Valuable Business Books

 Although many people no longer care much about printed books, occasionally one reads about some books that are highly valued and which fetch a great deal of money when offered for sale. Usually they are first editions, or are very rare, and mainly they are literary or historical works, or ones that are well illustrated and beautifully printed. Business books are not typically seen to be a good investment, unless one is actually interested in, say, investing.

    I thought about this recently when AbeBook published their most expensive sales for 2021. On it was a business book that was purchased for a high price and not because of the information it contained.  A facsimile of an ornithological work is number two on the AbeBook list and an image from it is seen above. It was sold for $36,635. The most expensive book they have ever sold was also a bird book and it went for $191,000. Our business book came in at number six, at $29,000 and a description of it is here:

   This reminded me of another business book that was perceived to be much more valuable than its cover price. At the time, I was the director of a business library and we had a copy of the book in the stacks. I decided that we had better pull the book and put it under controlled circulation before it disappeared.

    The book is Margin of Safety by Seth Klarman.  A limited number of copies were published in 1991 and by 2007, copies were being sold for over $1000, or filched from libraries. Copies are still difficult to come by and expensive. There is a Wikipedia entry for the book and there are other ways to learn about it. (There is also an entry for the concept, "margin of safety.")

   Seth Klarman is a very clever fellow and there is a Wikipedia entry for him as well. If you really want a good return on your investment, put your money with him, rather than in book collecting.

  A newsletter was produced by me and it probably had less readers than this blog. I wrote a bit about all of this in The Bottom Feeder, and from it you will learn a little more about the book and Mr. Klarman. The first sentence, in what follows, refers to another interesting book that was in high demand. In this case library staff were getting lending requests as well as late night email queries, many of which were from India. They were for an "unauthorized biography" of Dhirubhai Ambani and the title of the book is The Polyester Prince. It was unavailable in India and apparently there was a "brisk trade in samizdat copies." It was pulled from the stacks as well. I wrote about this, but will spare you the details, except to say that Mr. Ambani was the founder of Reliance Industries and you see its trucks on the streets of London.

Note: The information directly below was written in 2007.
From The Bottom Feeder, Dec. 2007
"What is The Margin of Safety?"
This episode reminded us of another, involving a book that was out of print and which was, consequently, fetching very high prices over the internet. The book, Margin of Safety, by Seth Klarman has also been put on short loan to ensure that it does not “go missing”. Note this description from the Wharton Journal:

“ If Benjamin Graham were alive today, he might, at first blush, be more impressed by the appreciated value of Seth Klarman's book Margin of Safety, than with the performance of his investment fund ….that's at first blush. Seth Klarman is a value investor and Portfolio Manager of the investment partnership The Baupost Group, and when Klarman first published Margin of Safety it had an original cover price of $25. The book is now out of print, and today sells on eBay for $1,145 [that was in 2005]. That's an increase of 4580%. But you can't deploy billions of dollars of capital on the purchase of a single book, so Klarman has done it in the stock market through The Baupost Group. Founded in 1982, The Baupost Group now manages $5.4 billion, and had you put $1 in the fund at inception, you would have $55 today. That's a whopping increase of 5500% … alas, first blushes are just that.”
For more discussions about this book see” “Investing Secrets That You Won’t Find at Your Local Bookstore,” Avner Mandelman, The Globe and Mail, Aug. 12, 2006 and “The $700 Used Book” Why All the Buzz About Seth Klarman’s Out-of-Print Investing Classic?”, Roben Farzad, Business Week, Aug. 7, 2006. [ 2007]

The Bonus:
   As I indicated, Mr. Klarman is a clever fellow, interested in many things. One of them was a mega-quarry that was to be in Melancthon Township north of Toronto. Aggregates were (are) needed and Highland Companies was going to extract them. Baupost Group was a major backer. There was considerable opposition and the project never proceeded. ("Highland Companies Withdraws Mega-Quarry Proposal for North of Toronto," Heather Loney, Global News, Mach 23, 2012.) There is also a brief mention of this incident in the Wikipedia entry for the Baupost Group. 
  You noted, perhaps that the Graham book referred to in the review of the one by Klarman is Security Analysis, which is the one that just sold for a high price. It is interesting also, that the business school (Ivey) in which the library was located, now has a Ben Graham Centre For Value Investing. 
  I was pleased to see that the library still has copies of all of these books.
  When you think of "AbeBooks" you probably think of the words, 'old', 'used', 'antiquarian' or 'rare'. AbeBooks is owned by Amazon. The headquarters of AbeBooks is in Victoria, B.C. There is no Abe.