Hah!  Paul said "a full, original set of Conchologica Iconica went for the
equivalent of 2000 dollars thirty years ago; think five times that now" I
will give you that for a complete set of the Iconica in a hot minute.  Try
$25,000 minimum for a decent set.  Paul is dead right, antiquarian natural
history books dealing with conchology are the closest thing to a great
investment as there gets in the shell world.  The supply is decreasing
because the finite number printed are disappearing due to the hated
"breakers", who buy these books at auction and tear them apart for the
hand-colored prints, which they mount and frame and sell to interior
decorators doing big hotels and the like.
 
To give you a sense of the economics here, one can purchase a copy of
deKay's "Mollusca of New York" for a couple hundred bucks (even less if you
get lucky).  It contains 40 hand-colored prints.  While at Kauai recently, I
visited an antique print shop that was selling these "authentic 19th
century" unmounted plates of deKay for $155 each!  Do the math, a pretty
nice mark-up.
 
But don't get me wrong, shell books can be expensive.  A european
antiquarian book dealer offered me recently one of the two known colored
copies of Rumph's D'Amboinsche Rariteitkamer for a cool quarter of a million
dollars.
 
Scott Jordan
 
-----Original Message-----
From: Paul Callomon <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask] <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, March 10, 1999 10:04 PM
Subject: Re: shell dealers
 
 
>Patty neglected to point out the main difference between shell books (and
>shells on stamps) and the shells themselves : the former will always
>decrease in number while the latter will increase. Dealers often say things
>like 'now hard to get' to try and boost interest, but ultimately they are
>selling something whose value is an inverse function of the number of
>examples known. What price Conus milneedwardsi now? 20 dollars a piece here
>in Japan; I can remember when they were 1000 or so, and I am a mere youth.
>On the other hand, a full, original set of Conchologica Iconica went for
>the equivalent of 2000 dollars thirty years ago; think five times that now.