Yes .......everyone wants them. I am looking for a few who both want them, and are willing to pay a "fair" price for them.

Wild Beasts and Their Ways by Samuel White Baker

I have a first edition, second printing, (I think 1892) nice shape.

I am an old man now, and time to start selling the Early African and early Alaskan books.

What would you consider a fair price?

I don't know.......which is why I am looking for where to get help with that. These books are sold, not very often, and not to people wanting inexpensive reprints. I can get them appraised, but before I paid for that I would like to have a "ballpark" idea of roughly market value.

There are people who collect these books.....hell I collected them for near sixty years. There are many business that purchase these type books for resale. They know what they are worth. I never kept records, but I know that some I paid over $300.00 for back forty plus years ago.

Might want to try the guys on Accurate Reloading. Some of them collect them and might have a better idea

Thank You.......

AGL4now:

Yes, interested here. As to pricing, I suggest one go to the AbeBooks.com site. They are in the business. Type in author and title and they'll bring up low to high prices. I'm a frequent purchaser there, and they have sources all over the world.

As I'm still acquiring, I've not schooled up though on potential sales through their site.

One might read up on assigning condition scores too. Good luck and keep us posted on your doings.

Edited: Just looked it up on Abe's. Range from $17 to $108 with first editions being on the higher end and reprints lower.

Thanks.......I did that, But they have a different classification for "Rare Books". I put the same information in there, and get values up to over $600.00 this is why I need to be careful.

If one finds some other good sources for books, please put up a post.

Thanks,

What is "Really" needed is clarification about deceptions in this book business. Seller will say's "First Edition" very good condition with dustcover, Only $108.00 (The First Edition, could have had 20 or 35 or 60 different printings. And each printing would show the date of that printing.

But that is not the same as "First Edition" First Printing 1890 or second printing 1898
(If you know the copyright was 1888 and the first printing was 1890)

These old book had a lot of what were called "Plates" many of the plates were frame able "art works". Those were not in later printings. The later printings had "photos" of the plates.

I am not very knowledgeable about all of this. But there must be some basic info. available to buyers and sellers of old books.......without getting an advanced degree from university.

Auction house maybe?

I would also try Africahunting.com which has a forum dedicated to books and movies.

This will be an interesting thread to follow, as I also have some old and rare African books that I may wish to sell in the near future. My son isn’t interested in them, nor is my daughter, so I may begin selling some of them.

One is a First Edition (1923 IIRC) of WDM Bell’s Wanderings of an Elephant Hunter, that I bought as a teenager back in 1977, IIRC. I paid $300 for that book back then and it sparked my interest in African hunting.

I used to spend a lot of time looking for old books at flea markets, online, antique stores, etc. Hard copies are just too much trouble for the most part now, and are often very fragile. For those interested in reading them instead of owning them, there are tons of e-copies available, usually free. Many are scanned originals with sepia tones, wrinkles, and owners’ names inside. I prefer those as the OCR versions often have “issues”.

Hope to read more of the ones I have someday, but that’ll have to be when I slow down a bit.

Call these folks.

https://www.gunnermanbooks.com/

Another one to try. I think they work with Safari Press also.

https://www.trophyroombooks.com/

Does it have an ISBN number on it?

Good one!

Yes, not sure when they went into effect, but every book published is issued an ISBN number. Makes them easier to locate rather than title or author.

According to the Czech bibliography (An Annotated Bibliography of African Big Game Hunting Books, 1785-1950) the first edition of Wild Beasts and Their Ways. Reminiscences of Europe, Asia, Africa, and America was published in London by Macmillan and Company in two volumes.(8vo, brick red cloth with gilt spine titles, with gilt tigers and buffalo vignettes on the boards.) The second edition was a single volume published in 1891 and is "far more commonly encountered". So, I think the first question would be: do you have the a 1st or 2nd edition published by Macmillan in London?

There's a lot of dross on abebooks.com - for a book like this, there will be numerous print-on-demand reproductions and books claimed to be first editions that aren't, leather bound books printed in India... Here's a few listings with seller-supplied photos:

Some apparent real 1st editions:
About $270 delivered from the UK

About $300 delivered from the UK

Some apparent second editions:
$165 delivered from the UK

$56 delivered from New Jersey

Regarding booksellers, besides those mentioned above, two others that come to mind are:
World Wide Hunting Books is affiliated with Safari Press. They have a first edition for $850.

Coch-y-Bonddu Books in Wales.

I'm not sure what the best avenue is for selling off old collectible books. I don't have any first-hand experience trying to sell to dealers, but I expect they'll only pay a small fraction of the price they hope to sell for. I suppose it depends how many you have. I have several thousand books on hunting and fishing and think from time to time about how I'll unload them. Haven't reached a conclusion yet.

As to whether or not anyone collects 130-year old Africana - yes, I'm sure there are, but I'm not sure what the market looks like now. Condition is very important; photos would help sell books. For me, the biggest problem buying on, for example, eBay is that there are often sellers who have no idea what they're selling; have no idea that there are standard definitions for book quality; and, package books in a way that might be OK for a $10 novel, but not for a limited edition book that might cost $75-$100. Lately, even reasonably well-packed books have arrived damaged. All these risks tend to hold prices down, or at least what I'm willing to pay.

Good luck finding a buyer!

Thank You, greatly appreciate the help. Very informative. Thanks to taking the time to post this information

You're very welcome. I thought of one more resource this morning. The place where I've seen the most early African hunting books is AntiquarianAuctions.com. Antiquarian Auctions is a platform, but all the sellers are book dealers. They alternate between "US auctions" and "South Africa Auctions". You can browse past "SA Auctions" and choose "Hunting & Shooting" to see realized prices.

For example, you can see the Hunting & Shooting results for the last SA auction here:
Hunting & Shooting - SA Auction #89 Results

They also have a search feature, which turns up about 20 past sales of Samuel Baker books, but no copies of Wild Beasts.