Book Discoveries: A Force Declaration for $16,000 and an Almanac for $556,500

by Lita Solis-Cohen

Better World Books, the company founded in 2000 by three friends from the University of Notre Dame to earn some money selling textbooks, has become a profitable on-line business with a mission to promote literacy. When the company sold an 1848 copy of the Declaration of Independence on rice paper for $16,000 on September 24, it sent out a press release. It announced the record sale for the company and a new commission structure for antiquarian, rare, and collectible books, which is a 50% commission on books sold for over $500, less 5% pledged to one of its five literacy partners: Books for Africa, Room to Read, Worldfund, the National Center for Family Literacy, and Invisible Children.

Better World Books gets its books from universities and libraries that would otherwise send them to landfill. Better World Books pays shipping charges but no remission on the sale of books for less than $500. A staff member of the company, who was going through a large consignment from the main library at the Dobbs Ferry, New York, campus of Mercy College, found the Declaration folded up (and bound into) inside a volume of American Archives. Peter Force (1790-1868) published the American Archives in 1848 and included the facsimile of the Declaration of Independence in each.

The Declaration was printed from the copperplate engraved by William J. Stone when he was commissioned to print 201 facsimiles of the Declaration on vellum in 1823 for members of Congress, descendants of the signers, and a few others. Stone also printed a few broadsides (printer's proofs) on paper at the same time. The one found and sold by Better World Books is from a later printing, using the same copperplate but printed for insertion in Force's American Archives.

Some say fewer than 1000 were printed on rice paper, while others have documented an order for 4000. The facsimiles turn up regularly at auction and in booksellers' catalogs. It is better to find one folded up in a volume than one that has been extracted and possibly damaged by being opened up and framed.

After failing to sell on eBay in August with a minimum bid of $20,000, the book with facsimile was sold for $16,000 by private treaty sale to a Connecticut buyer, who requested anonymity. The library at Mercy College received $7600 from the sale.

The $16,000 price, however, was far from a record for a Force Declaration. A Force Declaration in fine condition sold at Christie's on December 3, 2007, for $43,000. Elwin Fraley of (www. ehistorybuff.com) has one for sale for $48,000. Dealer Seth Kaller in White Plains, New York, has a few facsimiles in stock for $38,000 and one advertised at $55,000. Prices depend on condition and rarity and, in this market, are negotiable. Paul Drake, head of marketing at the antiquarian book division at Better World Books, said their copy was in fine condition.

"We get thousands of books from libraries that would send their used books to the dump. We separate them into used books and antiquarian books and sell them through twenty different on-line sites, such as Abe[Books], Biblio, eLibris, and Amazon and eBay," said Drake. "We offer free shipping in the United States and charge three dollars and ninety-seven cents per volume to ship overseas. Our consignors must agree to give a minimum of five percent of the sale price to one of our literacy partners."

The company claims to have converted more than 25 million donated books into $7.2 million in funding for literacy and education in the last nine years and in the process to have diverted more than 13,000 tons of books from landfills and donated nearly one million books to partner programs around the world. It also boasts carbon neutral shipping. The company's advertisements point out that when you buy used books, you save books from landfills and conserve resources.

This story about an institution not knowing what it had and cashing in on a discovery thanks to a bookseller's expertise cannot hold a candle to the story of the "Poor Richard Almanack" owned by the Berwick (Pennsylvania) Historical Society and sent to Sotheby's for evaluation. Sotheby's Selby Kiffer told the society that its almanac was indeed real-one of only three known of Franklin's first "Almanack," printed in 1733.

Antiquarian bookseller William Reese of New Haven, Connecticut, bought it for a client for $556,500 (includes buyer's premium) at Sotheby's on June 9, 2009, paying the second-highest price ever paid at auction for a book printed in America. (It is topped only by the $1.43 million paid for George Washington's own two-volume copy of The Federalist, essays by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay, that sold at the H. Bradley Martin auction at Sotheby's on January 30, 1990, and is now in Chapin Library at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts.)

As it turned out, this "Poor Richard Almanack" was not just one of the thousands of copies of almanacs Franklin printed between 1733 and 1760, dispensing humor, pragmatic advice, and aphorisms, such as "He that drinks fast, pays slow" and "He's a Fool that makes his Doctor his Heir." This almanac was the third known copy of Franklin's first "Almanack." There is one at the Rosenbach Museum and Library in Philadelphia; another is housed at the Library Company of Philadelphia.

"There is an advertisement that Franklin had corrected, an error in the first edition. He had transposed the months September and October in the first printing, but none are known with that mistake," said Reese. "This one has the months in the right order. The copy at the Rosenbach foundation, once thought to be the first printing, is almost certainly the second printing because the months have been put in the right order. There are no first printings known. The copy at Sotheby's and at the Library Company are third-state printings. The words 'Third Impression' are on the title page."

This third copy of Franklin's first almanac provoked strong competition. There were four phone bidders, private buyers, and institutions competing, but Reese prevailed. He got not only the rare Franklin imprint; it was bound with three other almanacs, including a previously unknown 1733 almanac by William Birkett. The lot included two more volumes, each containing several almanacs. Reese gladly paid well over the $100,000/150,000 estimate for the lot.

"Not only was this an extraordinary opportunity to buy Franklin's first almanac, it was bound in a contemporary pamphlet volume with a series of other almanacs-all of them extremely rare and one of them unique. To find such an item in completely unsophisticated, original condition is as notable as finding the thing itself," said Reese. "It is like looking at a piecrust table nobody had ever touched. It was absolutely delicious."

Thirteen members of the Berwick Historical Society were in the salesroom watching the sale, and when the hammer fell at $470,000 they whooped it up. They had gotten up at 6 a.m. and boarded a bus that took them from their town about 95 miles northwest of Philadelphia to New York City. After the sale Sotheby's happily gave each of them a copy of the $30 tiny sale catalog, and Kiffer autographed them. Then they went to Swifty's for lunch, bought two bottles of champagne, and celebrated on the bus all the way back to Berwick.

The historical society pocketed the $470,000 hammer price less an institutional seller's fee (probably 6%). Reportedly, it will use the money to enrich its endowment fund, renovate the 1860-era Berwick city hall, and acquire a Second World War vintage Stuart light tank, one of the 15,224 that were produced at a Berwick foundry during that war.

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