Scrambling for a piece of history

If you’d like to own a piece of Leonard Cohen’s work to remember him by, you’d be wise to act fast.

As in the art market, so with the book market: when a beloved artist or author passes away, people want to own something to remember them by — and so prices go up and competition grows fierce. Abe Books — the online used bookstore, with listings from booksellers around the world — has seen searches for Leonard Cohen go from none to “the top of the heap,” according to Richard Davies, spokesperson for AbeBooks.com.

The top two bestselling books on the site at the moment are, at No. 1, his 1966 novel Beautiful Losers (which has been reprinted) and, at No. 2, his 2006 book of poetry Book of Longing. In third spot, for comparison’s sake, is U.S. president-elect Donald Trump’s book Great Again: How to Fix Our Crippled America.

While Cohen’s books have been reprinted many times, the original first editions are commanding the most attention and the biggest prices.

Cohen’s first book, a 1956 volume of poetry titled Let Us Compare Mythologies, has been listed on the site at $14,500 (U.S.). Only 400 copies of this were printed in the first edition, according to Davies, and there are just three copies for sale.

“It’s quite common for a writer’s earliest published work to be among the most collectible and expensive,” Davies notes, pointing out that, because of its rarity, Mythologies was expensive even before his death. There haven’t been any buyers for that particular book yet, but the site did see a sale of The Favourite Game — published in 1963 — a signed and inscribed first edition. It’s Abe Books’s most expensive Leonard Cohen sale ever at $2,000, Davies says.

“For a collector it’s an important piece of literature from Cohen; it’s also something someone will have and will treasure,” Davies says.

One of the most interesting pieces in terms of his early life might possibly be a yearbook from1951, Cohen’s graduating year at Montreal’s Westmount High School, on sale for $3,500 (Canadian) from The Book Collector’s Library (TBCL). The picture of a very clean-cut “Leonard Norman Cohen” is accompanied by a bio noting his pastime as “leading singsongs at intermission” and his ambition as “world famous orator.”

His path clearly lay right from the start.