Ah but sellers can ask anything they like on EBay and, so far as chess books are concerned, they frequently do. It doesn't mean to say that they sell them. I buy and sell a lot of chess books including on EBay and I would start the Tartakower books at around £6.50 each post free. I would expect them to sell and perhaps make a little more but I wouldn't be getting very excited about them and expecting to make £20. So I doubt that the EBay route would generate anything very much in terms of funds.Roger Lancaster wrote:Having now read through the catalogue (2011 vintage so presumably a little out-of-date) I found just over 6500 books including, as others have noted, many duplicates. Among the more extreme cases were, for example, the two volumes (1905-30 and 1931-55 respectively) of Tartakower's best games, each with a dozen duplicates! My first inclination, I have to say, was that these could be regarded as junk. However, on checking eBay, I find that sellers are asking anything between £17 and £30 per volume.
That's the problem to which I alluded earlier. You can take an item which 99.9% of us would regard as junk but all it needs is one interested purchaser to put a different complexion on things. Taking the case of the Tartakower books, one could list copies on eBay at £15 each post-free and undercut other sellers. Whether this sort of thing is a worthwhile exercise, taking into account the time and effort involved, would be a decision for others. But I took the Tartakower books more or less at random and it's very likely that other books are listed on eBay at higher prices.
If you went to a dealer, he is going to look to cherry pick the better items. He certainly won't want innumerable books by Golombek (with one or two exceptions), Abrahams and dare I say it, Reinfeld and Chernev. Much though it pains me to say it, someone who knows what they are doing needs to go through it with David Robertson's skip(s) to hand.