1938 AT guide to Maine on Ebay

[peakbagger]

A fairly rare 1938 Guide to the Appalachian Trail in Maine is up on Ebay. It is the 3rd edition which is actually the first edition that has the entire AT in Maine route. The prior second edition published a few years earlier had large sections of trail that were not built yet. The large dam on the upper Dead River (that formed Flagstaff Lake) near Mt Bigelow was not built yet and the original AT route is now underwater replaced with a section of the older Arnold Trail portage route between the Kennebec and the upper Dead River. Much of the trail especially in Western Maine originally stayed off the ridgelines going from sporting camp to sporting camp as fires on private land were not allowed. It eventually was relocated onto the ridgelines starting in the nineteen seventies. I have no financial interest in the listing, as I already have a second and third but these do not come up often. The asking price is not cheap so I expect only a few folks would be interested. I have never seen the first edition of this guide, but I have heard the Maine State Library may have one.

Post WW2 versions do come up more often as MATC used the same guide into the fifties with annual supplements.

[TwoSpirits]

That is VERY cool.

[Montana Mac]

Interestingly I found it listed on two other sites. The pictures on the other sites show it with a green cover - the one on Ebay shows a white cover - they are all fairly close in the asking price

[peakbagger]

I think the one in the Ebay listing is just a faded cover. The ones I have are green A bit less green than the green used on whiteblaze as a background. Its got a velour (fuzzy) finish. I have no doubt the prices are close, most dealers have no clue what they are looking at and look up the value on a used book site like Abe books. In many cases those listings have been there for years. Anyone serious about buying one would not pay asking. The other thing that happens is "bots" will go wild on occasion and get into virtual bidding wars, I have seen some of Wingfoot's early AT guides priced up in the thousands. I dont think anyone buys them at that price, some bot just went wild.

I also used to collect old AMC hiking guides for the white mountains. The older AMC guides were in quite a demand and they came up on Ebay quite often as many were sold and they show up in estate and yard sales. I got a few nice ones over the years. There are a lot of hikers in the tech crowd in Boston that had more money than time and they started buying them and drove up the cost. It became a status symbol to own the complete set. I know some folks who started buying them prior to the boom and do have complete sets acquired over the years at a far lower cost.

A dealer in NH called the Book Moose started scarfing up any online and drove up the prices on the older editions. He also well known enough that other dealers sell to him. I think he also sells on Abe. He sells early editions of the AMC guides from the early 1900s and sells them in the hundreds to thousands range. They are to me less valuable than the AT guides as the White Mountain trails have rarely changed with the exception of the big change in after the forest fires in the 1940s. I do not have the complete set but do have representative guides of most eras. The funny thing is in most cases when the new editions of the later AMC guides came out, the clubs and stores that had them in stock would throw the old ones in the dumpster. I think MATC just kept selling the old version with a supplement included until the stock of the old guides ran out. The forties edition came with aluminum binding posts that could be unscrewed to remove and insert pages. Its also a "brick", nothing I would want to carry unless I field stripped it. Later on MATC just went to strip maps with the info needed printed on the back with the extraneous stuff in separate book that came with the map set.