How much is a book worth when handwritten with poetry (I have them if you like)

By Ouyang Yu

AI answers:

⭐ 1. Books with substantial handwritten poems (English + Chinese)

If the poems are full, original works — especially unpublished:

Typical market value: USD $50 – $300 each

Factors that push it toward the high end:

  • Multiple pages of poetry

  • Clear handwriting

  • Dated entries

  • Bilingual writing (unique & interesting to scholars)

  • If the poem is later published → this becomes an early draft

  • If the poem is unpublished → this becomes a unique manuscript

Some dealers might price exceptional pieces at $400–$800, but only if your name is known to collectors or if the content is unusually strong.

⭐ 2. Books with short handwritten poems or marginalia

Small poems of a few lines, or notes that show creative thinking:

Typical value: USD $20 – $120 each

These are collected more for the handwriting and creative trace, not the book itself.

⭐ 3. Books with only a signature, a date, or a very short line

If your writing inside the book is minimal:

Typical value: USD $5 – $30 each

Most collectors will not pay much unless you are already a collectible author.

⭐ 4. Books with no handwriting

Value is basically the used-book price → USD $1–$10.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

002, from Poetry Remarks

By Ouyang Yu
Image
Mel C. Thompson Publishing, San Francisco, 2013, p. 23. [I said 'no page number' because my lower ear mark concealed it, my apologies. Then I thought: What a fantastic idea if there's no page numbers! I have a book that has no Contents although it timidly carries page numbers. See Two Hearts, Two Tongues and Rain-coloured Eyes . Wild Peony, 2002. In future, I'd make a poetry book with no Contents and no page numbers. Why make things so easy for people that they won't even bother reading?] This book is long out of print, so don't start thinking that I'm trying to promote something. I've only got one copy in the world and I'm not selling it.
Read more

LOWER DOWNS, RUBBISH AND LOW POETRY by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
Beauty is so far from being the dominant principle of modern poetry that many of the most splendid modern works are clearly portrayals of ugliness - Friedrich Schlegel ( On the Study of Greek Poetry , 1797) Contemporary Chinese poetry has unashamedly turned from the sublime and sacred to the vulgar and profane. In April 1999 at the Panfeng Conference in Pinggu County, Beijing, poets split into two camps, the  zhishi fenzi  (intellectual) and the  minjian . 1  The poets in the intellectual camp (Wang Jiaxin, Ouyang Jianghe, Xi Chuan, Zang Di and others) were mostly well-published, anthologised, critically acclaimed, well-travelled and internationally well-connected. As university professor and poetry critic Cheng Guangwei noted, much of their poetry reflects the influences of Western literary masters such as Yeats, Rilke, Lowell, Pound, Baudelaire, Milosz, Pasternak and Brodsky. 2  The  minjian camp (Yu Jian, Yi Sha, Xu Jiang and others) critiqued these infl...
Read more

Self Publishing, a poem by Ouyang Yu

By Ouyang Yu
In a way, everything is self publishing. When you open your mouth to talk, you are self publishing because you don’t want someone else to speak for you even if he or she were the speech writer for Howard or Bush or Mao Zedong. When the rain decides to fall it is self publishing, on a regional scale, sometimes on a statewide scale. You can’t dismiss it as unworthily self publishing because it doesn’t fall on a national scale or international scale. Rivers in the world are self publishing on a daily and nightly basis. Even a little creek is self publishing when it winds its way through an industrial zone clogged with toxicity and waste. Birds never remain quiet because they don’t get paid for calling, their ways of self publishing that never is actually recorded in human history, not even in birds’ history, and when sometimes it does get recorded as in relaxation music they still don’t get paid and they still keep singing, their ways of self publishing. Some great self publish...
Read more