Market Watch: Nancy Reagan: A Special Kind of Love, by Roger Elwood

Whoa! I checked the market price on Nancy Reagan: A Different Kind of Love by Roger Elwood (Pocket Books, 1976) yesterday and couldn't believe my eyes: $35 to $75, with a small clump at $40. I tried searching with fewer and fewer search words, trying to turn up some listing error and therefore turn up more copies. No dice. Just a handful of copies on the market, and all of them expensive. Today, I took another peek, just to double-check the data. Same thing - except the $75 copy is gone from all but one website.

Many booksellers (ourselves included) sell through more than one retailer website (Amazon and Alibris and Biblio and abebooks.com and Barnes & Noble, for instance), and each selling site has different lag times between when you send in a 'sold' notice and they get the listing delisted, so my guess is that that copy is sold, and just isn't out of inventory lists everywhere yet. Yikes. Seventy-five bucks. (And yes, very often the more expensive copies go before the lower priced copies, if they are in better condition or are being offered by a bookseller the buyer knows and trusts.)

Used book prices are notoriously changeable. By tomorrow (or next week, or next year) there might be a flood of copies brought to market which will tend to push the price down, or we might see the market shrink to two copies that might soar in price. You never know in this business. (Which is why it's so interesting.)