Auctions and the buyer's premium

Also in today's blog

Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer
Comments

This section may be considered "off topic", but I'm hoping that some Bookworm readers share my enthusiasm for antique shops and auctions. Not that they are the happy hunting grounds they used to be back in the Eighties. In fact it's some years since I saw anything at a view which lured me to attend the sale.

Reading the online catalogue for a sale held yesterday, I was surprised and dismayed to see that my local auction house has increased the buyer's premium to 10%. According to receipts for things I bought in the mid-Eighties, no premium was charged, but by 1989 a b.p. of 5% was in place.

There's a good article on the subject of the buyer's premium by Stuart Maclaren, editor of Government Auction News, published monthly by
Wentworth Publishing Ltd, 17 Fleet Street, London.

He writes - "The buyer's premium is kept by the auction house and is not passed on to the vendor. This means that you are paying an additional fee to the auction house for the privilege of having bought from them: it's a bit like Tesco's charging you 30 pence for tin of baked beans, and then charging you an additional three pence fee for the pleasure of having shopped in their store."


After learning that "Christie's now charge an amazing 17.5%, and Sotheby's a truly astonishing 20%!" I then read, "So that's 'what it is' - but 'why it is' is a more difficult question. What do you get for the privilege of paying this money? Not catalogues, which you have to buy separately. Not a great service either, because the auction houses which charge the most are often the most chaotic. The truth is, you get nothing at all for your additional 10% (or whatever percentage it is). A buyer's premium is purely a tax on your spending, and auction houses charge it because they can, and because it makes them a lot of money."

Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer

A book which tempts me, even though it costs £20, is Roger Warner: Memoirs of a Twentieth Century Antique Dealer.

Who was Roger Warner. On an elegant page at the Regional Furniture Society's website, I read -

"Roger Warner was an antique dealer in the Oxfordshire town of Burford for over fifty years. During this period he traveled the United Kingdom visiting other dealers, buying stock and enjoying infinitely more encounters with furniture, both remarkable and unremarkable, than any curator or historian could hope to achieve in a lifetime. Starting business in 1936, he began by specialising in things that did not interest his fellow members of the trade. Beds, 'back stairs' furniture and obscure medieval items caught his early attention. Some objects were bought privately, but many of his prize finds came from the great country house auctions that occurred with such distressing frequency just before and after the Second World War. This was the great heyday of twentieth century collecting, an era in which almost every sale would turn up something of rarity and interest; items that are now certainly absent from the market, or their kind disappeared altogether."

Comments

Treva and Richard Havers posted interesting comments yesterday. I'll comment on Monday.

Treva, if you have time over the weekend, could you send me the list of Bridge titles you've bought to anneweale@yahoo.com?