Books inscribed by the author are stories in themselves.
Here's a story published last year in The New Yorker about the rare book market, and the art of selling.
A Controversial Rare-Book Dealer Tries to Rewrite His Own Ending
Glenn Horowitz built a fortune selling the archives of writers such as Vladimir Nabokov and Alice Walker. Then a rock star pressed charges. By Tad Friend
"Every form of collecting is an effort to stop time, but book collecting is a singularly hopeful incarnation of that wish. It is nourished by twin beliefs: first, that our most glorious ideas and fancies have been bound together in crushed morocco or polished calf—sacred repositories that must be conserved against fire and water and forgetfulness. And, second, that ownership of great literature in its most talismanic form will ennoble you. Horowitz cultivates these credos in his clients, yet his usual practice is to wrest books from the grip of one, bestow them into the hands of another, then wrest them back for a third. When I told him that Susan Cheever, the writer and the daughter of John Cheever, said that Horowitz had paid her handsomely for her father’s inscribed novels and letters “because Glenn is a gentleman, and because he wanted to help me,” he seemed offended. “I like Susan enormously,” he assured me, “but I bought from her at prices that allowed me to sell the material profitably.”
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" Traditional collecting aims at first editions in “pristine” or “mint” condition; the booksellers’ wry joke is “Never judge a book by its contents.”