A Book Still Worth Reading: Anatomy of an Auction
- By Bruce McKinney
A book well worth reading
The rare book business is the art of identifying attractive material, stocking it and then connecting with those who have the desire and resources to acquire it. The business takes many forms, an alchemy of shops and locations, catalogues and connections. However the business is structured all dealers share the need to efficiently acquire stock. For collectors and institutions the challenges are different. Theirs are to conceptualize a concentration and identify reliable sources from which to acquire. Setting between them are auctions that provide fleeting opportunities to acquire desirable material, often at attractive prices. Dealers, with years of experience, understand the ephemeral availability of material at auction, monitor sales closely and buy a majority of the lots offered. Collectors, at least at the outset of their collecting careers, are less likely to buy at them. The relationship between dealers, collectors and the auctions is therefore ever changing. Dealers, for their part, often exaggerate the risks of buying at auction while auction houses tend to minimize such concerns. The truth lies somewhere in between. Some institutions and collectors become auction buyers but the majority does not. Sorting all this out adds drama to the quest for books. Doing it correctly adds value and or reduces wasteful spending. At every stage information and experience are crucial. Dealers have historically gained theirs via apprenticeship, as collectors, networking and through the use of extensive resources. Old-time dealers frequently had hundreds, even thousands of reference materials. Collectors for the most part have relied on dealers for perspective, institutions a combination of resources and advice. As the following account suggests you can never know enough.
I recently read a fascinating book, Anatomy of an Auction, written by Arthur Freeman and Janet Ing Freeman. It’s hardly a new book but neither is it an old story. The Book Collector published it in 1990. It is the account of an important auction, the dispersal of the property and contents of Ruxley Lodge in Claygate, near Esher, in Surrey England by estate auctioneers and valuers, Castiglione & Scott. Included in the eight-day event were three days of book sales that were understood by the book trade to include exceptional material of immense value but that was not fully understood by the auctioneers. This knowledge on the one side and naivety on the other would set the stage for such a blatant abuse of the consignor that eight years later dealer “ringing” would be made a criminal act. At the time such rings were legal. This book is as it says, an anatomy of an auction, this auction.
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A Book Still Worth Reading: Anatomy of an Auction
- By Bruce McKinney
Three hundred years of book collecting
By many accounts the auctioneers enjoyed a strong reputation and did not blunder altogether. They disposed of the estate’s paintings, furniture and real estate effectively while failing badly with the books. The printed holdings they were charged to sell were the culmination of three hundred years of collecting by the Foley family that had intermittently exercised extraordinary judgment in their acquisitions. A financially pressed nineteen-year-old heir ordered the estate dispersed in 1919 and failed badly in his choice of auctioneers. He is not blameless.
The auction house then failed to appreciate what they was entrusted to sell and then failed again to guard against the English rare book trade that was known upon occasion to organize itself as a ring, to steal libraries at auction book by book by inviting potential bidders into a conspiracy to limit the public auction bidding. Their lure was the opportunity to share in gains on the public prices achieved in the post-auction ring auctions conducted immediately following the public sale. Participants would receive both a share of those gains and also have the opportunity to bid on all items now removed from public view. In this sale the ring purchased 447 of 641 items and by all accounts the bulk of the valuable material.
The books were highly unusual, most very old, many unique. Resources were at hand to establish values and the auctioneers would have known about them. Book Auction Prices, an English publication, had published annual volumes since 1903. Castiglione & Scott’s failure to consult or worse yet, possibly to willfully ignore them, would amount to dereliction. Auction houses then as now were responsible for understanding what they were selling and explaining it clearly. They failed to do this. Subsequent to the sale it would be uncovered that the publishers of these records, Henry Stevens, Sons & Stiles, themselves dealers, were ring members. In their next annual edition of Book Auction Records [1920] they omitted any reference to the sale.
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A Book Still Worth Reading: Anatomy of an Auction
- By Bruce McKinney
The garden of good and evil
Whether through incompetence, or the auctioneer’s criminal complicity, - a possibility given the magnitude of their failure and the documented inclusion of several unidentified non-bidding participants in the ring, the stage was set for a ring, composed of some eighty complicit dealers, to agree among themselves to have only one representative of their coterie bid on each item. To avoid the impression of ‘ringing’ they gave the responsibility for bidding to a group of shills in exchange for a share of the certain to be realized profits that would arise from the subsequent private re-auctions to be held by the conspirators once the original sale was completed. To establish the highest price any of the ringers would pay, the premium above the original auction price to be shared by all conspirators equally, a series of after-auctions was held. To ensure the ring bought all books its members wanted they when necessary ran up outside bidders to prices approaching retail, in this way killing outside interest in continuing to bid. The auction house’s incompetence in description and weak promotion did the rest.
The books in the original sale brought £3,714 of which the ring paid £3,161 for 447 lots. They ignored the rubbish and in other cases made competitors pay dearly. Then in four subsequent rounds of private bidding ring members bid and paid in an additional £15,981 to establish the final prices and ultimate winners for the 447 lots and then divided the excess premium equally for the first two rounds of post-sale bidding and then proportionately to the ever smaller pools competing for the most valuable material. The fact that records were kept and that Arthur and Janet Freeman carefully researched and told the story in 1990 is why it comes down to us today. Their account confirms the ring’s collusion and conveniently calculates its scale. What the ring paid £3,161 to acquire they immediately re-priced among themselves at £19,142, the original winning auction bids of £3,161 pounds and their additional premium of £15,981. In doing this they thwarted the consignor and the auctioneers causing the books to pass to them for only 16.5% of what they immediately after agreed to pay.
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A Book Still Worth Reading: Anatomy of an Auction
- By Bruce McKinney
Subsequent sales used the same catalogues with new prices in code
The re-sales worked this way.
All Items bought by the ring were offered in a first re-auction. Those items for which no further advance was offered were declared the property of the initial high bidder. Where there were higher bids control of the item shifted from the original named buyer to the new owner. This ownership in turn was then potentially contested in the second re-auction. For those items for which no higher bids were offered the second round owner then won the lot. Items receiving higher bids became the property of the new winner who then was required to submit their items to one more round of bidding. In the final round all high bids were declared winners and the ring bidding ended. In this way items that brought a pittance in the public auction rose, in many cases, to astronomical levels during the succession of re-auctions, in one case realizing 60 times what it brought in the public sale.
Members of the ring then divided all monies paid in excess of the original winning bids equally for the first two rounds to all participants and then among continuing bidders in the final two rounds. For those who participated through to the final round the prize was £470 pounds each [roughly equal to a year’s income at that time for most dealers] intended to buy their silence. For participants in the first two rounds their take was £165.
This may not at that time have been illegal but it was certainly immoral. No doubt, many of these ring member’s prior generations had sold the Foleys some of their books.
Later accusations and recriminations would breach the silence out after a few of the ring participants concluded others in the group had acted dishonestly. Shocking!
How could this happen?
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A Book Still Worth Reading: Anatomy of an Auction
- By Bruce McKinney
Rings were not outlawed in the United Kingdom until 1928. What these dealers did was legal as well as obviously unethical. We know they understood this very well because they went to great lengths to cover it up. That they screwed a seller so completely would, if widely known, certainly have damaged their reputations and jeopardized their appointments, those that had them, as sellers to the King. The story nevertheless leached out over the next few years because of disagreements among ring members. In time, detailed records of one of the participants came to light forming the basis for this book.
In the final analysis the final prices paid in the re-auctions appear to have been appropriate. Had the consignor received these proceeds the outcome would have been fair. That dealers pocketed two thirds of the auction proceeds is unconscionable.
Every day persons in pursuit of books seize every legitimate advantage to acquire them. A sharp-eyed observer will legitimately acquire an inaccurately described or significantly undervalued book. This is simply fair play. In fact, the reading of catalogues is often pursued exclusively for detecting such material. But if buyers band together for the purpose of denying the consignor fair value then a line is crossed. The ringers in cahoots in the Ruxley Ridge sale knew the practice to be unsavory and went to great lengths to hide it and when outed, simply claimed it was not illegal, the faintest of fig coverings. The publicity attendant to the sale led directly to laws in 1927 that elevated the reprehensible behavior from the immoral to the illegal.
The behavior is now illegal. The impulse to engage in such undertakings no doubt lives on. The book should be republished.
Copies of this book are hard to come by. There were recently a dozen copies listed for sale on the Americana Exchange, Amazon, eBay and Abebooks.
In 2007 material relating to this sale was sold by Bloomsbury.
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A Book Still Worth Reading: Anatomy of an Auction
- By Bruce McKinney
A reference to this sale appears in Sotheran’s recently published history. It provides perspective on the collecting and selling climate in that era.
Link to 1920 auction records It contains no records from this sale, the second or third most important that year. It's publishers, Henry Stevens, Son and Stiles were members of the ring.
A keyword search in the AED for Foley bookplate and the year of printing date range 1450-1900 shows the first 50 of 57 records.
1450 – 1600 9 records
1601 – 1700 18 records
1701 – 1800 19 records
1801 – 1900 9 records
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