1897 William Morris "Love is Enough" Book
APPRAISER: You brought me a book today.
GUEST: Yes, a William Morris book.
APPRAISER: Yes! I, I love William Morris. What do you know about William Morris?
GUEST: Um, he's a s, a socialist, uh, textile--wallpaper, I believe. A poet.
APPRAISER: William Morris is beloved by book people because he wanted to embrace the book arts in a way that, in industrial England in the 1890s, some of the traditions of designing type, making paper by hand, designing books in a way...
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: Yeah, more going back to the way books were designed in the 1400s.
GUEST: Fun.
APPRAISER: Because at that point, the Industrial Revolution had kind of taken a lot of the soul out of books. And I think if we look at this book, and this book is not only written by William Morris, but printed and type-designed by him...
GUEST: Yes.
APPRAISER: ...and his press. It was called the Kelmscott Press. William Morris, in addition to being a designer, also did write.
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: And he wrote the text of this book, Love is Enough, a morality play, written also emulating the style of the Renaissance and the medieval things that he loved and surrounded himself with. The illustrator is Edward Burne-Jones, the pre-Raphaelite London painter and friend of William Morris. And all of these woodcuts were made specifically for this book. So how did you happen to come into possession of this?
GUEST: I do household cleanouts. And I was actually at the dump with, with a, uh, a few pieces of furniture. And it was a desk. And I was taking the drawers out of the desk and one by one throwing them away. (laughs) And the, the middle drawer was stuck, and I couldn't get it. And I just gave it, you know, a little old one-two.
APPRAISER: (laughs)
GUEST: And when I pulled out, that book fell down.
APPRAISER: Really?
GUEST: And I pulled it out, and it had a letter in it from “Sothersby,” which alerted me that maybe this was something I should probably not toss into the waste, so...
APPRAISER: Yeah, and then did you open it and check it out?
GUEST: I did, and it was, like, "Oh, my gosh, look how beautiful this book is." And I actually immediately closed it, put it back up, and put it in my truck.
APPRAISER: (laughs) Yeah, it's really special. This was printed in 1897. He wrote it earlier, but they had a lot of trouble balancing the type, deciding what kind of illustrations, and balancing the borders and everything. So it was actually done just after his death. The Kelmscott Press printed books between 1891 and 1898.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: This is one of only two books that they printed in three colors. So there are some pages like these that are black with red. And there are some that are black that have blue ink, as well.
GUEST: Interesting.
APPRAISER: Which is quite special. People love William Morris's work and what he did, especially for the book arts.
GUEST: Yeah.
APPRAISER: So this was published in 300 copies. This is printed on paper. Some of them are printed on animal-skin parchment, which is the same as our binding material here, just thinner.
GUEST: Got you.
APPRAISER: Those are more valuable. An auction estimate for this book would be $4,000 to $6,000.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: And on the retail market right now, there are some that are, the retail asking price is $10,000 for this.
GUEST: Oh, my gosh. That's incredible--thank you so much.
APPRAISER: You're welcome. It is, it, and it's, it's very well-preserved. It's a, it's wonderful, and I'm glad that, that, uh, it, it didn't go to the dump.
GUEST: I'm glad it was stuck in that drawer for so long.
APPRAISER: Yeah. (laughs) It saved its life.
GUEST: Totally.
$4,000 Auction
$10,000 Retail
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Understanding Our Appraisals
Executive producer Marsha Bemko shares her tips for getting the most out of ANTIQUES ROADSHOW.
Value can change: The value of an item is dependent upon many things, including the condition of the object itself, trends in the market for that kind of object, and the location where the item will be sold. These are just some of the reasons why the answer to the question "What's it worth?" is so often "It depends."
Note the date: Take note of the date the appraisal was recorded. This information appears in the upper left corner of the page, with the label "Appraised On." Values change over time according to market forces, so the current value of the item could be higher, lower, or the same as when our expert first appraised it.
Context is key: Listen carefully. Most of our experts will give appraisal values in context. For example, you'll often hear them say what an item is worth "at auction," or "retail," or "for insurance purposes" (replacement value). Retail prices are different from wholesale prices. Often an auctioneer will talk about what she knows best: the auction market. A shop owner will usually talk about what he knows best: the retail price he'd place on the object in his shop. And though there are no hard and fast rules, an object's auction price can often be half its retail value; yet for other objects, an auction price could be higher than retail. As a rule, however, retail and insurance/replacement values are about the same.
Verbal approximations: The values given by the experts on ANTIQUES ROADSHOW are considered "verbal approximations of value." Technically, an "appraisal" is a legal document, generally for insurance purposes, written by a qualified expert and paid for by the owner of the item. An appraisal usually involves an extensive amount of research to establish authenticity, provenance, composition, method of construction, and other important attributes of a particular object.
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