Q&A: Is my misbound book a valuable collectible?

QUESTION: I have a misbound book I'd like to sell: "The Shaker Experience in America" by Stein, ISBN 0300059337. Lots of copies of this 1992 paperback are available from $6 to $28. But none of the descriptions mention that pages 405 to 420 are bound upside down, like mine.

With coins and stamps, printing and engraving errors can make a collector's item -- is this true with books?

ANSWER: Printing and production errors can add value to a book, but only when the book was a collectible to begin with.

It's not uncommon for a book to be misbound -- I'd estimate that one every 1,000 books has some noticeable binding mistake. I hear from a few customers every month who have found an upside-down or missing page in a book I've sold. Most book buyers regard these irregularities as defects that mandate a refund or replacment, not as curiosities to be treasured.

Your paperback isn't one collectors would be searching for, so the production error adds no value. There's not much demand for the original hardcover edition of this book either.

It might be worth e-mailing some of the other sellers to see if their copies have the defect. Depending on the situation, you might might need to discount your copy to sell it with the defect. Let's just hope the buyer reads your description.

Nevertheless, many sellers handle oddities. Here's an auction for a First Edition of "Cold Mountain" where the books is supposedly more valuable because it has a single typo on page 25. This First Edition regularly goes for under $10, so before paying $200 for the misprint, I'd want to know how rare it is.

And here's an eBay listing for a incorrectly bound children's Golden Book. The listing has a buy-it-now price of $1.

To be sure, a misprint or binding mistake can bump up the value of a rare book by as much as 50 percent. When book collectors are looking for "one of each" of their favorite author or genre, some will pay premiums for misbound or misprinted rarities.

Last year, some young readers of the fantasy novel "Eldest" noticed that 32 pages were accidentally replaced with text from the upcoming novel "Inkspell." Random House offered free replacements for the misprints, which made up about 2 percent of the 1.3 million-copy first print run. Whether the misprinted copies become valuable depends on future demand for the First Edition.

The first printing of Bill Clinton's "My Life" has a famous typo at the end of the acknowledgement ("failure of my life" should be "failures of my life"). Signed copies go for more than $1,200.

Used bibles are hardly ever worth any money, since so many have been printed. But there are some rarities from the 16th and 17th centuries -- such as the "Breeches" Bible, the "Vinegar" Bible, and the "Wicked" Bible -- that are highly collectible because of misprinting or odd word usage.

Collectors love to find misprints in all sorts of things, including baseball cards, record albums, and money. Usually, the more glaring the error, the more highly prized it is among collectors. In January, collectors went nuts over a $20 bill that somehow was printed with a Del Monte banana sticker next to Andrew Jackson's portrait. The note sold for $25,300.