sales: a calligraphy of 1719, a Hermann Hesse watercolour, a Kreütterbuch of 1539, a letter from Schumann — a continental, learned world, with round prices in euros, vanished not from the market but from the press release. The subsidiary now translates the triumphs of the parent company.

The finding, in sixty sales, fits in one sentence: the summit of the largest antiquarian book market is no longer old, no longer Latin, no longer learned. It is English-speaking, it is the age of our childhoods, and it sells in a dust jacket.

That is not forbidden. It was enough to count.

GUILDE · OM/PLATEFORMES-5

Sources: AbeBooks, “Most Expensive Sales” series — annual reviews 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024, 2025, April–June 2026 and archives. Comparison with ZVAB, “Die teuersten Verkäufe” series: archives, 2021 review, ranking since 2011. Prices as published by the platforms, not audited.

À lire ensuite

An Untold Poe Story: The Gold Bug and a Binding in Human Skin

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

Apart from books on the occult sciences and a few French illustrated Gothic-letter books (gothiques à figures), I buy few books outside these themes. Last year I departed from this line of conduct: I bought a book that was apparently harmless.

Judge for yourselves. It is a small-format volume, half-bound, of a text by Edgar Poe: “The Gold Bug”. The edition is of little interest (Paris, Dentu, 1892). On the substance, it is true that one spends a pleasant little moment discovering this story of treasure, but there is nothing here to make a collector’s item. Yet I did not hesitate for a second, holding my bids until the victorious fall of the hammer. The sale took place in San Francisco last year.

Edgar Poe having died in 1849, the copy could not possibly have been enriched with an autograph inscription. It is a note on a flyleaf, in another hand, that discloses all its interest. It is signed C.E.S.W. No doubt it is Charles Erskine Scott Wood (1852–1944), American author, attorney in Portland, Democratic politician.

He gives the book to his friend “John”, with the following note:

“Dear John, what a tribute to the morbid death-loving Poe to bind the « Gold Bug » in human skin, or is it an attempt at a pun ? Poe humani en peau humaine.” C.E.S.W.

Wood asserts to his friend that the book is bound in human skin. At a glance one sees that the skin is not quite so ordinary. The binder took care to decorate the spine with motifs drawn from the story: from the orbit of a skull set on a branch hangs a thread at the end of which swings the gold bug (an illustration of a key moment of the tale); at the foot of the spine, a scythe and a spade (tools used in the search for the treasure).

The binder signed his work on the inside board, taking care to state: “Relié en peau humaine. G. Rykers” [Bound in human skin]. A wholly unique precision. Gustave Rykers, of the Royal Academy of Belgium, was a master binder at 18 rue la Paille in Brussels at the end of the nineteenth century.

Though the photograph is not dazzlingly sharp, one can make out the lozenge pattern on the skin, a sign that one is indeed facing human skin and not pigskin, whose pores form triangles.

I cannot bring myself to run an analysis to answer the question: is it really human skin? Two reasons for this. The first: the evidence suffices to convince me that it is authentic. The second: it would require taking a sample that could damage the binding.

So why, you will ask, buy such a book at all? There are surely several reasons. Here is an object of high curiosity, morbid to be sure, that I like to leave for a moment, revealing nothing of its nature, in the perplexed hands of friends who come to discover my library. It is pleasant to watch their reaction when I confess what they are really holding between their fingers: the surprised faces, and in the end, curiosity satisfied.

How much skin do we brush against every day? Have you never touched a dead person? Is it because skin is so familiar to us that we can find it shocking to cover a book with it? Its touch, you can believe me, leaves a strange sensation. The book is diverted. It takes flesh. It puts on a skin that is not its own but is ours. Unconsciously, this is perhaps what really shocks: that a piece of life can thus be diverted to the making of an inanimate object. That said, I do not believe the binder was moved by so profound an intention, acting on a par with a god giving life to what has none. I see in it simply, like Wood, the curious expression of a pun: a binding in “human skin” (peau) on a book “by Edgar Poe”.

F.