This is the third installment of our blog series that monitors the changes in the rare book market at Nadir Kitap. While I was very optimistic about how overpriced autographed copies or 19th-century collected works would not be sold and rather a really rare Ottoman edition was sold quite quickly; I have observed that the market still insists on overpricing the said collected works and autographed copies rather than supply works that are rarely found on the market (including works as late as the 1970s).
Now, possibly related with high inflation and the rise in the currency rate, 55,000 TL is demanded for a 19th-century collection of primary sources. The same rise in prices can be seen in some autographed versions, such as those of Haluk Bilginer.
A letter written by Ercüment Atabay to Mina Urgan, thanking her on sending an autographed copy of her book on Hamlet, and gossiping about Halide Edip Adıvar (1984) is sold with the autographed copy. Image via Nadirkitap
Besides, some of the precious holdings of the late Shakespearean scholar Ercüment Atabay (1922-2018) are sold on Nadir Kitap. Seeing these makes me sad as these should belong to a collective Turkish Shakespeare Library, a dream that I hope to realise one day. I hope, though, that until that time these will find their place with enthusiastic scholars.
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Murat Öğütcü received his PhD degree with his dissertation entitled “Shakespeare’s Satirical Representation of the Elizabethan Court and the Nobility in His English History Plays” from the Department of English Language and Literature at Hacettepe University, Turkey, in 2016. From August 2012 to January 2013, he was a visiting scholar at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. He was the Head of the Department of Western Languages and Literatures at Munzur University, Turkey, between 2016 and 2021. He is currently working at Adıyaman University, Turkey. He is the General Editor of the “Turkish Shakespeares” Project that aims to introduce texts, productions and research on Turkish Shakespeares to a broader international audience of students, teachers, and researchers. He is among the regional editors of the Global Shakespeares Project and the World Shakespeare Bibliography. Along with MEMOs Events Editor, Aisha Hussain, he is co-Editor of the MEMOs edited collection, Materializing the East in Early Modern English Drama, forthcoming from Arden Studies in Early Modern Drama (2023). He has written book chapters and articles on his research interests that include early modern studies, Shakespeare, and cultural studies. His recent essays include “Materializing Mamluks and Turks in Salterne’s Tomumbeius” (Arden, 2023), “Contemporary Turkish Shakespeares: New Breath to Old Lives” (Arden, 2023), “Elizabethan Audience Gaze at History Plays: Liminal Time and Space in Shakespeare’s Richard II” (Routledge, 2022), “İkinci Katil [The Second Murderer]: A Turkish Adaptation of Shakespeare’s Scottish Play, Macbeth” (English Studies, 2021), “Of Pistols and Pikes: Weapons of War in Shakespeare’s Henry V” (PU Blaise Pascal, 2021), “Teaching Shakespeare Digitally: The Turkish Experience” (Research in Drama Education, 2020), “Masculine Dreams: Henry V and the Jacobean Politics of Court Performance” (Cambridge UP, 2019), “Julius Caesar: Tyrannicide Made Unpopular” (Parergon, 2017), and “Shakespeare in Animation” (Hacettepe, 2014).
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