Purposely Trying to Raise Prices or Just Clueless?

What's the point of this "sale"? Over $500 for a book that you can find for under $100? Charles Agvent, whom I believe has a reputation for asking quite a bit above market value, has this book for under $200. So I wonder, is the person listing this for over $500 really clueless? They have a few Limited Editions Club books and are asking ridiculous prices. I'm guessing they don't know that the books are worth a fraction of what they list them as. Either that, or this is one of those marketing schemes I never understood nor would approve of...

I often wonder the same. Such listings annoy me because they clog up eBay.

There is also an LEC seller who has multiple copies of many LECs at inflated prices -- as if s/he wants to corner the market for certain titles, making him/her the only game in town ...

The seller has hundreds of items, only a few are LECs, and some are very high ticket items--watches and camera and jewelry. I suppose he isn't that familiar with the book market, and obviously is some sort of broker or very deep pockets merchandise speculator. The Longfellow shown here is in finer conditions than Charles Avgent's $200 copy.

>3 Django6924:

On the other hand -- it's Longfellow.

I agree with Moby. Even if it is immaculate condition, so what? I do happen to rather like Longfellow's work, and the LEC Longfellow is beautiful, but this is not exactly a highly coveted LEC. If it was in immaculate condition and signed by Frost, or Picasso, well that might be a different matter. As it so happens, at that price, I think it's priced to move about as much as a whale on land.

Well, we certainly wouldn't pay that for it--but someone might. It doesn't harm me if he wants to overprice it.

Moby, Longfellow is rather out of fashion these days, but, as Wyndham Lewis remarked in The Stuffed Owl, "a man who can produce strains of music like...a boy's will is the wind's will,/And the thoughts of youth are long, long thoughts is a poet absolute, displayed, and regardant, in the Chief, the Pale, and the Quarter Fess...."

Also, I find the Boyd Hanna engravings and the reproduction of them superb--certainly preferable (to me) to his work in the Peter pauper Leaves of Grass, which commonly is priced at over a thousand dollars.

If you are a newbie LEC devotee with a taste for Longfellow and money is no object which copy you going to acquire? Someone got to cater to the upper classes.

So it appears the same seller sold a mint LEC copy of For Whom The Bell Tolls for $730.

Similarly what appears to be a mint HP copy of Song of Songs which is Solomon's with Angelo's signature and in a presentation Box rather than a slipcase sold for $200.

>2 NYCFaddict: I wonder if that other seller really has multiple copies of the same title, or multiple listings of the same copy, each with a different price.

Hmmm, I'm skeptical about this. A rare collectible book would be purchased most likely by someone that knows what they're doing. But, who knows. It is a harder LEC to find relatively speaking.