Executorium is a great resource to find those experts. One such expert is listed in Kings County, New York: a fine and rare book dealer. Today, we’re speaking with Arthur Fournier, who will help us understand what qualifies as a fine and rare book, and how these items might turn up during the estate process.  Arthur, what is a fine and rare book?  What might people find in the course of looking through their parents’ home, or a house they are dealing with, that might look to be a fine or rare book?

AF: Good afternoon, Bill. Thank you for inviting me to the Executorium Podcast. I’m delighted to be here.

I’m a member of the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America (ABAA), the national trade association for rare booksellers. In addition to rare books, I also work as a broker and dealer in manuscript materials and correspondence—broadly speaking, archives—related to the cultural history of the twentieth century.

I’m the owner and founder of Arthur Fournier Fine and Rare. The term “fine and rare” includes two distinct categories. A fine book might be a beautifully bound leather tome, like this one on poetry in Mexico. It’s immediately recognizable as a fine object. A rare book might be a first edition novel in an original dust jacket. That paper slip around a hardback book, common from the 1920s to today, plays a major role in determining value.

But beyond the obvious collectibles, I’m also interested in items that might escape notice: slips of paper, pamphlets, self-published catalogs—things that seem insignificant but could be incredibly rare and valuable.

For example, I have here a spiral-bound, self-published art catalog from Paris called Aspects of Racism from 1971. It looks like a student project, but no library has it, and many want it. I bought it cheaply at a flea market in France, (nobody saw value in it) and now it may sell to a library for several hundred dollars. This principle can be scaled and applied broadly.

For example, Bill, if you had a relative who was a major figure in the civil rights movement or an important author or a politician or a really notable event inventor and entrepreneur. All of these people might have kept what we would generally call pay their papers, right, which would include photographs, letters, diaries, datebooks, correspondence, their manuscripts, meaning the first drafts of history that they wrote down maybe on the back of a bar napkin, maybe in a spiral bound notebook.

BG: I went to college at USC in Los Angeles, and our basketball coach back about thirty years ago, George Raveling, told the story that when he was a kid, he went to Martin Luther King’s I Have a Dream speech.  Happened to be there. Happened to be within for whatever reason, within ten, fifteen feet. And when he was done, Dr. King just pulled out his notes that he had read from, or the version of the speech he had written out, and handed it to him as if to throw it away. But, you know, he held onto it. I imagine for him, he’s not gonna sell it because I can’t imagine what that would have been like as a child to be at that spot in history.  After a generation or two, the family may not have the same appreciation for it, or there might be more heirs, and the money becomes more valuable.

BG:  And if someone has, say, a relative who was a civil rights leader, a notable author, or an inventor, what should they be looking for?

AF: Great question. These individuals often leave behind what we call their “papers”—letters, manuscripts, photographs, diaries, even drafts written on cocktail napkins. That’s what I help executors and estates identify, preserve, and place—often with major institutions like Stanford, Yale, the Getty, the Ransom Center, and others around the world.

So, when estates come to you with these items, how does that process work?

AF: There are a few paths. First, I can appraise the item. I’m a qualified appraiser trained in USPAP (Uniform Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice), current through 2026. If you’re donating $5,000, the IRS requires a qualified appraisal, and I can provide that opinion of fair market value.

I am versed in this because so many people were coming to me and saying, like, I don’t wanna sell this, but I know it’s valuable. I need to get a good donation from the IRS. It used to be you could just ask your accountant to get somebody to come around and say, yeah. That’s worth about $50. Well, you know, now if you want something to be worth $50 on paper as a donation charitably, you need somebody [qualified] to say, “Look, I’ve examined it, I know that it’s authentic. I have looked at auction comparables within the last three years, and I have developed an opinion of value which is consistent with the Unified Standards of Professional Appraisal Practice. You can take my notarized report to the IRS. They will examine it and decide that this is correct, and then they will indeed give you that $50,000 charitable credit, in this hypothetical number hypothetical situation. But that’s an appraisal.

I can act as a dealer or broker. For example, those notes from Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech – just hearing about them, gives me chills. I think the Smithsonian would be interested.  I think a large number of American educational institutions would be interested. I would probably say, look. I don’t wanna try to beat you down on price and, you know, kick over the wide margin for myself. What I want to do is represent you as your advocate and as your dealer, as your broker for those papers, and I will do so on a commission basis. I will help you develop materials and relationships, so that we can create the highest and best presentation of those documents to the highest and best client. And, if we work together to do that, under an agreement, I would not charge you a dime until they’re sold. And after you get paid, I get paid. My commission would probably be about 20% on that.

Alternatively, I’ll happily buy a selection of books from your attic, a few boxes of papers, the old rock and roll posters in your garage, or under your bed. I’ll probably buy a lot of those.

BG:  Let’s talk about more common cases. Most estates don’t have historical treasures, but they may have a few gems hidden in their bookshelves.

AF: Look, most people avoid looking at the bookshelves or avoid thinking about them because, you know, their hunch is probably right.  99% of the time, books on the [estate] shelf are probably going to be donated to Goodwill or to Better World Books or to a local library sale. But occasionally, there’s that one book worth hundreds or even thousands. In very rare cases, you know, there might be a book that would have tens of thousands of dollars in value. And you might not know it unless you’re an expert, unless you work for an auction house or unless you’re a rare bookseller or a collector yourself. So it’s always good to have someone come in and look at the shelves.

I often visit homes and spend hours going through shelves. Even if there’s nothing financially valuable, I can tell families more about their loved one through their books. If nothing’s worth selling, I would direct a a client to do in that case is to say, make sure all your family, friends, all the kids, all the grandkids get to come in here and grab a book that’ll remind them of their granddad, before donating the rest to libraries or nonprofits like Better World Books.

There are a number of book brokers that’ll pick up entire libraries for free, and then they resell them, and some of the money goes to charity. Probably some of the money goes to support the staff and the organization, etc., but it keeps the books in circulation.

So that’s the most common case – get someone in who can scan through and say these five or 10 things might have some value. Either sell them to me or let me sell them on your behalf on a commission basis.

BG:  What should people look for when choosing someone to evaluate these books?

AF: Look for someone with the designation “ABAA”.  That’s the Antiquarian Booksellers’ Association of America.  That means they’re vetted, ethical, and experienced.  We are people who don’t accept everybody into our club.  You have to be reputable and vetted by colleagues. We have a code of ethics, so we don’t rip people off. We’re going to make a transparent fair market value offer for your books. And, you know, that’s really pretty much guaranteed if somebody from the ABAA seems to be treating you unfairly, you can contact the ABAA and say, “Hey, what’s going on with this situation?”

It’s sort of like, look, if you had a stamp collection, how would you know, if you’re not a philatelist, (a professional stamp dealer and collector), you might not know if it’s for the recycling bin or the auction house. And the same thing with books, and the same thing with posters, and the same thing with postcards and old photographs.

BG:  And you shared a great example recently—someone handed you what looked like a damaged book…

AF: Yes! A widow gave me a beat-up typescript with no cover. It turned out to be The Poker Night, an early draft of what became A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. Only four copies are known to exist.

I had it professionally appraised and restored, and it’s worth about $50,000.

So, I am not pocketing that one.  That would be against the code of ethics of the ABAA. So this is a perfect case where I’m saying, you know, either you keep it as a treasured family heirloom, probably the most valuable thing in your house.  If you ever wanna sell it, please bring it to me, and I will help you find the best client for it, and I will take a commission. But, you know, that’s a case of something hiding in plain sight that was probably bound for the dumpster, if not the recycling bin, if not Goodwill, if she hadn’t just picked it up off the floor and put on my pile of purchased books.

It’s considered to be the most important American play of the twentieth century.

BG: Classic. Classic.  And then and then it was also, you know, a popular movie. Somebody who saw it, did it in high school, whatever, and it’s important to their life – and that will be one of the treasured mementos in their life.  That’s why people pay for those things. You might say, well, it’s kinda silly. Why would you do that? Well, but to that person, it’s very valuable.

AF: I’ll tell you what’s even more valuable about it in this case because it is such a rare first draft. Do you remember what I was talking about? First draft. So it’s not just gonna be a collector. Could be a collector, but it’s probably gonna be a professor and a librarian and their graduate students who wanna know about the history of American theater.

So this is history, and that’s what I’m talking about: archives and manuscripts. And, you know, there might be a shoebox of folders with letters, you know, people you never heard of sitting under your loved one’s bed, and that could be the most valuable thing in the entire collection.

You know, forget about the, you know, the little bronze on the desk. It might be that shoe box of the letters – depends on their research value. Because these research institutions are different from collectors who are interested in collectibles. You know, that’s why when you want to look at somebody’s manuscripts and letters, when I say manuscript, what I might mean is, you know, a typed piece of paper with a lot of scribbling on it. It doesn’t look like much.

BG:  Incredible. So this isn’t just about monetary value—it’s about preserving history.

AF: I’ll give you another example. I was just at the Minneapolis Saint Paul Airport flying home.  They’ve got a Prince memorabilia and shop at MSU Airport. What they have there also is incredibly cool scraps of notebook paper under thick plexiglass inside vitrines. They have the original scribbled out lyrics crossed out, looked at rewritten for songs like Ballad of Dorothy Parker or 1999. Those are priceless.

Another estate that I was talking to recently – their dad was a journalist, happened to know Bob Dylan, happened to know Lou Reed and all these people.

They wanted me to get involved and go through all these papers in, New Jersey in a commercial storage. Dad was a pack rat, kept everything. And I said, you know what? Actually, in this case, I probably can’t get involved, but you should go through it, especially if you know that your dad had a good friendship with Bob Dylan. Look for things that could be lyrics.  Look for things that could be, you know, notes or postcards, because those will have value. They did. And they recently sold at auction the original lyrics to, “Hey, Mister Tambourine Man” for over $500,000.

BG: Oh my gosh. Oh my gosh.

Okay. So note to self, look. Through my customers, look through the box, and just double-check before you throw it away.

AF: I work with USC and UCLA and the Getty all the time, and they are buying research collections.  They’re not buying collectibles. Collectors buy collectibles. Universities buy research materials that help historians write the draft of American history, American culture.

You know, maybe somebody was publishing a little newsletter in their basement that helped change the world. You know? In California, I work a lot with members of the Chicano community in Sacramento, and these are people, you know, who helped establish the United Farm Workers Movement.  Incredibly important American history. I can work with some of those individuals, take graphic art, take newsletters, little stapled pamphlets, you know, things that might look just like a like a just a little, you know, a little handmade magazine. I can take that to a library and sell it for a very good price.

You know, if you have a complete set of, important and interesting magazines, even if it was just four issues of a little poetry journal or, you know, 10 issues of an art magazine or a music magazine.

Have you ever heard of Low Rider?

This was a really important magazine in the visibility and pride of Latino people in California, and car culture was a big part of that. And, you know, the pride to be a worker, to be able to afford a beautiful car, and to make it even more beautiful, make it special, make sure people notice you when you’re driving down the street. That was kinda, you know, just this beautiful romantic pride of being in the low rider movement.

This magazine, the first 10 issues, which I have I’ve actually got the first 15 issues in very good condition right in front of me, and I’ve been putting these together for a while. I just got the last number that I was missing from that sequence. This will be something that I will sell as a group, hopefully, to a museum or library that wants to know about Chicano history in the United States. They won’t have this. Almost no one has this.

I should be able to sell it for around $7,500. That’s my explanation. Wow. So, you know, again, you know, you might see you know, what, what’s that corny old car magazine, you know, hanging out? What you know, it almost looks like they wrote it by hand.

It was a major cultural force. So the Smithsonian Museum, Getty Museum, UIC, New York Public Library, they’ll all wanna know about this. Yeah. And, you know, one of them will go home with it after my next big book fair. Wow.

BG:  Amazing. And your work is global, right?

AF: Yes. I just returned from Paris, where I helped arrange the transfer of an artist’s archive to a U.S. university for a six-figure sum. I work across the country and internationally.

BG:  Arthur, thank you. Your expertise is impressive and valuable to our audience. Again, that’s Arthur Fournier Fine and Rare LLC. The phone number is (917) 749-9431, and the website is arthurfournier.com.

To our listeners, thank you for joining us. This is the Executorium Podcast, where each week we talk to professionals who can help executors navigate their responsibilities and maximize estate value.

I’m Bill Gross—@BillGrossProbate. If I can help, reach out.

As always, make today your best day ever.

Arthur Fournier

Arthur Fournier is an independent broker of twentieth-century archives.  Arthur Fournier Fine & Rare deals in books, serials, manuscripts, and archives in all fields and genres.  They specialize in primary source materials related to the transformative cultural movements of the late 20th century, modern conflicts, disruptive technologies, music, and the visual arts.

Arthur Fournier fine & rare
1206 Pacific Street, 4A
Brooklyn, NY 11216
(917) 749-9431

Bill Gross

Born in Santa Monica, and raised in Orange County, Bill is a lifetime Californian.  He is a Real Estate Investor and Broker, working with eXp Realty of California out of San Ramon.  He is the host of Probate Weekly a podcast for CPE Real Estate professionals and associated professionals.

Disclaimer:  The opinions of the Executorium’s Podcast hosts and guests are not necessarily the opinions of Executorium.com LLC, its principals, or its employees.