Reading through the New Yorker earlier this year, I found a profile on the watercolor painter Walton Ford. He works on an exaggerated scale. “Nila,” depicting an elephant lumbering across a field surround by birds (one of which has perched on its erect penis), measures 17 feet wide and stand 12 feet tall. To celebrate the magnitude of his work, the publisher, Taschen, designed a book of his collected work, and released a limited edition of 100. Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra, Art Edition sells for $7,000.

Taschen followed up with a second edition. Limited to 1,500 copies, all numbered and signed by the author, Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra sells for only $1,800. Speaking in gross figures, if Taschen sold all 1,600 of the first and second editions, they recouped $3.4 million. Let us assume, for the sake of estimating a low net return, that each book had an average material cost of $200 (an astronomical per unit figure, but the paper was nice, and they used leather in places, I believe). Even considering that unit cost, they returned more than $3 million. They likely paid Ford a large royalty. The Art Edition included a limited, signed print, for instance. So, supposing that Ford’s royalty was 30% (again, astronomical for anyone other than J.K. Rowling), he earned just over $1 million on the first two runs. The second edition also includes a forward by Bill Buford, of Heat fame. They paid Buford well, one can assume, so we’ll fix that figure at $40,000, for the hell of it. Even if in-house labor costs exceeded $200,000—a lot of designers worked on the book for a long time—the final profit, for 1,600 books sold, assuming that Taschen controlled those sales, approached or exceeded $2 million. Even if half of the units were discounted to secondary vendors, (in which case the royalties would decrease, but let me not over-complicate this) Taschen netted at least $1.5 million. That, inarguably, is one way to make money in the book industry.

But Walton Ford: Pancha Tantra is an art book. The market for an art book this unique and expensive is no doubt collectors of fine art, and many of Taschen’s new customers were already Walton Ford patrons, one can be certain. But, can you apply this model to a novel, and if so, how? Utilizing the pre-established network of James Bond fans, last spring Penguin released Devil May Care—the most recent installment of the Bond series—in a limited edition designed by the British car manufacturer, Bentley. The volume was “bound in Bodoniana-style cases and finished in burnt oak leather sourced from the tannery in Italy which provides the hides for Bentley’s interiors.” Each copy also came with a pewter scale model of a Bentley Continental. Penguin produced 300 of this first edition, and priced them at $1,156. They sold out the day of release. Again, though, Penguin was banking on a popular franchise. James Bond is an internationally known commodity, so selling 300 copies, even of an outlandishly expensive book, was a safe bet.

These two examples don’t go any distance in proving the argument that gorgeous, expensive design, a low print run, and a high price tag can force an obscure novel up into wild profitability. But there is one example that suggests that it isn’t outside the realm of possibility. In 1999, Canongate Books reissued Robert Sabbag’s semi-autobiographical cocaine novel from 1976, Snowblind. Designed by artist Damien Hirst, the new edition featured a mirrored cover, and came with a metal American Express credit card bookmark and a real American $100 bill. Printed in an edition of 1000, the books went for £1,000. Canongate sold all of them. 22 years after the release of the original book, it is safe to assume that the popularity of the reissue was not a product of the prose so much as it was a product of the subject (cocaine) and the design (a mirrored cover and a $100 bill) by Damien Hirst. In the art world, Hirst had gained acclaim by suspending a tiger shark in formaldehyde. That sculpture, “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living,” is one of the most iconic works of British art from the 90s. In other words, Hirst brought artistic celebrity to the Snowblind project, and we can assume again, as with Walton Ford, that many of the people who paid £1,000 for the book were fans of his, and not Sabbag’s.

Would a novel about flowers with a cover of, say, blown glass flowers sell as well? Perhaps if Dale Chihuly created it, but still not likely. Accordingly, the potential marketability of an art object first edition depends most on the subject, second-most on the designer, and perhaps contrarily, lastly on the author and the quality of the prose. Whether in our current economy there is growth potential in this market sub-sect, time will tell. But what is undeniably apparent from the above examples is that, in the right circumstance, a small number of people are willing to pay a whole lot of money for a “valuable” book. As writers and publishers, if we balance the extremes—selling books for upwards of $1,000 and giving away digital copies of that same book—we might survive the 21st Century.

Read Part I

By Kaelan Smith