House plan books appeal to collectors in many fields.  This guide explains what they are, points out some of the reasons they are collected, and provides tips on buying them at reasonable prices. It emphasizes books produced in the United States.

House plan books, proper, are catalogs that present stock designs for homes (and sometimes for related structures such as garages or barns) and offer working plans (working drawings, specifications, materials lists) for sale to prospective builders.  Fairly assimilated to such stock plan books are catalogs designed to sell kit houses, prefabricated houses, or modular homes.  Stock plans are designs that are intended to be sold to any number of customers, as distinct from custom designs that an architect makes for the one-time use of one particular client.  Books of stock plans thus form part of the broader category of trade catalogs.

As marketing materials, plan books were almost always designed and produced to have strong eye appeal.  They evolved in the late 19th century out of the older "pattern book" genre of  books that presented model designs and perhaps promoted the practices of particular architects but did not offer stock plans for sale.  In the 1990s they began to be supplemented or even replaced by CDs, and in the 21st century are being supplanted by stock-plan websites.

House plan books are strongly associated with Anglo-American culture.  Although examples can be found from many countries, they seem to have been most prevalent in (and often exported from) the United States, Great Britain, Canada, and other Commonwealth countries such as Australia.   They were produced in especially large numbers during times when, for various socio-economic reasons, the marketing of construction services intensified either to generate or meet increased demand.  For instance, there was a huge wave of plan-book production in the United States between the mid-1940s and the mid-1950s to meet the housing demands of returning GI's and others who could take advantage of new opportunities for home financing.

A large number of individuals and small companies produced plan books over the twentieth century, but perhaps the lion's share was produced by a relatively small number of firms intensively exploiting the stock plan market.  Large producers included C. Lane Bowes and National Plan Service of Illinois, the Brown-Blodgett Company of Minnesota, the L. F. Garlinghouse Company of Kansas (later Connecticut), Home Building Plan Service of Oregon, Standard Homes Plan Service of DC (later North Carolina), Lane Publishing of California, and Home Planners Inc. of Michigan (later Arizona).  Many New York City publishers issued plan books, as did United States and other government agencies.  Various firms and organizations with interests in the construction sector (banks, building-materials manufacturers, appliance manufacturers, contractors, real estate developers, etc.) often issued plan books.

For reasons related to the historical facts discussed above, plan books may be organized typologically:

A. Books intended to market construction documents;

B. Books intended to market construction services;

C.Books intended to market entire houses or house-building kits;

D. Books intended to promote the use of specific materials or other components in home building;

E. Books intended to promote certain real-estate developments;

F. Books intended to serve as souvenirs of exhibitions or trade shows;

G. Books documenting the results of design competitions.

In many cases a plan book's distributor was different from its publisher, and many publishers would customize books for particular distributors.  It is consequently not always easy to tell what company actually published a book that was distributed by, say, a lumber company whose name was prominently imprinted on a cover.  Publishers sometimes issued identical books with slightly variant titles or variant cover designs.  They seldom used terms like "edition" in conformity with the usage of the mainstream publishing world.  For those reasons, plan books tend to be hard to describe accurately.

Originally addressed mainly to individuals contemplating the construction of a home, and to speculative builders needing a steady supply of construction documents at low cost, vintage house plan books command the attention of collectors for many reasons.Some of the reasons people collect plan books include:

(1) historical interest, since they provide documentation of the history of architecture, the history of construction, the history of marketing, and the history of lifestyles;

(2) aesthetic or technological interest, since they provide examples of changing printing techniques and graphic design across time;

(3) practical artistic interest, since their contents can provide inspiration to artists, designers, or architects working today;

(4) decorative interest, since they may make attractive items for display;

(5) associational interest, arising out of their place of publication or distribution.

At the present time, most collectors of plan books probably form part of the nostalgia market, interested in them because of their "retro" looks and as reminders of the homes and neighborhoods of their childhood.

Individuals contemplating the erection of a house to a design from a vintage plan book are cautioned that old designs are not likely to conform to current building codes.  Also, the plans in many plan books were intentionally printed with slight errors in dimension to discourage the use of the plans without ordering the corresponding full-size construction documents.  The unauthorized use or adaptation of plans found in vintage or more recent plan books can violate copyright law.

The way house plan books were orignally used has greatly influenced the conditions in which they are now found on the collectibles market.  They were meant to be literally consumed in the process of generating an order for a set of blueprints, and in many cases that happened.  Plan books tended to be well thumbed through many times, annotated, and dog-eared.  Sometimes pages were torn out or specific illustrations (or order blanks) clipped out.  Price lists or order blanks laid in rather than bound in have disappeared in many cases because they were used as intended.  Collectors must choose to regard such marks of use either as defects or as historical evidence, and then judge the fairness of prices accordingly.

In collecting house plan books, as in building any collection, it helps to have a collecting plan (or goal), as well as to be mindful both of one's budget and of prevailing prices.  One tends to pay the right amount when a purchase is made on the basis of "need" to fill a genuine gap in a projected collection, rather than on that of a "want," which may actually be an impulse.  One should also be mindful of fads (for example, the recent "bungalow craze" or the current enthusiasm for "Sears Houses") that themselves are fed by trends in scholarly or popular publishing, and that can result in price bubbles.  It is important to remember that house plan books were mass produced.  An estimated 6.5 MILLION were sold in the United States alone in fiscal 1966-67 -- which means that even more were produced!

The following tips may help prospective buyers of house plan books on Ebay to place realistic bids.

Know the prevailing retail value of an item (or of similar items), which may be obtained by checking the websites of various antiquarian booksellers.

Try to determine the relative scarcity of an item, or of items from a particular publisher, which may be judged by consulting union library catalogs such as the WorldCat database accessible through many public and academic libraries. But bear in mind that neither scarcity on the market, nor infrequency in public collections, necessarily equates with absolute rarirty; also that rarity in and of itself is no indicator of historic significance. 

Beware of puffery in headings and other parts of Ebay listings for plan books.  The words "rare" and "wow" seldom have any real meaning in these contexts.  Words like "retro," "cool," and "atomic" are not so much descriptors as attention-grabbers.  The adverb, "extremely," applied to any adjective almost always flags puffery.  ("Extremely rare" books, for instance, do not come up for auction every few weeks or every few months, or even every few years.)   The phrases, "Eames Era" or "Eichler Era," have no meaning in scholarship.  They are instead merely marketing hooks intended to blur the distinction between artifacts truly associated with certain famous people and those unrelated to their careers except by a rough coincidence of date.  Such tenuous or imaginary associations may well inflate a price, but cannot increase a value. "Mid-century Modern" is a legitimate term but is often abused in the description of plan books containing mostly traditional designs interspersed with a  handful of "contemporary" ones.  The same goes for "Arts and Crafts," frequently seen in descriptions of plan books from the early 1900s even when they depict mass-produced designs with little or no philosophical or even superficially stylistic resemblance to the true products of that movement (which made very little use of plan books for the dissemination of its architecture, preferring magazines).  "Art Deco" is another much abused term, used to tag anything from the 1920s or 1930s regardless of whether it displays any content that is recognizably Art Deco in style (and Art Deco architecture is extremely rare amongst plan-book designs, as indeed it also is in American domestic architecture in general).  If such misleading terminology in headings did not lead to more and higher bids from naive buyers, it is unlikely that sellers would use so much of it.  Bidding based on puffed up descriptions will often lead to overpaying for items.

Beware of the ambiguity of the word "copy" in listings for publications. "Copy" may mean either a perfectly legitimate vintage instance of a book, or else a scan/photocopy whose value will never equal (let alone exceed)  the amount of the opening bid. Beware alse of the ambiguity of the word "ad": some plan books WERE themselves ads, but there were also innumerable ads for plan books which can be found offered in the form of tearsheets, scans, or photocopies -- and much less often as (truly collectible) broadsheets.

Vintage plan books are sold today alongside digitized (PDF) versions of such books, and mass-market reprints (such as those produced by Dover Publications but also by some smaller companies and internet-based entrepreneurs).  In some case a digitized copy or a reprint is what will best serve the purpose; but that purpose will, of course, never be to provide the benefits of owning a real collectible.

Most vintage plan books will have resale value, or be prized donations some day to local historical societies or libraries.  Treating these often fragile items with care will protect your investment and give you the satisfaction of preserving important pieces of the modern heritage.

A NOTE ON SHIPPING CHARGES: Within the United States, it should not cost more than a couple of bucks to package and mail (via Media Mail) the typical house-plan book or booklet.  Of course, "flat rate" media-mail charges on Ebay frequently range upwards of four dollars.  When placing bids, thererfore, it's always a good idea to reduce your maximum bid by the difference between the stated shipping charge and the probable actual shipping cost (typically, two to three dollars).