Part 1 of this series (I thought it was going to be one post but I ended up writing more than I figured I would) looked at the product of the specialty press. How the actual construction of the book matters to the collector and how most of the specialty press aren’t producing books of quality to justify the price points.

In this post, which should be a bit shorter, will take a look at the price point and the availability of the limited edition with regard to collecting and having them in your collection.

I suppose I should have referenced the prior post with how a well made special edition of a book would be beneficial to a collection but I think I was pretty clear in the sense that poor quality books priced too high are not something a collector should go after.

The majority of the horror specialty press offers their books for sale through a limited number of outlets. Direct purchase, a few online retailers, and a few brick and mortar stores seem to be the standard. Since there are, on a whole, limitations to the number of books of a given print run it is not necessary for a specialty press to try to sell through book chains either online or offline. I wouldn’t expect it. It is far easier to find that limited edition you are seeking by going to any of the online book finder websites out there that have booksellers stock ready to be searched.

For a collector, the limited edition offers the low print run coupled with a finely crafted book (hopefully), an author that does not have a mass market presence but is a fine writer, and at times a hardcover of a previously published book with a few extras. This is good for the collector. I good example of this would be Earthling Publication’s 20th Anniversary Edition of The HellBound Heart. Though not yet released, this book includes artwork by Barker himself, a fine binding, and extra text. I have many books from Earthling and I can reasonably say that this is going to be fine book. Books like this are a boon for collectors.

Picking and sorting through all the new limited edition announcements though will only bring about a handful of these gems. And this is the bad side for the collector. With the price per book and the availability of only a few hundred copies a collector is hard pressed to make a decision quickly. And to make a good well thought out decision at the same time with only a small window of opportunity to do it can end up with bad decisions.

This ends up being a bad thing for collectors who do not have a collection goal (see my posts on collecting and accumulating here Part 1, Part 2, Part 3.) They end up just accumulating limited editions with no purpose and this ends up making a poor collection of unrelated books where the percentage of valuable, in terms of price and worth (with worth being defined as artistic and longevity of the book) remains low.

A majority of the specialty press books are not worth the price point that they are issued at. And that an artificial inflation of the price based on the low number printed and the tendency of the poorly run presses to trade on the ideas of more well established and better run presses is prevalent. By tippiing in a signature sheet and calling it a limited or limited lettered edition, those poorly run presses can trade on those buzz words without putting the effort into producing a quality product. In turn they can charge comparable prices for their inferior product and ultimately collectors and buyers think that since it is labeled limited or limited lettered they are getting the same quality product. When in reality there is no comparison. Ultimately you have to lay some of the blame on the collector and general buyer who perpetuate this glut of limited editions hitting the market place. They keep buying the inferior product which in turn shows that there is still capital available for that product.

I have been guilty of this because I was too scattered in my collecting to turn down anything labeled limited edition. Now that I have rethought my collecting goals I find that any new announcement of a limited edition does not get my attention as it did several months ago.

The next entry will take on the last two points. The stable of authors being published in limited edition and whether or not they are worth collecting.