In part two of this series on where to find and buy Magical Artefacts and Mystical Art, I’m going to talk about buying at auction houses or sale rooms as they are sometimes called. These have changed a lot in recent years and can be challenging places at first, but they remain one of the essential hunting grounds…
Buying ‘in the room’ at an auction house has got to be one of the most nerve wracking, exciting, and frequently frustrating parts of the antiques world. In the room means you are actually sitting there, a few feet from the auctioneer and the other buyers, but its also possible to bid live online, by phone, or leave a commission bid on the book if you can’t attend in real-time.
Auction House is the term used for the company, or House that runs traditional auction sales, – they make their money by selling items to the highest bidder, on behalf the seller, and then taking a commission from both ends. A Sale Room is the bricks and mortar room where they do this.
This type of selling has been going on for centuries. There are different levels of Auction House, with the top end being international houses the likes of Christies and Sothebys, Next down are houses like Philips, Bonhams, and Spinks, that are still big and posh but more on a national level, with several salerooms in different cities in their home country. Then below these are a plethora of smaller houses, usually with just one or two sale rooms. Some small houses are still well known and highly respected within the antiques world, others are way down the food chain doing very local sales of everything from antiques and collectibles to house clearance ‘tat’, weekly or monthly throughout the year.
It’s the smaller houses I’ll mostly be talking about here, but the big ones will get a mention too.
If you already know how a sale room works then you can scroll past these next few paragraphs and go straight to the Tips and Advice bit…
but if you’ve never been to a sale then read it all – your first sale day will be more nerve wracking than you expect – and ten times worse if you’ve no idea what you are doing…. I still get a buzz from a good sale even now after more than two decades in the trade.
How Auction Sales Work
An auction house will get together a collection of items they will sell on behalf of the owners. The buyers can usually view the catalogue online in advance, most, but not all the smaller houses do this. You can also usually view the sale a few days before hand in the actual sale room, this is a good opportunity to have a real proper look at everything in the flesh. At some small-town sales this is essential as they often don’t have time to photograph and list every lot online, particularly with the ‘general’ sales when they might have up to a thousand lots to sell and prices are expected to be much lower.
Some of my best ever auction buys were lots that had not been photographed and were just listed as ‘miscellaneous’, or had been unrecognized and wrongly described – but more on that later….
What Happens On The Sale Day?
On the morning of the sale they normally open the doors an hour or two before the selling is scheduled to begin, this is to give buyers a last chance to inspect the lots they are interested in buying. It can be a bit of a rush trying to assess objects for the very first time just before the sale begins, and once bidding has started you wont be able to wander about still looking at things.
When you arrive go to the reception desk and register to bid, they will take your details and give you a number on a card or ‘paddle’ so that the auctioneer can identify who is buying what during the sale.
Once you have your number, you can either buy a catalogue or you may have just written the numbers of the lots you like on a piece of paper, some of the fancy catalogues with coloured photographs can be pricey (between £5 and £30 in the UK, depending on how fancy a sale it is) – but they are a great resource to keep if you ever get serious about collecting or dealing yourself. If you don’t want to buy a catalogue there is usually one you can just read through on display so ask at the reception desk.
Now you have your bidding number, and a list of the lots you are hoping to buy, find yourself a decent spot from where you can see what’s going on and the auctioneer can see you too.
When your lots come up be confident with your bids and try to stick to the budget you’ve given yourself for each item. Commissions for buyers can be high – and they’ve really gone up in recent years, with some houses charging well over 25% of the ‘hammer’ price, and some also add VAT to prices, so make sure you know exactly what the fees will be before you decide how high you can go with your bidding.
After The Sale
At posh sales you will not be able to remove what you have bought until after the sale has ended, some local houses are a bit more flexible. Go to the reception desk to pay and they will check which lots you have bought against the list they have from the Auctioneer. Then either a porter will go collect your purchases for you to leave with, or in some cases you will have a set amount of days to come collect your items. If you’ve bought something massive they can generally organize delivery for you but it will be pricey.
Tips & Advice For Buying At Auction
* (I know everyone says this, but seriously…) View the sale in advance
This really is essential – if possible go before the day of the sale and give yourself plenty of time, make notes of everything you fancy and research it when you get home, its just too easy to make mistakes in ‘the heat of the moment’ in a live saleroom, we’ve all done it, ‘you learn through your wallet’ as they say.
* Decide on a limit & Stick to it
Once you’ve researched your lots set your price and stick to it. Figure out commission and VAT fees so you don’t get a nasty surprise. And try not to get competitive once the bidding starts – sometimes that’s how a price goes feakishly high in a saleroom – when two bidders lose sight of what’s actually being sold and just want to ‘win’. I got into it once in a sale in the US and ended up paying twice my limit for a boring print that I didn’t even want that much – but I was feeling a bit aggro that morning and somehow ended up in a battle of wills over it…
* Look Out For Damage
This one’s important; A lot of objects at auction have old repairs or damage on them, it doesn’t mean you shouldn’t buy them but it can affect value considerably so you need to factor that into how much you will pay. Also objects are quite often damaged by people viewing the sale after you, so you might win a lot and then find that when you go to collect it there is some new damage on it – check before you leave the saleroom with your items and if this happens go talk to the staff to see if they will knock something off the commission – or if its really bad cancel your purchase. This happened to me quite recently with a 17th Century spice cupboard that someone broke a drawer handle off of after I’d viewed it, – I didn’t notice till I got it home (that’s going to be a huge pain in the arse and cost a fortune to get replaced…) Also make sure everything is there – people viewing sales sometimes steal small items from a larger lot, so if you’re buying a grouped lot or a ‘set’ of something, – make sure its all there before you leave.
* Search Through Boxes & Under Tables
My dad taught me the true value of this one – years ago when we were both trading he’d always spend hours rooting about through all the mixed lots and piles of ‘junk’ in boxes that just get a lot number stuck on them and shoved under the table at local sales. He found so many treasures that way – including a 400 year old GuanYin statue bought in a box of tatty household souvenirs for £30. One of my favourite auction buys ever was a pair of very early carved oak panels of the Green Man, bought in a mixed box and described only as ‘other panels’ – It was under the table in a saleroom full of antiques dealers but seems no one else had bothered to look properly… I paid £50 for the box, sold the other items for £150, and the panels went to one of the UK’s leading experts of 16th century carvings! When you’re rooting about make sure to look thoroughly – I’ve frequently seen dealers try to bury something interesting they’ve spotted right at the bottom of a box in hopes that no one else will notice it, (yes they are a bunch of chancers, it’s true, what can I say).
* Do Your Homework – Auctioneers Make Mistakes Too…
Most of the time auction catalogue descriptions are pretty accurate, but not all the time…
The big houses will very rarely make a mistake, but small local sale rooms make mistakes pretty often, especially with obscure and unusual objects and art. They have to catalogue thousands of pieces from every niche of the antiques world so its hardly surprising that some stuff gets past them. I’ve seen some pretty wild guesses printed as fact in sale catalogues, which I’ve only clocked because it happened to be Himalayan art or some other field that I have experience in. Ive also known tribal art dealers to get incredible bargains on misidentified objects that slipped through the auctioneers knowledge-net. The more you can learn about your favourite niche, the more ‘lucky’ you will become.
* Get Off The Beaten Track
It would be easy to only check out the most obvious sales when searching for the type of stuff that I buy; Asian Art, African and Oceanic Art, Ethnographic & Tribal Art, Antiquities… I’ve never actually come across a sale dedicated to ‘Magical Objects and Mystical Art’ – it’s pretty much my own little category so I’ve just had to learn which types of sales are my best chance to find something. But like all antiques dealers I’ve also dabbled in loads of categories within the trade, and it’s amazing where pieces sometimes turn up.
I’ve had some great finds in Country House sales, General sales, and even Artist Studio clearances, Interior & Garden sales, Library sales, and Jewellery sales. If you only look in the most obvious sales you will always be competing with loads of buyers who are after the same stuff as you, which is bound to push the prices up – but when you randomly come across some African Ritual Masks in a Country House sale, or tribal amulets in a sale of mostly fancy gold jewellery, you can sometimes do really well, especially when everyone else is there for the regency furniture or the diamond rings.
Commission Bids & Online Bidding
The auction world has changed so much in last decade, almost every saleroom is now online when before it was only the big ones. And advances in digital photography mean that you can now view picture catalogues for sales literally all over the world from your own kitchen table. This is both daunting and amazing.
There’s nothing quite like being in the room at a great sale, and its an essential part of the learning-curve too. But bidding live online means we can now be part of auctions taking place hundreds of miles apart on the same day – or in places that are just way too far to travel.
The down side of all this is that its massively pushed up prices on some things, you might spot a hidden gem at a local country saleroom only to end up bidding against online buyers from literally all over the world. That’s a bummer. Also be aware that if you are the highest bidder you will also have a fat postage bill to add to the commission fees and VAT. But there is the upside too.
I’ll be honest here, I don’t do a lot of online bidding, I just really love doing things in ‘real-life’ and even the best digital photographs cant replace touching and examining objects with your own senses. But for the times when that’s just not possible, and the days when you can sneak off to a quiet corner of the office to bid on magical artefacts instead of filling in spreadsheets… I’d say start small, don’t take big risks on stuff you haven’t actually physically examined yourself, and enjoy being one of the first generations ever who can bid live for strange and beautiful artefacts across the known world – from the broom cupboard of an accounts office in Swindon.