During my recent posts on magic books, my friend Richard Morrell asked about insuring your book collection. While I hope that you’ll never need to claim on your insurance, if you own a lot of magic books I would urge you to insure them … especially as it could be free with your building contents insurance.

While I hate to say it, before I continue I need to explain that I have no experience in the insurance world and can only tell you about the process I took in insuring my collection. Your experience may be different and what I say may not be necessarily correct. So, in short – please don’t sue me if things go wrong with your insurance!

With that out of the way, the insurance process starts with the long and laborious task of cataloguing your collection. There’s a lot to be said about that, so I’ll post a detailed article in a few days. For now, I’ll continue with the assumption that you have a detailed list of all your books.

Next, add up your estimated value of the books and contact your building insurer. If you don’t have one, I’d suggest considering getting one as it could be just as cheap as insuring your collection with an independent collection insurer. Most homeowner / letting insurers that I looked at seemed to allow you to register a collection of any sort onto your policy.

When I contacted my insurer, they asked for a basic summary of the type of books that I was storing. Not wanting to go into too much detail, I explained that they were textbooks for magicians and that seemed to be enough of a description for them. They told me that my house insurance allowed me to register a collection up to a maximum value of £10,000 without any additional charge to my policy. While my catalogue showed that my collection was worth a little more than that, I decided that for now, this would be an appropriate amount.

I could have insured my collection for more than that and in that scenario they would have charged me a set amount, per thousand pound. It actually wasn’t that much more expensive, so I will definitely add to my policy as my collection expands.

There’s one more problem that I haven’t yet considered: proving the value of my collection. An insurance expert that I talked to (you can call her Tyler Wilson’s girlfriend … and sister) told me that if I made a claim I would be expected to prove that the books were really worth the amount that I specified. Apparently, many industries have independent auditors that you can pay to approve your catalogue, but the magic world seems to be lacking that.

Other than that one piece of unfinished business, the process ended at that. It took just a few minutes (except for cataloguing the collection!) and really added to my peace of mind. It’s incredibly easy so I would suggest that you look into insuring your own magic books!

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 28th, 2007 at 11:29 am and is filed under Magic books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.