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Additional Services
Gift Certificates. On occasion the nautical imagination of a friend or family member needs to be satisfied but the specifics are elusive. Your collector may not have "everything", nor has your voracious reader read everything, but only he or she knows what the next acquisition should be. Sometimes the ultimate owner rather the giver needs the thrill of the hunt, the challenge of the chase, the burden of choice, the browse and the search. Gift Certificates are available from this website on request and may be sent to either the buyer or the beneficiary. Gift Certificates are redeemable for three years from the date of issuance.
Or, simply Gifts. If you know what is required, simply order and provide us the details, including an appropriate note or card (happy birthday from??) to include with the package.
Wants. An all too frequent fact of life in finding a one-of-a-kind treasure is that someone else has found it first. Let us know what you want: a single book, a list of books, another item?and we will endeavor to let you know if we come across it again. Much of our business is done by offering items we have reason to believe are particularly sought by specific customers. On request, we can also seek out items from other purveyors on a special order basis.
Appraisals. When the need arises to determine the value of a book collection for insurance, sale, gift tax, charitable donation or estate purposes, we offer our market experience in providing valuations or appraisals at an hourly rate plus out-of-pocket expenses. We do not normally appraise antiques and ship models, but we suggest local auction houses and antique dealers may be a good source for such information.
Bi-Monthly Book Catalog
The heart of our business over the last twenty years has been a simple Catalog of books mailed to customers who prefer the look and feel of the printed page, to be stuffed into a pocket or briefcase and read in odd moments, items circled in pencil, questions in the margins, pages corners turned down. There are no glossy pictures and no color (maybe someday?). Currently, we carry 500 to 600 titles in each Catalog and mail about six times per year. Most books are recent acquisitions, although popular titles reappear with some frequency just as they reappear in collections acquired on a regular basis. The contents of the Catalog represent but a small portion of our total inventory. The Catalog is sent free to anyone who asks, although those who do not purchase are dropped after a year or two unless they have "re-subscribed" with a simple message or post card request. Catalog books are generally not posted on this website until a few weeks after mailing. Catalog orders are accepted by telephone, email, fax, letter and through the secure order portion of this website. Please be aware that most of our books are one-of-a-kind items; please have in mind alternate choices should your primary selections be no longer available. We generally maintain "want" lists for those unable to acquire their first choice. To receive the Catalog, simply send us an email, post card, or voice mail message with your pertinent data.
Books and Collections Purchased
We are interested in purchasing nautical books from individuals and institutions.
Our life blood is the newly acquired material which we can offer to our clients. We pay a fair price in the context of our industry and the current market environment, how long we expect to hold an item before its resale, how many of the same or similar items we already have, what our customers are calling for, provenance, scarcity and (most important) condition. We believe most collections of nautical books are usually more valuable to us than to a non-specialist books dealer, but this is not always the case. A glance at our inventory on this website will demonstrate that our nautical interests are broad and deep ?ancient to modern history, peace and war, sport and pleasure, passengers and freight, sail and power, art and technology, survival and disaster, exploration and science, polar and tropical, building ships and models of ships, fiction and non-fiction, antiquarian and recent.
Depending on the size of a collection, and on our schedule, we have traveled throughout the U.S. East Coast to value, bid on, box and remove books. We have accepted mailed shipments of books on trial and agreed to return them if the price we offer is not acceptable. Many sellers have simply brought their books into the shop. We prefer, if possible, to begin with a list of books offered (author, title, publisher, date, soft or hardcover, dust jacket or not, condition). Even an informal list can result in a ballpark estimate of what we would be willing to offer to a bona fide and willing seller.
Naturally, we reserve the right not to bid on all books or collections offered. We seldom purchase softcover books or mass market paperbacks, with many notable exceptions, unless they are part of a larger collection. We tend to avoid recent magazine issues. Books acquired as part of a collection that do not meet our needs or standards are usually passed along to a charity or wholesaled to another dealer.
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