American Book Prices Current 1895-1995
Nicolas Barker Original
The idea of the cumulation of book-auction records arose out of necessity,
particularly in the business of selling rare books. The dealers were dependent
upon bibliographies, priced earnings, and other scattered media for estimates of
rarity or value. It was a time-consuming process, and a short-cut time-saver was
a desideratum. In England Auction Prices was established to take
care of the English and to some extent the Continental trade, but American books
were featured only in a very limited way.
Victor Hugo Paltsits
Introduction, American Book Prices Current (1944)
The inception of Book Prices Current (as it was actually titled) in
London in 1886 was indeed the result of the needs of the book trade. But how had
these needs come to make themselves felt? What other pressures had made the
existence of such a record necessary? For a century past, the European book
trade had been adjusting to the extraordinary bouleversement of habits
and ways of conducting business that had continued, hardly altered by the
invention of printing, since the Middle Ages. A sequence of events -- the
secularization of monastic houses and the dispossession of their libraries,
especially in Germany, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic wars -- had
wrenched an incalculable number of books from shelves that they had occupied for
centuries past.1 For decades the trade had been trying to digest this
vast surplus.
The process itself required regulation. This took three forms. The first was
restriction by subject matter. True, classification had occupied the minds of
scholars and the book trade since the publication of Conrad Gesner's
Bibliotheca universalis in 1545 (or even earlier), and the auction trade in
l7th-century Holland and l8th-century France had taken advantage of terms like
"Theologia" or "Belles-Lettres" to divide up what they offered. But these
titles when they existed, were little more than a lax method of indicating
content. Only Guillaume de Bure and his homonymous son had given them any rigor.
In England, classification was mostly limited to division by format, which
reflected the order in which the books had stood on the shelves before being
sent for sale.
The idea of forcing the conduit of books into more rigid categories to create a
market was one method of dealing with the superfluity. Its formalization was
largely due to the titanic figure of Jacques-Charles Brunet (1780-1867).2
His Manuel du libraire et de l'amateur des livres first appeared in
1803; its fifth edition, completed in 1865, had its final Supplément in
1880.
The second method of regulation was more brutal. It involved the creation of an
ideal content, by comparing multiple copies of the same book (or what appeared
to be the same book), and, largely on the basis of the collation formula
indicated by the binder's signatures, determining how many leaves it ought to
contain. If any copy failed to measure up to this ideal, another would be found
that could supplement it. Sometimes as many as six copies would be
"amalgamated" in this way and the residue thrown away. To us, this seems not
only an act of vandalism, but also the lamentable destruction of valuable
historic evidence. Too often, the copies supposed to be identical but imperfect
we now recognize to have been different states or issues, even editions,
bibliographically distinct and in their own terms complete. We may regret the
destruction, but we must also recognize it as a reaction, if unconscious, to the
burden created for the book trade by the same vast superfluity.
The third and last product of it was fixed pricing. Throughout the mid-19th
century, gold, and with it currency, held its value, and book prices fluctuated
very little. This was not the case in the first third of the century, when
markets were at first artificially fuelled by war, and then declined. The
Valdarfer Boccaccio, £2,260 in the Roxburghe sale in 1812 fell to less than half
that in the White Knights Sale in 1819, while the vellum Sweynheym and Pannartz
Livy, £903 at the Edwards sale in 1815, dropped to £262 in the Dent sale in
1827.
The book trade had an interest in stabilizing prices. Payne and Foss's regular
priced catalogues had a strong influence in this, and the Heber sales in the
1830s, if they never reached the giddy heights of Dibdin's "cometary" period,
showed a consistent level of pricing. Other markets might waver, as "railway
fever" came and went in Britain, Europe and America, but the solid base of the
industrial revolution kept the book trade firm, strong enough to withstand a
substantial influx, like Heber's books. It was on this foundation that the
monumental catalogues of Henry George Bohn (1796-1884) and, after him, Bernard
Quaritch (1819-1899) were laid.
Catalogues like these, several inches thick and containing over 20,000 entries,
came to serve two secondary purposes: increasingly subject-ordered, they
canonized the new categories, elaborating and sub-dividing them; as the prices
of the books, like the descriptions, were held as standing type, they remained
remarkably constant. So these giant catalogues, listing most of the books in or
out of print published in Europe (and, although it was only a small beginning,
America), came to be used by librarians and by other booksellers, as a guide to
the "right" price. Since copies sold could almost always be supplied again
from the great whirlpool of books still circulating, a book and its price
remained constant, year after year.
It was in this world of apparent certainty and established values that the first
major American book-collectors, John Carter Brown and James Lenox, formed their
collections. Inevitably, most of the books they sought were to be found in
Europe, and if American entrepreneurs, Obadiah Rich or Henry Stevens of Vermont,
found them books and interposed their services, that intervention did not
obscure the extent to which their customers depended on the European trade, not
merely for books but for the way in which they collected them. Both Brown and
Lenox came, in the fullness of time, to form highly individual collections, but
in doing so they both followed highly conventional paths.
Change was, nonetheless, on the way. The Franco-Prussian War in 1870-71, so
short and one-sided, might seem to have had little impact on the book trade, but
in fact the causes that led to it and its aftermath reflect wider changes in
western Europe. The fragility of Third Empire and Third Republic France
encouraged the formation of small cabinet collections. portable in extremity.
French collectors took the lead in this direction; they found English imitators:
Robert Turner, who lived and bought his books in Paris, and Frederick
Locker-Lampson, whose Rowfant Library popularized the mode in England. French
taste was also dominant in bookbinding in America, and the earliest "art"
binderies, such as the Club Bindery, reveal a stylistic dependence on Lortic,
Duru and Trautz-Bauzonnet.
In Germany, the result of Bismarck's policies both before and after the war and
the Zollverein again had an effect, if equally indirect, on the book trade, and
not only in Prussia but also in other German-speaking countries. It also made
those initially outside the Prussian sphere of influence, notably Jacques
Rosenthal in Munich, more aware of markets outside their home states.
The unification of Italy after the Risorgimento had a not dissimilar effect, and
the links of blood and trade that joined the Rosenthals with the Florentine
Olschkis created a dynasty happily still with us. Apart from Obadiah Rich's
exploration of Spanish archives, the Iberian peninsulas remained closed.
Quaritch's failure to secure the Romana collection only emphasized the blank
between the sale of the Marques de Astorga in 1826 and the Morante sale in 1872.
Inevitably, Britain provided American collectors with most of the books that
they wanted, and their habits were formed by the style and state of the British
manner. When Henry Bohn wrote to Lord Lindsay during the Stuart de Rothesay sale
in 1855 that "the Americans . . . are buying with great spirit anything which
in the remotest degree concerns them," 3 he meant the Spanish books
in which Lord Stuart's collection was so rich, and the perceptible accent on
"remotest" indicates that Americans were expected to buy books in English.
John Russell Smith, that enterprising bookseller and publisher at 36 Soho Square
(where a century later my own apprenticeship in publishing began), produced in
1865 the first extensive catalogue of Americana, issued by a British bookseller.
But for the most part the London trade regarded business from America
(inevitably by correspondence, rarely if ever supplemented by visits) with the
same passive and detached attention as they did that of their more remote
correspondents in Europe or outlying parts of Britain. However, change was on
the way, a change which affected the volume and extent of American
book-collecting and the nature of the interest that the British book trade took
in it.
American book-collectors, notably James Lenox, were baffled by one aspect of the
book trade in London which made no sort of business sense to them. The principle
was firmly spelt out in a letterhead which Bernard Quaritch began to use about
1870. Part of this initial exhortation stated:
Whenever two gentlemen give to B.Q. a commission for one and the same lot, he
buys it as cheaply as possible for the gentleman who has fixed the highest
commission. In such cases only B.Q. charges his fee upon the full
commission, in all other cases, upon the cost at the sale. The unsuccessful
Competitor is sure to have a similar advantage some other time.4
American competitors were far from sure that such an advantage would recur. They
did not understand the unwritten, unspoken, time-honoured custom of the London
trade that the book seller's task was to keep prices down, or at least down to a
level consonant with the prices marked in their catalogues. The whole process of
the "ring" (which, since it benefits the weak at the expense of the strong,
seems to the outsider a bewilderingly socialist form of mutual benefit
association) was based on this principle, connived at by the auctioneers. They
had enough business, given the volume of banks in circulation, to keep them
going, and they had an interest in seeing their principal customers, the
booksellers, kept happy.5 Quaritch was more explicit in private to
his customers:
In cases where I have a double commission, I still buy as low as I can, but
charge my commission on the sum commissioned, not at which the lot was bought. I
arrange fairly between my employers'letting them have the advantage of
the money saved.6
He did not explain further that such was his dominance of the London trade that
he could withdraw his commission purchases from the operations of the ring,
contemptuously scattering the cumulative shares of the difference, in successive
settlements, between saleroom and final price on his competitors.
It was perhaps as well that this added refinement was unknown to American
customers. As it was, James Lenox's furious outburst in 1874 against Quaritch's
printed custom had its roots in the belief that a bid given should be fully
executed in the room. Thanks to the generosity of Lord Lindsay (now Earl of
Crawford), Lenox got his book, the 1686 Bordeaux New Testament in French, and in
his letter of gratitude concluded:
And yet your Lordship must allow me to add that I find it difficult to
understand the code of morals of the purchasers at London book sales as I do of
the speculators in Wall Street.7
This judgment more accurately reflected the habits of the French collectors,
despised by Quaritch and Lindsay, like Felix Solar and Leopold Double, whose
collections were, in Lindsay's words,
mere accumulation, of rare and precious books, purchased for the purpose of
ostentation and luxe by the mushroom speculators of the day.8
But, willingly or not, American collectors conformed to Wall Street standards in
one respect: they required not only fixed prices, but also an open market which
responded to the same valuation.
Whether or not the British market would have responded to general pressure as
Quaritch did in the individual case of James Lenox is a question that cannot be
simply answered. For the matter was overtaken and submerged by a catastrophe
whose far-reaching consequences included an irrevocable change in the hitherto
small, cosy, club-like atmosphere of the old book trade. For a decade before
Lenox?s outburst, the English economy, weakened by the impact of the Civil War
on the cotton trade, was further debilitated by the inability of home
agriculture to compete with grain from the Midwest. Then, in 1875 -- he year
after the Lenox incident -- came the first of five successive bad harvests. This
blow fell heaviest on the nobility and gentry, the owners of the great country
houses and estates. Their income from produce and rents diminished; moreover,
they were obliged to fall back on reserves to support not only themselves and
their families but also an extended network of dependents in the traditional
social fabric of the country. The value of agricultural land fell, and a period
of political unrest ensued, punctuated by measures to extend the franchise
beginning with Disraeli's Reform Bill in 1867.
The problem of the traditional landowning classes was increased by the fact that
what reserves they had were tied by entails and family settlements extending
over several generations. A series of parliamentary acts, beginning with the
Real Property Limitation Act (1874) and Settled Estates Act (1877) and
culminating in the Conveyancing Acts (1881 and 1882) and the Settled Land Act
(1882), for all of which Earl Cairns (1819-1885), the Lord Chancellor, was
chiefly responsible, provided the necessary relief.
The results were immediate: chattels could now be sold to meet other
liabilities, and as always books were among the first to go. The Duke of
Marlborough, the first major landowner to take advantage of the new freedom
offered, began, in fact, by selling the Marlborough Gems as a single lot at
Christie's in 1875 for the startling price of £10,000. Early in 1881, F.S. Ellis
was engaged by the Duke to sell the great library formed by Charles, 3rd Earl of
Sunderland (1674-1722), which had passed by inheritance to Blenheim and of which
the Duke had printed a catalogue in 1872. Two negotiations for sale en bloc
for £20,000 failed, and it was dispersed in five sales by Puttick&Simpson
between 1881 and 1883, the 13,858 lots bringing £56,581. This resounding success
opened the floodgates. William Beckford's collection, which had passed to his
son-in-law the Duke of Hamilton, came next, followed by the Stourhead and
Towneley libraries, with those of the Thorold family of Syston Park, and the
Earl of Jersey at Osterley.
Bernard Quaritch fought a titanic rearguard action to sustain book prices
through this deluge. If his favorite customers, the Earls of Crawford, were
obliged to sell the best of the Bibliotheca Lindesiana in 1887 and 1889,
he found new customers: William Bragge the Sheffield steel-master, Lord Amherst
of Hackney, William Morris, and an ever-increasing circle of American
collectors, among them Theodore Irwin of Oswego, Mrs. Abby Pope, and J.P.
Morgan.
But inevitably the saleroom, not the booksellers' catalogues, became the index
of book prices. It was no coincidence, then, that in 1886 Book Prices Current
was launched. It was published by the enterprising firm of Elliott Stock and
edited by J. Herbert Slater.9 The first volume, dated 1888, covered
sales from December 1886 to December 1887.
Rather oddly, from our perspective, Book Prices Current provided an
anthology of the main items in each successive sale in the order in which they
had been sold; the price of any particular book could only be found if you knew
which sale it had appeared in. The inconvenience of this arrangement was
mitigated by the publication every ten years of alphabetical indices, but the
inconvenience of having to look up everything twice was (and is) considerable.
Not until 1917 was the arrangement altered so that each year was arranged in
alphabetical order, with a table of the main sales at the beginning. The
limitations of Book Prices Current as a work of reference were obvious.
The gap was filled in 1903 with the first volume of Book Auction
Records, edited by Frank Karslake. From the outset, B.A.R.
listed the books sold in simple alphabetic order, with the prices and the sales
in which they had been reached set out in a separate column on the right. It was
ideal for those who wanted to know in a hurry what a particular book was worth
and even easier to consult than the Bohn or Quaritch catalogues.
In the second volume of Book Prices Current, Slater commented on the
relative prices of books in different subject areas. Books about America
particularly drew his attention, among them a volume of twelve English tracts,
eight of them about North America, beginning with Las Cases The Spanish
colonie 1583, which had been sold as lot 43 in Christie's sale of books
"from the library of Lord Chancellor Hardwicke" at Wimpole Hall on June 29,
1888. It brought £555 and was bought by Henry Stevens. Such works, wrote Slater,
now realise enormous sum and appear likely to bring even more as time goes
on.... All books of this class are eagerly sought after, and will probably soon
be absorbed by American libraries.10
But it was not just Americana that engaged the interest of a new, much larger,
enthusiastic generation of American collectors. The Grolier Club had been
founded in New York in 1884 with Robert Hoe, enriched by the worldwide sales of
the printing presses that bore his name, as its first President. Not
surprisingly, the emphasis of the Club, expressed in its first publications, was
on the quality of book production. But its catalogues of literary first editions
showed how strongly this vein of collecting, which can be traced back to Heber,
had taken root across the Atlantic. The same enthusiasm was extended to the
already substantial volume of North American literature, which was approached
with the same increasingly scientific method, and increasing revenues, as the
English classics.
Robert H. Dodd of Dodd, Mead&Company had taken a leading part in this
development. With American collectors he had watched the growing pace of the
British market through the sales of the 1880s. The need for an annual comparable
with Book Prices Current recording American auction sales and the prices
of books that appealed and were available to American collectors had become
apparent to him. The means of achieving this objective were already at hand in
the form of Luther Livingston, who was engaged by Dodd. According to Victor
Paltsits, Livingston was "then already a highly competent bookseller's clerk
and exhibited a prodigious memory, freely displaced at the disposal of those who
made inquiry of him."11
Luther S. Livingston, born Grand Rapids, Michigan, July 7, 1864; died Cambridge,
Mass., December 24, 1914, was a heroic figure. He shouldered the burden of
planning and supervising ABPC, writing an introductory chapter, giving a
general view of the sales for the year, and an elaborate and complete index. The
first year covered ran from September 1, 1894 to August 31, 1895, and it was
indeed, as the circular advertising it stated, "similar in arrangement and
scope to the English publication of that name." In fact, the entire editorial
and even typographic arrangement of its pages make this clear; like BPC,
it listed the sales sequentially, not alphabetically, hence the need for the
index. This was changed to an alphabetic listing the next year in the volume for
1896, well ahead of either of the English auction records. The success of ABPC
is attested by the print run: the 400 copies in 1895 became 600 in
1896. The price was six dollars.
There were other improvements on the English model. "Reports, of all important
autograph and manuscripts sold at auction during the year" were included, and
separately indexed from 1896. The record of "the large number of books by
American authors and books relating to American subjects" which did not appear
in BPC would thus make ABPC" even more useful to American
booksellers, librarians and book-buyers in general." Thus, from the outset,
Livingston and Dodd aimed their work at the reader, not the auction houses
whence the material come, They did not, initially, include European sales, even
when they contained American material. BPC, by contrast, did record the
main results of the Charles B. Foote sale at Bangs' rooms on Broadway in
1894-95.
The Charles B. Foote sale of "English Literature" and "Modern English and
American Authors" in New York City at Bangs' Rooms in 1894-95 typified the new
style of American collecting. (It was the first named sale in the USA to contain
any of the Forman-Wise forgeries). And it may have been its predictable success
that set Livingston to work. Success was accompanied by improvement. The
alphabetic arrangement was suggested by Wilberforce Eames and other
"professional friends." This necessitated editorial assistance provided by Ida
Stewart and "Miss C.E. Dyett who gradually took almost entire charge of the
routine compilation of copy for the printer, prepared on cards." Sales in New
York, Boston, and Philadelphia were included from the outset; Cincinnati and
Chicago were added in 1896 and 1897. The edition grew to 960 by 1902 and in 1901
and 1902 editions of 25 and 30 respectively were issued on large paper, in
quarto. Due to the new volume of sales, the superfluous index was dropped in
1906; it was not until 1912 that Miss Dyett's name appeared in the
acknowledgements of assistance.
So much for the publishing arrangements in the early days: What of the sales? In
his first introduction Livingston wrote that
Prices which even five years ago would have been called exorbitant are today
considered moderate. The demand exceeds supply and at each sale some buyer is
prepared to pay, for a fine copy, a little more than the book has ever brought
at any previous sale. This can be said of the rarest books only, for the
commoner books, and especially interior copies, have not shown any marked
increase in price.
Oddly enough, the most expensive book recorded in 1895 was an exception to this
rule. The copy of Poe's Tamerlane that cost $1,450 on April 25 at Bangs?
"in a handsome Parisian binding by Lortic" was the same copy that, in
wrappers, made $1,850 in the George T. Maxwell sale two years earlier. As
subsequent records of this copy make clear, the wrappers had not been jettisoned
but bound in, and the drop in price is less likely to be an exceptionally early
appreciation of original condition than a temporary lapse of Livingston's Law,
due perhaps in part to an American economy in the trough of depression.
The following year, 1896, saw the first record of a major Philadelphia sale,
that of the Americana of Moses Polock (the Rosenbachs' uncle) including early
Franklin imprints, and, it was noted, "Mr. Quaritch, the great London
bookseller, sent over two consignments for sale." -- Quaritch, who in 1868,
sending a commission to Bouton "one of the smartest booksellers in
America," observed of the local trade "the auctioneers are ignorant but
respectable, though in matters of commission an auctioneer can never be trusted
absolutely." There followed Bierstadt's "treasures of the Grolier Club
publication" and Charles Frederickson's Shelley collection. Of Henry T. Cox's
first editions of Dickens and Thackeray Livingston observed that they "sold for
more than equally good copies could have been bought for at the prominent
bookshops," and that Kelmscott Press books were well up. This was the hothouse
atmosphere on which Wise and Forman planted their forgeries, and the first copy
of the famous "Reading" Sonnets to reach auction anywhere sold for $440
in the W.H. Arnold sale in 1901.
This can be set against the $7,860 paid for all four folios of Shakespeare in
the Augustin Daly sale at the American Art Association the previous year. This
in turn seems small by comparison with the $5,544 paid for a Dublin 1792
"Douai" Bible enlarged to 42 volumes and the 1936 set of Boswell and
Johnsoniana in 23 volumes which made $2,965, a monument to the now declining
taste for "grangerization."
In 1902 the Maxwell copy of Tamerlane, in its new Lortic binding came up
for sale again in the collection of Thomas J. McKee and made $2,050. In the same
sale Burns's copy of Shakespeare (Edinburgh, 1771) was bought by George D. South
for $111; evidently, it was still too early for such an association to be
appreciated. The contentious takeover of Bangs&Company by John Anderson in
1903 led to the establishment of the rival Merwin-Clayton Company founded by two
of the dissident Bangs staff. They handled the 1905 sale of the library of John
Kendrick Bangs, the humorist, which showed the extent to which Wise and Forman,
had used the now defunct company to establish values for their forgeries. This
in turn shows how the auction record had come to be accepted as the index of
book price levels. All this had come about in less than 20 years. It is hard to
appreciate now the extent, as well as rapidity, of this revolution.
Jacob Blanck, writing in the 50th volume of ABPC, identified the years
1908-9 as "a definite turning point in collecting American first editions."12
He was thinking primarily of the libraries of Frank Maier and J. Chester
Chamberlain but included those of Henry W. Poor and Louis I. Haber. To us now,
it seems a more gradual progress, indistinguishable from a wider bibliophilic
development. In 1906, for example, Henkels' sale of the books of William H.
Kemble of Philadelphia promised the first Audubon sale record, a set of both
Birds and Quadrupeds combined fetching $4,350. In 1907-8 came the
Louis L. Dillman collection (the first major Chicago library to come to
auction), rich in Romantics, and that of George M. Williamson, with its
fashionable emphasis on R.L. Stevenson and Lewis Carroll. But all these,
including the Edwin B. Holden sale in 1920, were but precursors of the gigantic
Hoe sale in 1921.
The interest awakened by a sale of these proportions and such quality brought
buyers over from Europe, not least among them Bernard Alfred Quaritch (the great
man's son), who on an early visit to America had quickly realized the potential
of the new market. Hoe had been one of his customers, and other major buyers
included George C. Thomas, W.A. White, and J.P. Morgan. Now, at the sale of
Hoe's library, records were broken left and right. George D. Smith paid $50,000
for Henry E. Huntington's copy of the 42-line Bible on vellum for which Quaritch
had paid £3,400 in the Perkins sale in 1873, breaking the record price of £2,260
for the Valdarfer Boccaccio which had stood since the Roxburghe sale in 1812.
The unique complete Morte Darthur bought by Abby Pope at the Osterley
sale now went to J.P. Morgan for $42,800; Beckford's copy of Blake's Milton
made $9,000; and, most startling, $10,000 was paid for the 4-page Winthrop
Declaration 1645.
Altogether, 3,358 lots made just under $1,000,000, a remarkable record in
itself, and the residue of the collection the next year did scarcely less well,
the Syston Park 1st Folio, £590 in 1884, returning at $13,000. The grand total
for both parts was $1,932,065. Luther Livingston was moved beyond his normal
acute analysis of content and trends to a philosophical, even psychological,
view of collecting on this scale:
We who watched the dispersal of the Hoe collection have marveled at the huge
advances upon the prices paid by him. But in counting up the profits we have
left out of our reckoning that larger profit, not of dollars, but of months and
years of joy in possession which made up Mr. Hoe's half century of collecting.
Mr. Hoe had a rough and unpleasing exterior and an overbearing manner, but back
of that and back of the restless, energetic businessman there was the true
collector, the true bibliophile. And we may be certain that the happiest hours
of his long and busy life were those spent among his books.
To a certain extent also this hobby of collecting fine books brings with it its
own reward. The collector has the joys of acquisition and of possession and at
the end, if he has collected with discrimination, his library will sell for as
much, or nearly as much as he has paid -- this at least (allowing for exceptions
enough to prove the rule) is the record of the book-marker for the last century.
In other words he "can eat his cake and have it too."13
This boutade proved to be Livingston's swan song. On November 30,1914, he
was appointed first Librarian of Harvard's newly established Widener Library;
less than a month later he was dead. Victor Paltsits stepped into the breach. In
1917 Dodd sold ABPC to E.P. Dutton&Co. Miss Dyett continued briefly as
compiler, succeeded by Mary H. Warren, who continued as editor when R.R. Bowker
succeeded Dutton in 1926.
In 1919, ABPC recorded the sale of a copy of Tamerlane, at
$11,600; the copy of Comus sold as one of the Huntington duplicates on
April 4, 1918 for $9,400 returned to the market on June 19, 1919 and made
$14,250. In 1920 the sale of Samuel P. Avery brought medieval manuscripts to the
New York saleroom, a book of hours making $4,350. It was also the year in which
Theodore Low De Vinne's printing library was sold, and Anderson acquired,
through the nefarious mediation of John B. Stetson, the library of Harry Buxton
Forman. This provenance was sufficiently vendible for the auctioneer to print a
facsimile of the bookplate for those books not already provided with one.
But, with hindsight, the most distinctive and, in the long run, prophetic of all
the sales in the decade was the Quinn sale. Quinn's feeling for modern authors
was far ahead of his time, but had it not been for Dr. Rosenbach, stepping into
the place left vacant by the sudden and premature death of George D. Smith, who
can say what would have happened? The prices for the highest lots, notably
Conrad, were not of the Doctor's making, since there were underbidders, but he
paid them. He was equally dominant in the more familiar territory, Shakespeare's
contemporaries, of the Herschel V. Jones sale in 1923.
Perhaps the most significant prices were those paid for exceptional Americana:
notably James Terry's copy of Sanderson's Biographies of the Signers,
suitably grangerized, which made $19,750, also in 1923. And even more the letter
of intent of the Continental Congress, dated July 12, 1776, signed by Button
Gwinnett, John Hancock, etc., which reached the startling price of $51,000 in
1927. The autograph of "Das Rheingold" at $15,400 was also a sign of things to
come. The high note came at the end of the decade: the Kern sale broke all
records again. Rosenbach faced fierce opposition from Gabriel Wells, Charles
Sessler, and Barnet Beyer, and if he bought the 1787 Burns
Poems with its wonderful presentation inscription for $23,500, he lost
Shelley's Queen Mab 1863 to Wells at the incredible price of $68,000.
Altogether, some 1,500 lots made over $1,700,000. Only, fourteen weeks
later the stock market crashed, and as late as 1932, the introduction to ABPC
expressed worry about "the uncertain conditions which characterize
all trade."
It was perhaps the Lothian sale of books from Blickling Hall in Norfolk in 1933
that indicated an upward turn. Lord Lothian's motives for consigning these books
to New York are obscure, but may have been connected with the national cowry
over the sale of the Luttrell and Bedford Psalters in 1929. Although the
result, were less than Cortlandt Bishop, the new owner of the joint
American-Anderson Galleries, had hoped, the outcome was satisfactory: the
Tickhill Psalter made $61,000, the Blickling Homilies $55,000 and Psalter
$23,000. The Terry sales in 1934-35 added further stability, but even so, it is
startling to find the Audubon sold in 1938 for $6,400 hailed in ABPC as
"a record price for all time." This was the year, too, in which the
American-Anderson Galleries finally collapsed, and Hiram Parke and Otto Bernet
set up on their own.14
In 1940 the name of Edward Lazare appeared on the title page of ABPC
for the first time, and remained there until the 1966 volume, except for
the 1943-45 volumes when Colton Storm of the William L. Clements Library at
Ann Arbor briefly took over. Even then the break was not absolute:
The editor owes thanks to S/Sgt. Edward Lazare for much assistance, in spite of
the sergeant's more pressing duties and (the editor fears) at the expense
of his leisure. Sergeant Lazare's amazing bibliographical knowledge
prevented many errors; those which are found are the editor's. While
he feels the temporary role an honor, the editor trusts that the sergeant
will re-assume the editorship before too long a time has passed.15
The end of World War II coincided with the 50th anniversary of ABPC.
Lazare was still officially away, but the next year he was back, in time for
the Eldridge L. Johnson sale where the manuscript of "Alice in
Wonderland" and two remarkable copies of the 1865 edition, one with Tenniel's
illustrations bound in, made a total of $80,500 -- only a little over half what
the late owner paid Dr. Rosenbach. At Lessing Rosenwald's generous suggestion,
the manuscript was bought by a group of subscribers and given to the British
Museum as a victory present. Next year produced a record price, however, which
was to stand for many years, the $151,000 paid by Dr.
Rosenbach for the Prince-Crowninshield-Stevens-Brinley-Vanderbilt-Whitney
copy of The Bay Psalm Book
Looking back at the decade after World War II (and excluding the artificially
inflated prices of the Bishop sale in 1949), the chief landmarks were in
Americana: $54,000 for the fifth and final revision of the Gettysburg Address in
1949, $35,000 for 14 letters to Joshua F. Speed among the Oliver Barrett
Lincolniana in 1952. It was this that no doubt tempted the astute Robinson
brothers to consign the Phillipps copy, one of eight known, of The Journal of
Major George Washington, 1754, to Parke-Bernet in 1955, where it was bought
for Colonial Williamsburg by John D. Rockefeller, Jr., for $25,000.
In 1958 ABPC, whose publication had been assumed by Lazare and his astute
wife "Moni," made its most radical change by including prices of British
sales. What appeared to be a basic contradiction of its original purpose was the
natural outcome of the increasingly international book market as much as the
cessation that year of BPC (then edited by Reginald Horrox). Thus the
startling prices in the Chatsworth sale and at Mrs. Emerson's sale of W.A.
White's Blake collection were now recorded in ABPC.
The late 1950s and 1960s represented a high point for Sotheby's and also an
astonishing revival in the volume and quality of medieval manuscripts, with the
sale of Dyson Perrins and Philipps collections, dominated by H.P. Kraus. The
increase in prices could be startling: in New York the copy of the "1478"
Caxton Chaucer (substantially imperfect) that made $13,000 in the Hogan sale in
1946 turned to $47,500 in 1963.
By now, however, ABPC was in difficulties. Its publication had got
behind. And when the Columbia University Press acquired it from the Lazares in
1966, it could only issue the 1966 volume in 1969. Edith Hazen, happily still
with us, became "senior editor," but the architect of the publication
arrangement was her husband, the eminent bibliographer Allen Hazen. Columbia
remained uneasily ABPC's publisher for the 1966 to 1971 volumes (the last
of which appeared in 1973). Edith Hazen departed after the 1968 volume, although
she would again work on ABPC in the 1970s.
In 1970 the sale of Pierce Butler's annotated copy of the second printed draft
of the Constitution reached a record $160,000. In 1972 the ownership of ABPC
changed again. It was taken over by a courageous and (as it seemed then)
absurdly young couple, Daniel J. Leab and Katharine Kyes Leab. He had been an
editor at the Columbia University Press and was a historian and Dean at Columbia
University. She, after editorially rescuing several Columbia University Press
projects, most notably the multi-volume Biographical Dictionary of Republican
China, had assumed responsibility for the Autographs&Manuscripts
section of ABPC.
The Leabs admired Allen Hazen and listened to what he and Edith had to tell them
about the merits and needs of the publication. They thought it could be rescued
and bought it from the Columbia University Press. They have done it ever since:
expanding dramatically the number of auction houses covered from a dozen to over
50 worldwide, modernizing production by going from 3 x 5 cards to innovative
software, and most recently by preparing for the 21st century by making the
volumes produced under their tenure available on CD-ROM.
Their first step was to bring ABPC up-to-date and this they did by
producing four annuals in 2 1/2 years, using an army of eager young helpers.
ABPC was back on course again and from 1975 onwards it has been a model of
punctuality. A major part of this is due to the utilization of information
technology and computer typesetting-all the while ensuring that the information
provided in auctioneers' catalogues and, still more, the lists of prices and
buyers' names was as accurate as they should be. In 1972 ABPC, at Kathy
Leab's instigation, went outside the English-speaking market, including the
Esmerian sale at Paris in its pages; from then on the major continental sales
have continued to appear in it such as the massive seminal autograph auctions
held by Stargardt. Australia also broke into ABPC?s pages. It seems
absurd to regard the last 25 years as history, but in terms of book prices it
seems as long or longer than the 75 that precede it.
During these years natural history books advanced significantly, with Dudley
Massey carrying all before him at Christie's on May 9, 1973, including Redouté?s
Les Lilliacées at £17,000, while Sotheby's retaliated with the
Plesch sales, a significant advance in cataloging (by John Collins). Chicago
figured largely for the first time in 1974, the Joyce sale producing astonishing
prices for Conan Doyle manuscripts. In 1975, Texas, in the person of El Dieff,
scooped the Sassoon sale at £107,919, and the Stockhausen Tamerlane made
$123,000, almost 100 times the price recorded in the first volume of ABPC.
The year 1976 saw the coming together of the American and British markets,
canonized by the merger of Parke-Bernet with Sotheby's to form a single
business. It also saw Swann's 1,000th sale, a landmark no less significant in
the home market. The sales of John Carter and A.N.L. Munby were a sadder
milestone, but in 1977 Christopher de Hamel began his career at Sotheby's. This
was the year of the Sion College and Evelyn sales, which can be seen now as
landmarks in setting up the opposition to sales of "heritage" material in
Britain. Next year was the year of the Gutenberg Bibles, three in one year, of
which one, the General Theological Seminary copy, was sold at auction by
Christie's in New York for $2,000,000.
The decade ended with the great, but finally vain, battle against the "buyers'
surcharge," the clearest indication that the balance of power had moved from
the buyer to the vendor. The price, reached in the Honeyman sale in 1980-81 for
scientific books, compared with those in the Kenney sales, not 15 years earlier,
reinforced this.
The Gospels of Henry the Lion at £7,400,000 at Sotheby's in 1983 set a record
for medieval manuscripts which seems likely to last the century. (In the fall of
1994 the Codex Hammer sold at Christie's in New York for $28,000,000; it now
holds the record for highest price at auction for a manuscript.) The successful
sale of the Burckhardt-Wildt manuscript leaves in 1983 was a more influential
event in auction terms. At a less stratospheric level the Sang collection of
"Signers" at $320,000 was a landmark at least equal to the Terry set in 1923.
In 1983, too, Bloomsbury Book Auctions was founded by schism from Sotheby?s, a
welcome indication that the increase in the highest prices did not necessitate
an equal increase in the minimum price for an acceptable lot, a principle which
Bloomsbury have established successfully since.
The last decade has seen the dispersal of two great American collections, the
Doheny Library by Christie's and Bradley Martin's by Sotheby's; both elicited
protest but, as war advances technology, so we can recognize, in superior
cataloguing, gains as well as losses. Paul Needham at Sotheby's and Felix Oyens
at Christie's have shown that the highest standards of incunabular scholarship
can pay off in the saleroom. Subject sales -- the Crahan gastronomy, De Belder
botany, Jeanson field sports, Blackmer the Levant, Kissner Rome -- have done
notably well. Three final milestones are represented by the sale of the Alnwick
Bestiary for £2,700,000 (Quaritch, 1991), the Becket fragments (£1,250,000,
Maggs, 1985), and, finally, the dispersal of the residue of the collection of
John Sparrow, a collector pur sang, in 1993,
If there has been one distressing tendency in the last few years, represented
(for example) by the "Garden" sale, it is not a new one, and it was dealt with
in masterly fashion by Luther Livingston in a passage following the reflections
on the Hoe sale quoted earlier:
But woe to him who buys solely as an investment and feels not within him the
bibliophilistic spark. Dust and ashes is like to be his portion. He might better
become a book-seller and hang out a sign. The true bibliophile buys only for the
pleasure of acquisition and ownership, and without definite thought of sale or
profit. Then when death takes him and his treasure-house is thrown open the
world will rush in to compete for its contents. If he has collected with
judgment and circumspection, and time has ripened and mellowed his treasures,
and if they have absorbed some of his love for them, then when all is over and
the auctioneer has cried the last bid, the bystanders can say "he made a good
profit on his books," even though the sums realized happen to be small.
There are few who read and use ABPC who will not say "amen" to that.
But this is no occasion to ponder the ephemeral. Behind us stands the solid
monument of a hundred red cloth volumes. Before us lies a disc containing the
past score of these in a small space and vastly more accessible form. And
ABPC henceforth will be available on CD-ROM as well as in hard copy.
American Book Prices Current represents the longest continuous and most
reliable record of the progress of book prices in the world. With new technology
advancing thus, and no sign that the material upon which the record is based is
diminishing, we may confidently predict a future at least as long as its past
for ABPC. And in that future let us gratefully, as well as confidently,
thank the present proprietors for preserving ABPC and now, twenty-five
years after that courageous leap in the dark giving it the secure base from
which to move into a new century.
Nicolas Barker
December 1994
1Some reflection of this will be found in a memorable passage in A.M.L.
Murray's
Phillipps Studies (III.19ff)
2See R. Stoddard,
"Jacques-Charles
Brunet (some Uncollected
Authors LVII),"
The Book Collector 42 (I993), 341-62, 324-46, and A.
Jammes
Didotiana (Paris, 1994), pp. 13-30
3N
. Barker,
Bibliotheca Lindesiana (Roxburghe Club, 2nd
Edition, 1978),
p. 153.
4N
. Barker,
Bibliotheca Lindesiana, p. 259-60.
5Arthur Freeman and
Janet Ing Freeman,
Anatomy of an Auction
Rare Books at Ruxley Lodge, 1919 (London 1990), pp. 29-58.
6Bibliotheca Lindesiana, p. 260.
7Bibliotheca Lindesiana, p. 238.
8Bibliotheca Lindesiana, p. 260.
9Sybil Pantazzi, "Elliott Stock,"
The Book Collector 20 (1971),
pp. 25-46.
10 Bibliotheca Lindesiana p.237
11 ABPC 50, "The Beginnings of American Book Auction Records
During the First Quarter Century," p, XIII.
12ABPC 50 (1945), "Some Famous Auctions & Auctioneers," P. XVII
13ABPC 20 (1913), p. VI.
14Douglas
Gordon. "Cortland Bishop and the death struggles of the
Anderson Galleries."
The Book Collector 34 (1985) pp. 452-60.
15ABPC 49 (1944), p.2
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