Free Online Antique Price Guides & Resources

When you're looking for a quick valuable estimate for popular antiques and vintage collectibles, you can't beat these online resources.

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Price guides are listings of values for items - how much something sold for or may be expected to sell for. Such guides provide a starting point for determining the value of a particular item, but you need to understand how they work and how to use them if you want to get the most out of what the guides offer.

All Types of Antiques

A good guide will explain how it calculated the values, and it will be as recent as possible (check to see when the website was last updated.) Prices may come from auctions, shows, or other dealers, and may vary widely. In fact, one source alone does not give a true value. Auction prices may be too high because of a bidding war. Show prices may be high at the start of the show or lower at the end of a show. Dealer pricing may also show a wide range for the same items. Still, good price guides will continually update their sources.

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Kovels

Kovels has maintained up-to-date antiques pricing guides since 1958. Register for the free Basic subscription and receive access to their Price Guide with over 1,000,000 actual prices. Note that their Buyer's Price Guide is available only with a paid membership, along with some other areas of the website.

While most online price guides specialize in one type of antique, Kovels lists antiques in many categories. The website is easy to navigate, with antiques arranged according to type. There is also a chat board where you can ask questions and discuss your items with other collectors. If you have a piece of pottery or antique porcelain, you can easily identify it by using the images provided.

Additional Websites for Pricing Information

While not price guides, an online free valuation is useful. If you are interested in selling rare or valuable items, you may be able to obtain a suggested sales price from auction houses. Some, like Bonhams Auction House or Christie's, will offer free valuations, but remember, please: higher end items only, and not a chipped tea set.

If you have a specific piece that you're looking to find some pricing information on, you can check with other websites that provide realized sales listings or professional appraisals.

• Search at Antiques Roadshow. After all their appraisals over the years, you can find prices for just about anything online here, if you just do a bit of searching.
• eBay has a handy way to look up realized prices for any antique: you can do a search and under the "Categories" column to the left of your screen, head to the bottom and click on "Sold Listings." Voila - realized sales for comparison.

Book Market Values

Find the market value of your old books by checking several places online.

• Abe Books is an online database that allows you to search for antique and vintage books. You can compare several copies of the same book in different conditions to most closely match your own book to it. However, these are asking prices, so you need to find the outliers (very high or very low prices) and determine whether your books fit with them, or with the more average values.
• Biblio is another great website for identifying book values. They have articles about book collecting, and they link to thousands of dealers and their offerings. Again, keep in mind these are asking prices rather than realized values. If you want to know how or why a dealer is asking a certain price, you can easily email the shop.
• Some auction houses specialize in rare books, and you can view their catalogs and realized prices online. Swann and PBA Galleries allow you to see their realized prices for past sales.

The Smithsonian Libraries do not offer price guides, but they do have an excellent resource for helping you to identify your books, which goes hand in hand with assigning a value.