EAR: Are there any cigar books that have increased in value?

[El Presidente]

 

EAR= Email Assistance Required. 

 

Rob, maybe you will know. I have been a collector of cigar books and have always purchased multiple copies and retained them in their plastic coverings. My question is whether any of these books have increased in value because if they have then I would like to offload them. I know MRN can go for big dollars but I wonder if there are any other cigar books that have done the same albeit on a smaller scale? 

 

Over to you good people. Not my sand pit 

 

 

[Fugu]

Jeez, Rob, can’t believe you really get such sort of enquiries in your daily mails! What do pple think?!!

 Almost all out-of-print serious cigar-related books (and most are out of print) have gained in price, some considerably. Google is your friend / amazon antiquarian/marketplace.

Ahh, and just briefly, Rob, can you get me a hint what's currently the cheapest gas station in my area? No, not looking for fuel, but I feel a sudden craving for some cheap tubos....

[benfica_77]

Let's just buy all of Alex Groom's books, caress them aggressively like that dummy on instagram and sell them for $1000 a pop...

 

[Boss Hog]

2 hours ago, Fugu said:

Jeez, Rob, can’t believe you really get such sort of enquiries in your daily mails! What do pple think?!!

It’s unbelievable.

Some people will do just about anything to make a buck.

[Chitmo]

12 hours ago, Boss Hog said:

It’s unbelievable.

Some people will do just about anything to make a buck.

I resorted to getting a job once, I didn’t like it much 😉 

[MrBirdman]

20 hours ago, benfica_77 said:

Let's just buy all of Alex Groom's books, caress them aggressively like that dummy on instagram and sell them for $1000 a pop...

Unfortunately for us (I own 2 copies) I think Alex would actually release a new edition if demand were high enough. I never understood MRN’s refusal to reprint his book. He’s gone now so I won’t say anything more, other than I hope his heirs will either approve a reprint or, if they aren’t going to monetize the rights, allow it to enter the public domain. We have enough issues with Cuban cigars pricing out regular joes already, and it doesn’t help when any copy of the the authoritative history pre-2000 costs 4-figures. 

[Odessa]

18 hours ago, Boss Hog said:

Some people will do just about anything to make a buck.

And what is wrong with that? Don't you think the open market and entrepreneurialism is much better than the government controlled society?

[Cigar Surgeon]

Love the EARs but that title is going to have @JohnS twitching.

[JohnS]

11 minutes ago, Cigar Surgeon said:

Love the EARs but that title is going to have @JohnS twitching.

Haha...thanks John for pointing that out!

[zeedubbya]

I bought this book on eBay for $11. It arrived today - think I did ok. It's a very fascinating book upon perusal, can’t wait to read it all, BUT… don’t think I’d probably sell it ever. Don’t think it had ever been opened. Old hard pages, think it was a recommendation of @ATGroom whose book I look at almost daily along with my MRN. I have another book by Adriano Martinez Rius - it’s a somewhat boring book, but content is interesting, might be the factories book - shows how much I am worried about its value. I need to find it. Think I sent an extra copy to a friend, or maybe I didn’t have 2. Hmmm.  🤔 

[Ken Gargett]

6 hours ago, zeedubbya said:

I bought this book on eBay for $11. It arrived today - think I did ok. It's a very fascinating book upon perusal, can’t wait to read it all, BUT… don’t think I’d probably sell it ever. Don’t think it had ever been opened. Old hard pages, think it was a recommendation of @ATGroom whose book I look at almost daily along with my MRN. I have another book by Adriano Martinez Rius - it’s a somewhat boring book, but content is interesting, might be the factories book - shows how much I am worried about its value. I need to find it. Think I sent an extra copy to a friend, or maybe I didn’t have 2. Hmmm

i have had this for a long while and enjoyed it. have a heap of cgar books - MRN still the leader by a mile - but no interest in selling any of them. 

[ATGroom]

Would be interested to know if anybody has a firm pricing history for the MRN book and can pinpoint when the prices really started to go up.

As I understand it the print run in English was 5,000 in 2003, and then another 5,000 in 2005, plus 5,000 in Spanish and 3,000 in German.

They were distributed by Habanos who made all the regional distributors take them, so as far as MRN was concerned each run was sold out from day one and he never saw anything from it after that.

From my memory they were still pretty easy to find at or near RRP until at least around 2010 or so.

He was planning to do his second edition in 2014. I never quite got to the bottom of what aborted that release, but I think he had some unrelated personal issues come up that distracted him and he was never quite able to get back to it. He was still talking about finishing it as late as 2021.

I think the big obstacle to a re-print for him was that he didn't really have access to a "real" publisher, in that he printed the first book himself and sold 100% of them to Habanos who took it from there. He didn't know anything about distribution, and he was too much of a perfectionist and control-freak for a regular publisher who just wants you to give them a manuscript and go away. Habanos of today is a different beast to what it was in 2003 and I don't think they'd be as interested in distributing a third party book like MRNs (they never returned any of my emails, anyway 🤓). He was also very proud of the prices the old book was getting on the secondary market.

 

Most cigar books print somewhere in the vicinity of 3000, which is about the minimum you can do if you want to have any hope of turning a profit from it. They usually take a few years to sell out that volume. There are a few that print fewer than that which I guess are more the scale of "vanity publishing." I think the Emeulio Espino books are probably in that category, which is what makes them good - he publishes them not really for sales but in order to contribute something to the public record.

His most obscure one is El Tabaco Cubano: Recursos Fitogeneticos. I bought it for something like $15 not that long ago, but there are people out there asking $700. Basically there seem to be two business models in the vintage book business - buy books by weight and put them up at reasonable prices and hope to clear them out by volume, or else find something super obscure and put an insane price on it and hope that sooner or later someone comes along who needs one very badly and you have the only copy available.