Value added: how rare book dealers save you the trouble of endlessly looking, hoping books will turn up at the Salvation Army for 99 cents instead of being thrown away because they look too old.

A participant in London University's MA course in the History of the Book looks back on her 200-hour placement with a rare bookdealer:

When I began my internship at Maggs, I thought I knew what the antiquarian book trade was all about: selling customers old books. That’s it. I’d worked in bookstores before – how different could selling someone an old book possibly be from selling someone a new book?

Turns out, quite different.

Yes, the antiquarian book trade is fundamentally about selling customers books. It’s about starting, adding to, and never quite completing collections. It’s about developing professional relationships with customers, many of whom regularly visit the shop just to browse and to chat. In these ways, the antiquarian and modern book trades do have things in common. They are businesses, aiming to make a profit.

However, Maggs taught me that the antiquarian book trade is about more than just making a profit. It’s about uncovering the unique narrative held by each book, autograph, and artefact in the shop. I was tasked, for just one example, with writing a long-form catalogue entry for an anonymous African-American World War II soldier’s scrapbook. This required close examination of everything included in the book, extensive research to determine the context in which the book was produced, and a heck of a lot of imagination to make connections that resulted in a cohesive narrative. Sure, narratives like these help sell products, but they also help us understand why these products are culturally valuable. This is the difference between the antiquarian and modern book trades: antiquarian booksellers see each item as having a completely unique story to tell. Turns out, antiquarian booksellers do more than just sell books. They research, they enrich.