Everyday on the way to work, I pass a cove that’s subject to a strong tide. When the cove’s bed is exposed, the sea birds go on a quest for any morsel that might have been left behind by the receding water.

That’s the best image I have of the current book market. We’re in an odd interregnum, when first editions of books with intrinsic value are worth more than the retail price printed on the book, let alone more than the price if the book is discounted besides.

This won’t last, like that tide that will flood back into the bay and deprive seagulls, cranes, pelicans and whatever ducks of their dinner, the market will correct itself eventually and prices for freshly minted first editions will soar. But for right now, smart indie bookstores know they can do a nice business by selling freshly minted, first edition books.

I don’t think it’s going to be just this year, but I’m seeing shortages in the book market like I haven’t seen since the old days of fifteen or twenty years ago when buyers had to claw and scratch to get a supply of a coveted book. Why, several weeks ago, I posted a strong review of a new volume that I’m told will not be reprinted. The first printing in cloth will be the only printing until the book is re-issued in trade paper.

So the volume I recommended is now in the process of disappearing from your local bookstore. When my rep told me that I couldn’t have a reorder, my response was: “Well, at least I have one”. I had bought it. I’m glad that I didn’t take the chance and ask for a review copy. I probably wouldn’t have gotten it.

My feeling is: get used to limited availability on cloth editions of valuable books. I think that’s what’s coming down the road. But that’s not a bad thing. Cloth volumes of intrinsic worth are increasingly becoming collectors’ items and that’s a good market to be into in the coming years. When you have fixed prices on anything, then the market becomes distorted if the price is wrong. That’s why I think prices for cloth books are set to soar, supplies shrink, and the market shift to being more of a collectible market.

A physical book can be a joy for generations if it’s as magnificently beautiful as The Conference of the Birds illustrated by Peter Sis and based on the 4,500 line poem by Sufi poet Farid un-Din Attar.

Imagine a venerated voice of spiritual wisdom from the poet of a lost civilization, printed in a gorgeous first edition at a reasonable price that you you can walk into a local bookstore and purchase today and that will probably be worth at least one hundred times its current value if it’s respected and preserved by your grandchildren until the time that they are as mature and sophisticated as you are. What are you waiting for? Buy the fucking book. A trade paper reissue is for suckers in my opinion.

Let’s leave the dreary world of commerce behind. The Conference of the Birds is a stellar production of the stages of life’s journey. It’s genuinely profound and it made me tear up when I reached the concluding pages, thanks to the inner wisdom of the great Persian poet and the inner vision of Peter Sis that he has somehow managed to put on the pages of a book that you…(yes, you!)…can have if you purchase it right now before it fades away into trade paperback martyrdom.

And there’s a legend about The Conference of the Birds illustrated by Peter Sis that I wanted to relate. It’s said that if you bring the book within six feet of an electronic reader at midnight on Christmas Eve, then the electronic device will crack and buckle and then shatter into a thousand pieces.