Eric Takabayashi wrote:

> Making more money, or more quickly, would give you more money
> to spend on your  collection, without much effort on your part.
> You could have been a multimillionaire on Yahoo! stocks.

It is equally true, surely, to say that you could bankrupt yourself trying
to guess what the next Yahoo! will be. It is probably also true to say that
speculating on the stock market creates as many bankrupts as millionaires
(perhaps more). And, finally, I have no interest in or aptitude for judging
the current performance and anticipating the future performance of business
enterprises.

The following reflects my own attitude fairly closely:

"We'd enjoyed Salinger's Catcher in the Rye and wanted a hardback copy, but
a first edition in the early 1960s was selling for $15 or $20, four to ten
times what a hardback reprint would cost. This was a lot of money at the
time...but...it turned out to be a good investment. Today a nice copy [of
the first edition of Catcher in the Rye] is selling for $7,500. Whether it
was a good investment relative to other investments, such as stock or real
estate, is certainly questionable, but we wouldn't have made those
investments anyway, so it's a moot point for us." (Allen and Patricia
Ahearn, Book Collecting 2000)

Today, a decent copy of Catcher in the Rye might fetch around $20,000. Now,
even if the books and curios I bought did not increase in value to that
extent - or even if they decreased in value - I would at least have had the
pleasure of choosing them, finding them and owning them, whereas there is no
intrinsic pleasure (or none that I can see) in owning a handful of stocks
and shares.

> Or if instead of trying to buy a house for my own family, I
> put up two apartment buildings for rent, I could be making
> more than my current salary doing nothing.

I don't know quite what your moral is here. In my case, I *enjoy* what I do,
both in my main job and with my "rare books" hat on, so being able to get
more money for doing less isn't really the point. The point is that I don't
want to pay financial managers to manage my money and then stew when they
continue to charge me for their services while they are actually losing
money on my behalf, nor do I want to have to spend time trying (with no
knowledge or training or interest) to cut out the middleman and do the work
of a financial manager myself. I am simply saying that if I have a bit of
money that I can spare from mortgage repayments, savings against my eventual
decrepitude and everyday living expenses, then I prefer to spend that money
on the rare books and antiques markets (from which I derive some intrinsic
satisfaction) than on the stock market. YMMV.

--
John
http://rarebooksinjapan.com