What this is
HalfCalf publishes guides and reports for people who collect second-hand and antiquarian books: how editions are identified, what bindings are made of, what condition words are worth, and what happens in Australian salerooms and at fairs. It is written for collectors rather than for the trade, which mostly means we explain the things dealers assume you already know.
The journal began in 2014 as a set of notes kept while cataloguing a family library that turned out to be less valuable and more interesting than anyone expected. It has been published continuously since, with new entries most Thursdays.
How this is funded
Out of pocket. There is no advertising, no sponsorship, no affiliate link and no paid listing on this site, and there never has been. Nothing here earns a commission when you buy a book.
That has consequences worth stating plainly. We are slower than a staffed publication, we cover Australian material better than overseas material because that is what we can attend in person, and we have no obligation to be nice about a saleroom or a fair.
Who writes it
A small editorial group, all collectors, none of them dealers. Pieces are published under the journal rather than under personal bylines: the guides are revised repeatedly as we learn we were wrong about something, and a byline on a document that changes every year is a fiction.
Corrections are made openly. Where a guide changes materially, the change is noted at the foot of the page with the date, rather than edited in silently.
What we get wrong
Two things, consistently, and it is fair to warn you about both. We are more confident about nineteenth-century material than about modern firsts, where issue points are a specialist discipline with a literature of its own. And our sense of price is Australian: what a book fetches in Melbourne and what it fetches in London have not tracked each other closely for a decade.
Reusing what is here
Quote us, link to us, print a guide out for a book club. Please do not republish whole guides elsewhere; the versions here are corrected over time and a frozen copy becomes wrong without anyone noticing. Full terms are on the terms page.