Off the top of my head right now I couldn’t tell you how many copies of Shakespeare’s sonnets I have. I get them for review, people give them to me as gifts. A common topic on the Reddit Shakespeare sub is, “How much is my copy of the sonnets worth?” And the answer is, typically, not much. Shakespeare has been published by a lot of different sources over a lot of years. It’s hardly rare and thus scarcely valuable.
Unless it’s one of only twelve copies of the 1899 Roycroft Press edition printed on vellum. In this case, according to the experts at Antiques Roadshow, it is worth up to $10,000.
So maybe there are some needles in those haystacks after all? Given that I just lost my job, perhaps I have to look through those stacks of mine and see if any Elizabethan lottery tickets are waiting for me!