Q&A: Are my old medical books worth any money?

QUESTION: Is there a market for old medical and veterinary books? My father was a Vet for the Saint Louis Zoo and a medical doctor as well, and we have lots of old medical books.

ANSWER: I know that people collect old medical books simply because I've stumbled onto a few that happened to be worth quite a bit. I haven't dealt with enough of them to know what makes some of them valuable and others not valuable.

I don't know anything about veterinary books either, but again, I've stumbled onto a few at library sales, estates sales, etc. that turned out to be valuable. For example, I bought one book that was about how to breed dogs to achieve certain colors in their coat, and it turned out to be worth a couple hundred dollars. I found the book in a box of books I'd bought for $5.

The only specific thing I can tell you is that the first editions of books that are considered groundbreaking or influential in their field (this includes any area, science, medical, etc.) are worth especially great amounts. For example, early books by Einstein or Darwin can be worth $25,000 and more.

It sounds like this would be a good specialty area for you if you were interested in bookselling. With a bit of research you could learn what makes some medical books worth perhaps $40 and others worth hundreds or more.

Until perhaps 10 years ago researching book values required an expensive, encylopedic book on collectible books and their values, but today it's fairly easy to look up these values on the Internet.

If your books are recent enough to have an ISBN (a 10-digit identifier usually found on the back cover), you can look up the prices at various booksellers here:
AddAll
BookFinder

Or if the book is too old to have an ISBN (printed before the 1970s) you can usually find the value by entering the title and author last name.

Nowadays many out-of-print books are available on Amazon.com also, but it's good to double-check with these other search engines too.