Links to all out of print and rare books on Abe (1 Viewer)

mjp

Founding member
I made this list for something else, but since I had it I figured I'd post it. As a curiosity if nothing else. When you follow a link the available copies are priced form the highest to the lowest.

It's interesting to note that these are all of the rare Bukowski titles, but there are only two, I believe, that have zero copies available on Abe. So if you're thinking to yourself, "Maybe there aren't very many really rare Bukowski books," you're right.

Flower, Fist And Bestial Wail
Poems And Drawings
Longshot Pomes For Broke Players
Run With The Hunted
It Catches My Heart In Its Hands
Crucifix In A Deathhand
Cold Dogs In The Courtyard
Confessions Of A Man Insane Enough To Live With Beasts
The Genius Of The Crowd
All The Assholes In The World And Mine
2 Poems
The Curtains Are Waving And People Walk Through The Afternoon Here And In Berlin And In New York City And In Mexico
At Terror Street And Agony Way
Poems Written Before Jumping Out Of An 8 Story Window
A Bukowski Sampler
Fire Station
Erections, Ejaculations, Exhibitions And General Tales Of Ordinary Madness
Me And Your Sometimes Love Poems
Scarlet
You Kissed Lilly
Legs, Hips And Behind
Shakespeare Never Did This (City Lights)
Horsemeat
The Bukowski/Purdy Letters
Horses Don't Bet On People and Neither do I
Going Modern
The Wedding
The Day It Snowed In L.A.
Relentless As The Tarantula
Bukowski Photographs 1977-1987
Beauti-Ful & Other Long Poems
Red
Not Quite Bernadette
This
Darkness & Ice
In The Shadow Of The Rose
People Poems
Three Poems
Bukowski Photographs 1977-1991
Heat Wave
The Captain Is Out To Lunch And The Sailors Have Taken Over The Ship (Black Sparrow Graphic Arts)
The Cruelty Of Loveless Love
 
So if you're thinking to yourself, "Maybe there aren't very many really rare Bukowski books," you're right.

I have to disagree with you a bit on this one. Just because they are available on Abe, doesn't make them not rare. The obvious other piece of the puzzle is price. If a book costs $8,500 and there's only one available on ABE, I'd say that makes the book pretty damn rare -- in terms of supply and demand.

We've given the internet 20 years to work itself out. Even if there are five copies available on ABE, I'd say that's rare. Because I believe that 99.9% of the available books on the market are on ABE. It's not like the pre-internet days when you had to track a book down by word of mouth or catalogs that came out every few months -- which is kind of sad in a way, because it was another era that is lost forever.

As an example, let's look at the early years. There are always going to be a "It Catches" or a "Crucifix" on the market, only because they were beautiful books and had a fairly big production run. Don't try to convince me that you can always by a Flower, Long Shot, or Run whenever you want for a negotiable price.

Bring Black Sparrow into the equation, and there are always going to be copies on the market and prices that will never get that high -- even those with paintings. Because at that point, the books were valuable enough not to be tossed in the garbage when moving apartments or lent to friends on the promise they'd give them back.
 
I guess I define rare as "difficult to find." Maybe you define it differently. To my way of thinking, if a certain title is on Abe every time that I go look at Abe - regardless of the price and whether or not that price can be negotiated - it ain't rare. It's easy to obtain. The opposite of rare.

You're lumping "Flower, Long Shot, or Run" together, but I've probably seen 15 available copies of Flower, Fist and Longshot Pomes for every one copy of Run With the Hunted. Doesn't that make Run With the Hunted the only really rare book among those three?

Anyway, you weren't kidding about the Internet killing the era when we shopped by mail or over the phone. It was certainly different, buying something based off a description in a Xeroxed catalog that came to your mailbox. But it's the Internet that's shown us that much of this stuff is not as rare as we may have been led to believe in the past. Pre-Internet a lot of book sellers took advantage of the lack of information that mere mortals had at their disposal.
 
I think of one-off items as the only true rarities in collecting Buk. Just my opinion, but original manuscripts (not carbons), stand-alone drawings/artwork and letters cannot be replaced. Most any book, given enough time, will show up again. And again..
 

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