How to Find Out If Your Old Law Books Are Worth Anything

A lot of what decides whether an old law book is worth anything is printed on the book itself. The spine and the title page tell you what it is, which edition it is and when it was printed, and those are the first things anyone valuing it will ask you.

Here is how to check your books, step by step, and who to ask once you know what you have.

How do I find out if my old books are worth anything?

Work through the books in this order. First, see whether you have sets or single books. Then read the spines and title pages, check whether each set is complete, and look honestly at the condition. Finally, check the date on anything that looks really old, because a few law books are worth money as rare books.

Most of this you can do standing at the shelves with your phone, taking photos as you go. Only the title pages mean taking a book down. Our guide to what makes old law books worth something explains why each of these things matters, and here is how to check them.

Check whether you have a set or single books

Law books are mostly bought and sold as sets, so this is the first thing to find out.

A set is easy to spot: the same title runs along the spines of a whole shelf, with the volume numbers or years climbing as you go. The big sets are law reports, which are series of judges' decisions in court cases published one volume after another, and legal encyclopaedias such as Halsbury's Laws of England. Practitioner texts, the reference books lawyers work from, often come in several volumes too.

Single textbooks, the kind bought for a law degree, are a different matter. We do not buy them, and they have their own routes, which our guide to what to do with old law books sets out.

Read the spine and the title page

To look a book up, or to ask a bookseller about it, you need four details: the title, the author's name, the date of publication and the publisher's name. That is the advice of the Antiquarian Booksellers' Association, the trade body for dealers in rare books.

The spine usually gives you the title and often the edition. The title page, near the front of the book, gives you the rest. The edition matters most for practitioner texts and encyclopaedias, because lawyers working from them need the current edition, so a newer one is worth more than an old one.

On older books, look at the foot of the title page. That is where you usually find the imprint, a short block that gives the place of publication, the name of the printer or publisher, and the date. If the title page has no date, try the last printed page, where some early books carry the same details.

Dates on old title pages are often in Roman numerals. MDCCLXV, for example, is 1765: M is 1,000, DCC is 700, LX is 60 and V is 5.

Check whether the set is complete

For a set, completeness usually matters more than anything else. A run with no gaps can be sold on as a complete set, while a run with missing volumes means the next owner has to hunt them down, which is why gaps bring the value down.

So note the first and last volume or year on each set, and look along the shelf for any gaps in between. For some sets you can check the count against the full number of volumes:

• The English Reports: 178 volumes, published between 1900 and 1932.
• Halsbury's Laws of England, fourth edition: 56 volumes, published between 1973 and 1987.
• Halsbury's Laws of England, fifth edition: 103 volumes, published since 2008.
• Halsbury's Statutes, fourth edition: 50 volumes, published between 1985 and 1992.

With the Halsbury's sets, the count is a starting point. Their volumes are reissued when the law changes, and some reissues come in several parts, so a set that was kept up to date can hold more books than these numbers. The legal bookseller Wildy & Sons records that the fourth edition of Halsbury's Laws now runs to 80 volumes.

Look for the supplements, index volumes and updating binders as well. They belong to the set, so if they are on another shelf, put them back beside it.

Check the condition

The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association says the condition of a book makes a huge difference to its selling price, and that holds for law books of every age. Water damage, smoke damage and mould all bring the value down, and so do loose or broken bindings.

It helps to know the words booksellers use for leather and cloth bindings, so you can describe your books the way a buyer will. A binding is rubbed when the surface is scuffed but the board underneath does not show through, and worn when the board does show through. The joints are the outside joins between the covers and the spine, and booksellers call them starting, cracked or split as they come apart.

Library stamps and labels are worth mentioning too. When you photograph a set, include the worst of the bindings, so whoever values it sees the set as it really is.

How do I find out if an old book is valuable?

A few law books are worth money as old books, whatever law is printed in them. The Law Society's guide to disposing of a law library says that "legal books are more likely to be valuable if they were printed before 1800." So the date on the title page is the first thing to check.

Then look for signs of who owned the book before: a name written inside, a bookplate, a library stamp, or handwritten notes in the margins. The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association's guide to describing books says the prior ownership of a book "is always of interest", and that notes written at the time a book was in use are "now attracting considerable attention from scholars and librarians." Leave them all exactly where they are.

Next, look the book up. The association's Book Search searches the books for sale from around 2,000 booksellers in the International League of Antiquarian Booksellers, so it shows you what dealers are asking for copies like yours. Expect a bookseller to buy for a good deal less than those prices, the association says, to allow for their costs and profit. Start with just a few details, such as the title and the date, and add more if too many books come up.

Finally, ask an expert. The Law Society suggests an auctioneer for rare legal books, and names Bloomsbury Auctions, Sotheby's and Bonhams as auctioneers that deal with them. Before you choose one, it says to check that the auctioneer has experience of selling legal material, to ask to see the catalogue from a similar sale, and to have a list of your books ready with their editions and dates. The Antiquarian Booksellers' Association also lets you search its members by speciality, so you can find a dealer who knows law books.

We buy rare law books too. If you think there is one among a collection, include a photo of its title page with your other photos and tell us.

Ask for the right kind of valuation

There are two kinds of valuation, and it helps to know which one you want. The Law Society explains the difference: an insurance valuation is the cost of replacing the books, and a sale valuation is what you could expect to make by selling them. Insurance valuations tend to be higher, so be clear which one you are asking for.

A valuation from a buyer like us is a sale valuation. It tells you what we can pay for the books.

Getting a free valuation for old law books

If you have sets, the quickest way to find out what they are worth is to ask us. Use the photos you took while checking the shelves, as long as each bay is taken straight on with the spines readable, and add a close-up of the title page of anything you think is old. Send them through our valuation form, or WhatsApp them to 07920 748314, and we will give you a free sale valuation of the sets we can buy.

If you decide to sell once you know what the sets are worth, we pack them straight from the shelves and collect them free from anywhere in the UK. Where your checks suggest that part of the collection has little resale value, we can talk about collecting that part free of charge, so it does not stay behind on the shelves. The full list of law books we buy shows which series we look for, and our checklist for preparing a law library for collection covers the rest.