A Treasure on Your Bookshelves

Are you wanting to clean out your bookshelves or desperately looking for an out of print photo book? You might want to try Photo-eye and a great guy named Eric Miles, whom I have had wonderful dealings with.

Photo-eye is located in Santa Fe but Eric is here in NYC. If you contact him he will come and look at your books and tell you which ones he would like to put up for auction. They need to be worth at least $250 to go on auction. Eric will pick up the books and do all the administrative work. There are many books like monographs by certain photographers from the 50's, 60's, 70's, or 80's that go for very high prices. Eric is also interested in Japanese and Eastern European photography books as well as many others. I recently sold a Sudek book for several thousand dollars! (Lunch is on Laurie. -- Ed.) If the books are signed or have a special "association" or interesting provenance they go for even more. And DON'T take the dust jackets off the books as they are a major value factor for the books!

The Photo-eye site is also a very good reference for all out of print photography books. All their previous auctions, with their prices realized, are there and books not sold the first time around are listed for after-auction sales. The site is very easy to navigate and Eric is very professional to deal with. My old mainstay for checking value's was ABEBOOKS which just got bought by Amazon.com.

You will be surprised at the value photo books carry now. Last year Christie's auction house had their first Photographic Literature sale and I was there to witness unbelievable prices. So look through your collections. I'm sure you will be more surprised at what you have. The publishing houses were very generous in the past sending out review copies, so you may have more than you realize. Plus it's really fun watching the books while they are up for auction. I also check the site a couple times per week looking for books I might want to add to my collection.

Good luck!


Some books recently available from Photo-eye: