The Market for Ford First Editions

By Andrew Gustar

The market for books is notoriously tricky to quantify. It is easy to find which titles have been published, but very hard to discover how many copies were printed or actually sold. In isolated cases there may be anecdotal information, but in general it is extremely difficult to assess a book’s initial reception in terms of sales, or to decide whether an apparently scarce first edition is really worth the hefty price tag.

A century on, the only echoes of the original market for Ford’s books lie in countless bookshelves and catalogues around the world, and in the second-hand trade in his early editions. To shed some light on this trade, I decided to gather data on Ford’s first editions listed by online booksellers. Once or twice a week between 9 February 2022 and 25 January 2025 I collected the results of the same search for Ford first editions on bookfinder.com.¹ This produced over 180,000 individual records, including details of the books, names and locations of the booksellers, and prices.

Bookfinder searches across several online platforms including Amazon, Abebooks, Alibris, Biblio, ZVAB, eBay, and others. Booksellers often list books across multiple platforms, so there was a lot of duplication in the data. However, the description of each book (publisher, size, condition, binding, provenance, inscriptions, defects, etc) did not change from week to week, and was almost identical across platforms, so it was relatively straightforward (though time-consuming) to identify 696 distinct copies of Ford first editions, and track the periods during which they were offered for sale.

Identifying a first edition is not always straightforward. My guide was Harvey’s invaluable Bibliography,² which contains publishers and dates, as well as explanations of various peculiarities related to certain books. I rejected listings with a later date or a different publisher than those given by Harvey. In one or two cases, there is more than one candidate for the first edition – such as the first US publication of The Last Post, for which both the Literary Guild of America and the A & C Boni versions have been included.

Locations

Two-thirds of the listings (456) were from booksellers in the United States and almost a quarter (162) were in the UK. The remaining 11% were located in Canada (30), Australia and New Zealand (18), continental Europe (17), Ireland (7), South Africa (5), and one in Argentina. A total of 358 books (51%) were published in the UK, and 337 in the US, with one from France (a copy of Women and Men, Paris: 1923).

As might be expected, the UK editions have travelled much more widely than those from the US: 35% of the books for sale in the US were published in the UK, but only 10% of those for sale in the UK were published in the US. Of the 48 books located beyond the UK or North America, 41 (85%) of them were UK editions.

Of the 344 booksellers (which were split geographically in about the same proportions as the books), 69% were only represented by a single book. Just nine sellers (five in the US, four in the UK) offered ten or more Ford first editions over the period, accounting for 21% of the total listings.

Common and Rare Titles

The most common book to appear in these results was The Nature of a Crime, Ford’s collaboration with Joseph Conrad, originally serialised in The English Review in 1909 but only published in book form shortly after Conrad’s death in 1924. The 49 copies of the first UK edition, plus 43 of the US edition, account for over 13% of the data. Close behind them are Great Trade Route (US edition) with 37 listings, The Last Post (US) with 35, A Man Could Stand Up– (US) with 24, and the UK edition of Joseph Conrad with 16.

At the other end of the scale, the books appearing in the data just once were The Brown Owl (US 1891), The Feather (US 1892), The Benefactor (1905), An English Girl (1907), Privy Seal (1907), Mr. Apollo (1908), Songs from London (1910), High Germany (1912), and Women and Men (1923). The copies of The Brown Owl and An English Girl sold within a month or two, and The Benefactor and High Germany sold within six and ten months respectively. Both Privy Seal and Women and Men remained unsold.

Rarer still are those books that were not listed for sale at all. Ford’s first editions that did not come onto the market over the period were The Shifting of the Fire (1892), The Questions at the Well (1893), Poems for Pictures (1900), The Face of the Night (1904), Christina’s Fairy Book (1906), From Inland and Other Poems (1907), The Simple Life Limited (1911), The Desirable Alien (with Violet Hunt, 1913), The Young Lovell (1913), This Monstrous Regiment of Women (1913), Antwerp (1915), A House (1921), Some Do Not… (UK 1924), Return to Yesterday (UK 1931), and When the Wicked Man (UK 1932).

Some Do Not…, the first of the Parade’s End series, is perhaps a surprising member of this list. Harvey says that “the English edition [of Some Do Not…] went into at least three editions” (p.58), but the scarcity of the first UK edition perhaps reflects the publisher’s initial expectations being relatively low. Harvey quotes Douglas Goldring in Trained for Genius (New York: E P Dutton, 1949, p.215):³

The reason for the reluctance of London publishers to offer Ford attractive terms was due to the painful fact that his earlier books had not proved commercially profitable. Shortly after the London publication of Some Do Not, the writer encountered Mr Gerald Duckworth, the most faithful of Ford’s London publishers, who had recently issued it. Mr Duckworth expressed himself full of admiration for Ford’s works, but added that “the trouble is, we can’t sell the old boy”.

Harvey also notes that, while the US edition of When the Wicked Man was “published on May 20 [and] reprinted on May 23 [1931]”, the first UK edition a year later sold just 1,396 of the 2,984 print run, with the remainder, apart from a few promotional copies, being pulped. This lack of commercial success perhaps came as no surprise to Ford himself, who had added a note to the UK edition saying “I publish this novel in England only with reluctance and under the action of a force majeure as to whose incidence I cannot here be explicit”.

This list of absent books includes several of Ford’s poetry publications, some of which were very short. The Questions at the Well and Poems for Pictures had fewer than 70 pages, From Inland had 40, A House had 24 pages, and Antwerp just four.

Turnover

Although it is impossible to be certain that the disappearance of a book from these listings indicates that it was sold, this is the likely explanation in most cases. Among the 696 books listed there were 317 sales (46%) over the period, 323 were unsold, and 56 were probably withdrawn.⁴

On average, the books sold at the rate of 2.2% per month. That implies a ‘half-life’ (the time it would take for half of the books to sell) of around 2½ years. Among those books with ten or more copies in the dataset, the UK edition of Joseph Conrad sold at about twice this average rate, and sales of the UK edition of It Was the Nightingale were about 60% faster than average. On the other hand, sales of On Heaven, It Was the Nightingale (US), A Little Less than Gods (US), and The Rash Act (US) were all at less than half of the average rate. Ford’s poetry, overall, sold about 40% slower than average.

A few books saw no sales at all over the period, although none of these were represented by more than five copies, so we cannot read too much into this. Those with no sales but at least three copies listed were The Inheritors (UK, with Conrad), Thus to Revisit, Collected Poems (US 1936), and both Ancient Lights and its US version Memories and Impressions.

Prices

The prices paid for Ford first editions show enormous variation from a few pounds to several thousands, and do not appear to be significantly correlated with publication dates, rates of sale, or even scarcity. Whilst first edition copies of The Good Soldier certainly command a premium price, this does not seem to be the case for any other titles. There is, however, a clear correlation with genre, with the children’s books being priced some way above the average, and the memoirs, literary criticism and biographies well below (see the summary table at the bottom of this page).

Whatever the title, Ford’s signature or inscription typically adds around £1,200 to the price, and the existence of an original dust jacket will push the price up by around £120.

One interesting metric is the price differential between sold and unsold copies. For Ford’s post-1919 titles, unsold copies are listed at about double the price of those that sold, i.e. the cheaper copies sell better. Conversely, for pre-war books, the more expensive copies sell better. This suggests that the earlier books are more sought after as physical objects (where collectors will pay a premium for a fine example), whereas the later publications are purchased primarily for their textual content (where a legible cheap copy is just as good as an expensive one).

Conclusions

Ford enthusiasts will probably not be surprised by the overall pattern of these results, although it is interesting to have some numbers showing quite how rare certain books are, or how the market varies by geography, genre or publication date.

Ultimately the prices of books depend on the balance of supply and demand, and the quality of individual copies, so it is very difficult to generalise. First editions, of course, only reflect the author’s and/or publisher’s initial guess at how successful a book is likely to be. With When the Wicked Man in the UK these expectations were over-optimistic, and with Some Do Not… they were too low (although both of these examples resulted in rare first editions a century later). So the scarcity of first editions is more a reflection of a publisher’s ability to predict the market, rather than being a useful measure of a book’s success or desirability, for which an analysis of second and subsequent editions would perhaps be more instructive.

This analysis is based on just 700 books during a particular three year period, considers only online sales (ignoring physical bookshops, book fairs, private sales, auctions, and parts of the world not well covered by these online platforms), and is reliant on the accuracy and completeness of booksellers’ descriptions. It therefore may contain a few errors, misattributions and duplicate records. Some of the numbers are rather small, and are thus unlikely to be representative of the larger population of books, so they cannot be reliably used for drawing broader conclusions.

Whilst many of Ford’s books are scarce, they are also little known, so demand is often even lower than the supply. This means that it is certainly possible to pick up affordable first editions of many of his books. Despite some of the indications above, there are even occasional opportunities to acquire very rare copies at reasonable prices.

Summary tables

The following table summarises the results for each of Ford’s first editions. It can be sorted using the arrows in the column headings, or filtered for particular words using the search box.

Copies Listed is the total number of distinct books listed for sale at some point during the period (1081 days from 9 February 2022 to 25 January 2025), Copies Sold is the number of those that had sold by the end of the period. Sold per Month is the proportion of listed books that, on average, sold each month. Average Sold Price is the average listed price for the copies that sold, and Average Unsold Price is the average listed price for the copies remaining unsold.

The average prices and rates of sale should be treated with caution for books with fewer than about ten copies listed, as such small numbers of cases are unlikely to be representative of typical listings.

The following table provides the same information as above, but summarised by category and whether publication was before or after 1919.

1. The search was for author “Ford Madox”, used first editions, hardcover, published before 1940, with prices in pounds sterling. The results included publications under the names Hueffer and Daniel Chaucer, and Ford’s collaborations with Joseph Conrad and Violet Hunt. I ignored miscellanea such as compilations, short stories, articles, serialisations, Ford as translator, forewords by Ford, etc. ↩︎
2. David Dow Harvey, Ford Madox Ford, 1873-1939: Bibliography of Works and Criticism (Princeton University Press, 1962). ↩︎
3. Originally published in the UK as The Last Pre-Raphaelite (London: Macdonald, 1948). ↩︎
4. Books were deemed to be withdrawn, rather than sold, when all of the books of a seller with three or more Ford listings disappeared at the same time – suggesting that the seller had for some reason withdrawn from the platforms. ↩︎