It's a well-kept secret but many people are selling their old cookbooks to raise some cash in these harder economic times. They want to keep it a secret so they don't have as much competition. Because they've found that after selling their own old cookbooks that they can easily pick up the best used, old, rare, vintage and antique cookbooks at garage sales, yard sales, estate sales, etc.

The average person will have no idea that their cook books are valuable and could bring them a lot of money. They just consider them to be old cookbooks with no real value. If they do wonder, they don't know how to go about finding out what they're worth. The average antique appraiser is not going to know without a lot of research either.

Vendors, who are in business to put on garage sales, are completely unaware of the value of any of these cook books. These old, collectible cookbooks go for unbelievable prices of fifty cents to a dollar easily.

You can take advantage of this and earn yourself some nice cash. You can sell cook books for much more than you bought them for.

Go through your own old cookbooks first, if you have any, or through you mother's grandmother's or relative's books to start with so you can build up a little knowledge.

What to look for. Although there are hundreds of cook books you can make a lot of money with you want to at first concentrate on the Better Homes and Garden Cookbooks and Betty Crocker Cookbooks. Look for those books that are from the 1950s and 1960s and older. Also look for the plaid covers or pie covers. You can also look for the Betty Crocker Boys and Girl Cookbooks. This is a good place to start because they're plentiful and still bring in a lot of money.

What you should forget about - newer cook books are generally not going to be sought after by collectors. They can easily get these. The only time you can make any money with these is if the publisher did a short print run and it's a small publishing company but this is usually not the case. Even then you may not get much for it.

You can sell cookbooks to collectors - old, rare, antique or vintage cookbooks - because they buy year 'round and the state of the economy doesn't make a bit of difference to them. In fact they know they can find even more as people are finding out that old cookbooks have value and selling them. Of course there's a lot more to learn and a lot of secrets in the cook book market but too much to go into in a short article. You can quickly learn how to sell old cookbooks.