Terms that cost money
| Term | What it does |
|---|---|
| Buyer’s premium | Added to the hammer price, commonly 20–28% plus tax. A $1,000 hammer can settle above $1,300 |
| Sold not subject to return | Removes your recourse on completeness and condition. Common on mixed lots |
| “Sold as a collection of books” | The lot is the shelf, not any individual title. Nothing is guaranteed present |
| “Attributed to” | An opinion, not a statement of fact, and catalogues define the phrase in their own conditions |
| Reserve | The unpublished floor. A lot passed at reserve tells you less than a lot bought in at estimate |
Read the conditions of sale once, properly, for each house you bid with. They differ, they are the contract, and the differences are where the surprises live.
Absentee and online bidding
Set the maximum including premium, not the hammer figure, and write it down before the sale rather than during it. Live online bidding compresses the decision to a few seconds, which is precisely the condition under which people exceed their limit and call it enthusiasm.
- Ask for a condition report on anything above your comfortable loss, and ask specifically about completeness of plates and the state of the hinges.
- Photographs are lit to sell. Ask for one in flat light, spine and fore-edge.
- Factor in shipping for heavy sets; a twelve-volume run can cost more to move than to buy.
Recent sale, read closely
A Melbourne sale of sixty-one lots of colonial Australiana this winter is a useful sample. Twenty-one lots were bought in, which is a high proportion, and the pattern in what sold is more interesting than the totals.
- Named-copy provenance sold at or above estimate almost without exception.
- Mixed lots described as “a collection of books” largely failed, even where the contents were plainly good, because nobody could tell what was in them from the catalogue.
- Two well-known titles in tired condition failed twice, having also been unsold in an earlier sale. A title that has been passed once carries that history into the next catalogue.
The market has not fallen. It has become far less forgiving about condition and description at the same time.
How a fair works
The stock that dealers most want to sell to each other moves in the first hour, often before public opening. That is not a conspiracy: dealers buy from dealers, and a book priced for the trade at eight o’clock is priced for the public at eleven. Paying for early entry is worth it in a field where material is thin and irrelevant in a field where it is not.
What works at a fair: knowing your field’s prices well enough to decide in a minute, carrying a list of what you already own, and talking to the dealer about what you collect. Most of the best material never reaches a table — it is offered to whoever the dealer remembers.
