GUEST: Well, I picked it up at an auction, and as you can see, it's not the best condition book, but it was more what was inside that intrigued me than the outside.
APPRAISER: Well, I'm just going to sort of gingerly open the cover, and indeed, the inside is a standard text by this man Théodore Duret on impressionism, the painting movement. And this edition is in German, where there was a lot of scholarship done in the early part of the 20th century on the history of painting. And this is Berlin, 1909. And here on an earlier page, we see that it is a limited edition. 1,000 copies were made, and then there was a special edition of one of 30.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: And what we have here is number 514 of the thousand edition. And it looks like a sort of art reference book with inset text pictures. But... Inside there is some original artwork. Here we have an etching by Camille Pissarro, for example. And as I turn over again, an original etching by Monet. And then further in, we have an original Renoir. And another more familiar, perhaps, Renoir image. Now, you said you picked it up at a local auction.
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: Was it on its own in the lot?
GUEST: I can't quite remember, but I think this was one of three, three art books.
APPRAISER: How much did you pay?
GUEST: Uh, for the three books... I'm thinking $100, $200. Just because I liked the pictures and I thought, "Hmm, different type of paper."
APPRAISER: Yes.
GUEST: It had the guard piece of paper in front of it. I don't read German, never intend to read German, but I just thought the pictures were kind of unique.
APPRAISER: Indeed. The paper stock is a giveaway from the more glossy art paper that was used for the text, the main text of the book. This book routinely sells in named auctions for around $7,000 to $8,000.
GUEST: Wow! $7,000 to $8,000?!
APPRAISER: Yes, so well done you.
GUEST: Even with the bad binding? Um... Or is that going to knock that down?
APPRAISER: It's going to knock the value down a bit, that's true. But the value is in the etchings within the book.
GUEST: Would it pay to get it rebound?
APPRAISER: It's not going to help you commercially to rebind it, but if you wanted to keep it and treasure it, you could have a hand-made leather spine put on that, and it would be worth spending $500 on it.
GUEST: Okay. That's great. Good. Thank you very much indeed.
APPRAISER: Thank you.
