Good.

I brought you in a very rare book.

You have a book?

Um, you know what?

My bosses right here.

Okay, Rick, do you have a second to look in a book?

Today was actually kind of weird.

I was just looking at a book with Rick, and another one came in.

It was just perfect timing.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Classic of American Literature.

This is actually the salesman sample for Tom Sawyer.

Okay, that is definitely cool.

I consider it the Holy Grail of Mark Twain collecting.

All right, There you go.

I had great timing.

Their book expert was actually in the shop and ready to look at it.

The book is sort of like the preview for a movie.

These air excerpts from Tom Sawyer.

I'm prepared for tough negotiation.

I've been here a few times.

They always have their eye on the profit.

18.

76.

Tom Sawyer came out in her Mark Twain.

He was an amazing marketer.

This was a period where books were normally sold in bookshops and he decided with this publisher that he would send salesman around trying to get, you know, sales of his up and coming book.

When you open it up, you have different binding types, like you would offer a cloth binding at a certain price for different types of leather bindings.

Well, that's why this book is interesting, even though it's not.

The first edition is because it kind of shows the history printing how things would have been sold.

This time you get more of an eye into the things that you normally don't get to see how things were done behind the scenes.

Exactly.

One of the reasons that Twain like to sell by subscription is that he said that way people have already committed to buying the book before they know that it's bad.

He said that specifically about Tom Sawyer.

Yeah, well, he was very worried how Tom Sawyer was going to do they, you know, he wrote it as a basically an adult book, but it kind of got branded is a boy's book.

Which sort of annoyed him.

Yeah, he wasn't known for writing books about Children, and this was a big departure for him.

It was a big risk.

Tom Sawyer was pretty controversial at the time because he was not a good person.

You realize he cheats.

He steals.

So this was really hard because he wasn't a good example for kids.

Okay, so what do you want for it?

Well, uh, I would like to get 10,000 out of it.

What do you think?

What do I think?

Let's see.

This is a really rare Mark Twain salesman's prospectus.

Salesman's copies were thrown out after they had served their use.

That being said, it's also quite beat up, and it's still not a first edition.

Tom Sawyer, with all of those things in mind, the value that I would place on a retail, it's probably between nine and $10,000.

Okay, I think it five grand.

I have to re sell it.

I have to make money.

I mean, I tried to find out in the Library of Congress, doesn't even have a copy of the salesman's sample.

It's that where he's right, that this is a more rare salesman sample of Tween than other works by him.

You, honestly, five grand is just too little familiar.

I mean, I want you to make a profit.

I honestly didn't think 10,000 was unreasonable.

Uh, I'll tell you what at the end of Tom Sawyer, he finds gold.

You know how much gold he finds?

$5000 worth $66,000 worth of gold?

That's really the least I could take, And I think it gives you I'll go 55.

It's a fair price, you know.

It's a fair price.

I actually think 6000 is cheap.

It was a little awkward to sit there during the negotiation.

You want to put in your two cents, but it's not really your business.

I really want to stick to 666 55 $100.

6000 line of Twain collectors at your door, I promise you, once you start getting over like 1000 $2000 the amount of people in this world that have the money to buy it and are willing to buy it dramatically falls off a cliff.

But it's honestly hard to give this one up for that.

That's Ah, it's Ah, it's a very special book.

How about like, you know, Tom Soy?

He swears on a blood oath.

Blood oath at 5500 500.

It's a deal.

Um, I'll meet you right over there.

and I'll have someone write $5500 was honestly low.

I think he's going to make a profit.

On the flip side, I think Mark Twain would be smiling to know that I got $5500 for a book that was likely going to be thrown out in the 18 hundreds.