The birth of modern auctions

From Wesley Towner's "The Elegant Auctioneers"

English auction houses, by tradition and by design, catered then almost exclusively to the trade. Sales of famous art collections sometimes drew the curious as spectators, but private buyers were excluded from the bidding by custom. If they wanted to buy, they placed bids through dealers, who had entree to the sales and charged 5 or 10 percent commission on the purchase price.

The rooms had the atmosphere of a. catchall for derelict possessions. Things were sold just as they came from the consignor—often dirty and in disrepair. The lots were numbered and just put around.

Mediocrities were not readily distinguishable from things of value: Catalogues, unless interpreted by an expert, gave little clue as to which was which. Oil paintings had the dust and grime of years thick upon the glass that preserved the brush strokes of a master or blurred the hand of a copyist or forger. The sales had an air of cut-and-dried professionalism. Porters in green baize aprons held up chairs by one leg or hoisted portraits that may or may not have been painted by Reynolds above the bidders' heads. The auctioneer wore wore the formal dress of a stockbroker and, in. contrast to his surroundings, was a man of similar dignity and consequence. The porters, it was said, did not even wash their necks. The dealers who did the bidding sat around a big table or stood near it, subdued, expressionless, and tense, like seasoned players in a gambling house. They were firmly organized in the Ring,

The Ring, or knockout system, which still prevails at auctions where the bidding is predominantly by the trade-is an age-old conspiracy to control auction prices and keep the “privates” -the dealers' word for nonprofessional bidders—from getting anything of value at less than the going retail price. The dealers in a particular category of art property form a syndicate and agree not to bid against one another, When one member of the combine bids, the others- however much they may want to buy the lot refrain from running up the price.

After the public sale, the Ring holds its own auction, and the members bid on the lots obtained among themselves. If an item is of no interest to other members of the combine, the original bidder may pay for it and keep it. When two or more dealers in the ring compete for it, the difference between its knockdown price and the amount it brings in the Ring auction goes into the profits of the syndicate. An object of exceptional value may remain joint property of the syndicate members until one of the dealers finds a customer for it and submits a bid acceptable to the others. The gravy is then portioned out among the members as usual.

There are many variations and vicissitudes in the operations of the syndicates. Occasionally a rival combine will invade the auction rooms and bid against the regulars with the object of gaining membership in the established gang. Strong and unpleasant measures may have to be taken to restore monopoly. Sometimes syndicates operate within the syndicate, in which case two or more members form a conspiracy not to compete against each other in the Ring auctions. If the Ring-within-the-Ring succeeds in obtaining objects below their market value,its members may hold a third auction to divide the spoils.

For instance, a Chelsea soup tureen may bring £100 in a London auction. If the porcelain syndicate is composed of ten dealers and the soup tureen brings £1,000 in the King auction, each of the ten dealers gets £90 profit. But the £1,000 may have been paid by three dealers united in a Knockout of their own. The soup tureen for—brings say, £4000 in the subsequent auction among the three, regardless of which dealer buys the tureen, each of the three comes out with an additional £iooo profit. Moreover, a syndicate member, whether the mere circumstance that a Chelsea soup tureen has come up at auction nets him £90 or £1,090, would be unlikely to pay taxes on his ill-gotten gains, since the operations of |the ring are illegal in England, and in any case, undercover.

In any event, the “privates” are not to be tolerated at Ring-controlled auctions. A functionary, who used to be given the colorful title King of the Knockout, is delegated to take over the casual intruder who imagines he can buy advantageously for his own account at auction. If, for instance, a gentleman fancies a Georgian silver coffeepot and attempts to bid for it against the silver Ring, the King of the Knockout will run him up to about the retail value of the coffeepot—or higher, if the gentleman appears to be well-heeled and stubborn—and let him have it. The intruder goes home with his prize—for which he may have paid more than it would have cost in a Bond Street silver shop, -pondering on the fact that in the published reports of auction sales similar coffeepots had frequently fallen for the price of crockery.

As a defense against the Ring, English auction houses operate on a system of reserve prices. The consignor is permitted by law to put a secret reserve, or “upset,” price on each lot to be sold. When the bidding fails to reach the upset price the auctioneer knocks the lot down to himself and the would-be seller pays only a reduced commission. Thus the bidder is placed in the position of playing a kind of blindman's buff with, the auctioneer, who alone is supposed to know what the reserve price is.

Secret reserve prices, though not sanctioned by law, certainly prevailed at New York auctions. What was worse, if the auctioneer did not actually own the property he sold, he mixed in derelict objects of his own in order to cash in on the good will emanating from a real consignor's name. moreover, the consignor—if consignor there was—could hardly be said to be in a better position than the bidder faced with all those unidentified competitors. Most auctioneers were shoe-string operators; they delayed payment interminably, juggled the accounts and sometimes absconded with the funds altogether.

During his retirement from the rostrum Kirby had been mulling over the trouble with auctions, and he had come up with some cardinal principles to herald the Art Associations entrance into the field of management. What he proposed to establish, with the Seney sale as a springboard, was a free and unrestricted auction commission market with the private buyer as its main support. In the language of his manifesto this was to be accomplished by “selling without reserve, restriction or protection, never permitting addition to sales of private or estates' collections, prominently advertising and displaying real ownership, mating final payment within thirty days from the date of sale.

These are in essence the principles under which the Parke-Bernet Galleries functioned for many years. If they do not sound particularly cardinal now, they did in 1885.

From: O Rare Don Marquis

In 1931, Don Marquis' publisher suggested he write his autobiography. He turned down the proposal with these word: "I'm entitled to a better subject".
He did write:
"The name Marquis is not French but Scottish in origin. the first of the name of whom I have any record came to Virginia from the North of Ireland in 1720, and settled near Winchester. They were Calvinists who believed in Infant Damnation, Calomel, and Scotch Whiskey. "

Marquis and his wife moved to Brooklyn in 1909, the year horse-drawn streetcars were abandoned for electrically powered car lines. "...and as more and more ofthese conveyances swung down the streets of Brooklyn, the local citizenry came to be known as trolley dodgers.... eventually shortened to dodgers", which is how the Brooklyn Dodgers acquired its name.

For some years Marquis rattled out his daily stint with his typewriter machine perched on an up-ended packing crate. This box had stenciled on it "1 GROSS TOM CAT" which meant tomato catsup, but became by legend the first suggestion of mehitabel.

Barbara Comyns

From "Sisters By A River", her first novel....


After she had had six babies at eighteen month intervals Mammy suddenly went deaf, perhaps her subconscious mind just couldn't bear the noise of babies crying anymore. Mammy had always looked and been rather vague, she had a kind of gypsoflia mind all little bits and pieces held together by whisps, now she grew vaguer still and talked with a high floating voice, leaving her sentences half finished. It must have been beastly looking at all those flapping hands all the time.

All our family were very superstitious but Granny was the worst, and she was always seeing spirits about the house. she would say things about the house had a curse on them, even our toys and they were burnt because of that, sometimes I thought maybe she was a witch in rather thin disguise.

Zeena Frome

Shockingly, this appears to be Edith Wharton, minx.
I've reread Ethan Frome (whom I believe bears his fate uncomplainingly as complaining would be churlish at best. After all, he has had nearly everything he desired given him, but, like Victorian children who find a genie, has rashly forgotten to specify the terms.)
After marrying Zeena...

But purchasers were slow in coming, and while he waited for them Ethan learned the impossibility of transplanting her. She chose to look down on Starkfield, but she could not have lived in a place which looked down on her. Even Bettsbridge or Shadd's Falls would not have been sufficiently aware of her, and in the greater cities which attracted Ethan she would have suffered a complete loss of identity. And within a year of their marriage she developed the “sickliness” which had since made her notable even in a community rich in pathological instances.

From the auction

A pewter lidded container with a recumbent fawn knob, marked "Denmark" and unhelpfully accompanied by an indistinguishable maker's insignia.

My hangover Agatha

Funerals Are Fatal.
A half-batty elderly sister attending her brother's funeral, blurts out "Well, it WAS murder wasn't it?" and is subsequently chopped to bits with a hatchet. Her companion is poisoned by a slice of mailed wedding cake- part of which she leaves under her pillow so as to dream of her own wedding. Mustachioed nuns are thrown in as a red herring, and Victorian wax flowers under a bell jar become significant to Poirot. The means and the murderer become glaringly obvious from the wedding cake on, although the motive would be, let's say, unlikely to inspire hatchet murder in many; that motive being to take the money from selling the victim's Vermeer (over which the murderer had painted a seaside scene) and open a tea shoppe.
Of course Aggie sets herself a brilliant problem to solve- what if a murder is not a murder but an opportunity to distract from a planned crime? (Not that the sister hatcheted herself to death.)

Nice cover, though.

The Day of the Locust

Reading Nathaniel West's final novel in a wonderfully lurid pulp edition.(bottom pic) A pocket edition as dry as a pressed flower. It closes like an over-used wallet because its spine has been broken. The two halves of pages are nearly bifurcated at the place where Homer Simpson takes pity on Miss Martin, the lush. Everything after Miss Martin would drift and flitter out one page after the other but for the six tough strings of dried glue that hold it intact. They stretch like spit between lips and are amber, crusted with bits of brown paper- like broken, translucent bug parts.

I have also included the Penguin edition which has the most fitting cover art.

From the bk.:
It was a picture of Faye Greener, a still from a two-reel farce in which she worked as an extra. She had given him the photograph willingly enough, had even autographed it in a large wild hand, "Affectionately yours, Faye Greener". Faye played one of the dancing girls. She had only one line to speak, "Oh, Mr. Smith" and spoke it badly.

Finally

I had long avoided reading To Kill a Mockingbird, which is a difficult feat. At the time, the prevalent edition was this one with a bird being annoyed by poky color triangles. I suppose I thought the book was about murderous Graphic Designers. As a child, I couldn't even look at the cover without it upsetting me. I also shunned it because my sister (possibly kindly) warned me if a dog died in anything, a movie, a book or a television show and one, named Tim Johnson, does indeed die- so I deliberately never watched the Gregory Peck film, and may eventually have confused it with Member of the Wedding.
Of course, I loved the novel.

From the bk.....
Maycomb was an old town, but it was a tired old town when I first knew it. In rainy weather the streets turned to red slop; grass grew on sidewalks, the courthouse sagged in the square. Somehow, it was hotter then: a black dog suffered on a summer's day; bony mules hitched to Hoover carts flicked flies in the sweltering shade of the live oaks on the square. Men's stiff collars wilted by nine in the morning. Ladies bathed before noon, after their three-o'clock naps, and by nightfall were like soft teacakes with frostings of sweat and sweet talcum.

Revisiting Muriel Spark

Daylight was appearing over London, the great city of bachelors. Half-pint bottles of milk began to be stood at the doorsteps of houses containing single apartments from Hampstead Heath to Greenwich Park, from Wanstead Flats to Putney Heath; but especially in Hampstead, especially in Kensington.
In Queens Gate, Kensington, in Harrington Road, The Boltons.... Chelsea and its backwaters, the bachelors stirred between their sheets, reached for their wound watches, and with waking intelligences noted the time; then remembering it was Saturday morning turned over on their pillows. But soon because it was Saturday, most would be out on the streets shopping for their bacon and eggs.... would set out early, before a quarter past ten, in order to avoid being jostled by the women, the legitimate shoppers.

and

It is all demonology and to do with creatures of the air, and there are others besides ourselves, he thought who lie in their beds like happy countries that have no history. Others ferment in prison; some rot, maimed; some lean over the banisters of presbyteries to see if anyone is going to answer the telephone.

From "Hawkins of the Paris Herald"

Sarah Bernhardt, 1879: "It's curious how many idle stories there are about me. My favorite dishes are supposed to be burnt cats, lizards' tails and peacock brains sauteed in monkey butter, whatever that is..."

I saw La Goulue sometime after her retirement from the Moulin Rouge. True to her soubriquet, meaning the glutton, she had ruined her dancing career by overeating, and my glimpse of her was as a lion tamer in a street fair. She later became a wrestler and just before she died in 1921 she could be seen selling oranges outside the Moulin rouge.

"In the early years of the century, the Folies Bergere competed with the Moulin Rouge by producing revues that featured English dancehall girls, because French girls are incapable of learning the precisions required in a chorus line.

Ladies of pleasure had been known under the Second Empire a les biches and les soupeuses. A biche was a small deer. A soupeuse was a beauty of limited virtue available for supper. By the turn of the century, the appellations had gone out of fashion in favor of the simpler 'demimondaine'.

Worst wedding toast ever

John Donne in 1627, from the NYRB:

Where be all the splinters of that Bone,
which a shot hath shivered and scattered in the Ayre ?
Where be all the Atoms of that flesh, which a Corrasive hath eat away,
or a Consumption hath breath'd,and exhal'd away from our arms, and other Limbs ?
In what wrinkle, in what furrow, in what bowel of the earth,
ly all the graines of the ashes of a body burnta thousand years since ?
 In what corner, in what ventricle of the sea, lies all the jelly of a Body drowned
in the generall flood ? What coherence, what sympathy, what dependence
maintaines any relation, any correspondence, between that arm that was lost in Europe,
and that legge that was lost in Afrique or Asia, scores of yeers between ?
One humour of our dead body produces worms,
and those worms suck and exhaust all other humour, and then all dies, and all dries,
 and molders into dust, and that dust is blowen into the River, &
that puddled water tumbled into the sea, and that ebs and flows in infinite revolutions,
and still, still God knows in what Cabinet every seed-Pearle lies,
in what part of the world every graine of every mans dust lies.

MURTHER somewhat foul

After a marvelous July 4th with work folk, I spent the afternoon with Agatha. "Murder at Hazelmoor" opened, as always, with a terrific premise. An evening party where the hostesses, suggesting diversions, agree to some table turning. The lights are dimmed and the table raps out, letter by letter, that Captain Trevelyan has just been murdered at the Hazelmoor cottage he was renting. His good friend Burnaby sets off in a snowstorm to investigate. Trevelyan is indeed dead- coshed with a sand-filled sock laid against under door draughts. Since the time of death coincides with the spirit occurance, it is obvious that one of the guests must be the murderer, and as only 4 characters are sketched out in the length of the story, it is of course the one most present in that narrative.

Acquisitions

The 3 latest art purchases at auction- unsigned or illegibly signed. "Landscape" pencil signed " N. Mayer", dated '51. Mid to early 20th century- the two lithographs were from the estate of artist Eugene Pizzuto- in a sheaf of art from many different artists. The bridge is a greater mystery- the artist seems to have also created the frame- there is a two letter monogram in the lower left corner, possibly "K.T.".

Agatha

Left: The face of my hangovers.





When, on the morning following a night out I have no desire to move, I'll reread an Agatha Christie cover to cover until the throbbing ceases. After "The Clocks", I read "Mrs. McGinty's Dead" in which an elderly charwoman was murdered by one of any of her five clients as she had discovered that one of them was related to one of four murderesses featured in a newspaper article. The solution, not very thrillingly, had to do with the fact that "Evelyn CAN also be a MAN'S name!"
Next it was "Ordeal by Innocence" in which a woman is murdered by one of any of 4 adopted children, her husband, secretary or housekeeper. The motive was rather implausible.... (housekeeper infatuated with son, hiding theft of slain mother's money). The reaction of the son when convicted of the murder committed by the housekeeper was inexplicable.
I enjoy having all the Christie paperbacks around to remind me of my days spent in paperback swap shops like The Book Rack, situated next to the waterfall in the University Village shopping center, but I never need read them again, so they are being purged, along with Solzhenitsyn's Cancer Ward, Virginia Kelly (Clinton)'s Autobiography and some Brigid Brophy.

Oh, T.H.R-G!

From Robsjohn-Gibbings' petulant screed against the antique, "Goodbye, Mr. Chippendale":
"Those were the days, so help me, when it was the height of something to sit on a cassapanca upon a tiled floor amid frescoed walls and coffered ceiling- an interior of incredible gloom..."
(A cassapanca is a sort of Italiany hope chest, to which arms and a back could be added).

and on "French Gothic"

This confusion of the ecclesiastical and the secular, the result of too many visits to European churches and cathedrals by the American laity, struck few if any as incongruous. It seemed natural to hang your pants over a prie-dieu, keep the telephone book on a lectern, the cigars in a gutted hymnal, drape the walls with chasubles, put a chalice on the piano, and stand dolorous carved saints in the odd corners.

Somerset Maughham, Agatha Christie, Chanel, William James

The order of completion of the last four books I have read.
This was my second reading of "Cakes and Ale", and I enjoyed it even more than I had previously. It is the only Maugham I've ever attempted (other than a reluctant plunge into "Of Human Bondage"- a novel that should be quietly slid behind file cabinets and into elevator shafts while no one's looking)
I followed this up with Agatha Christie's "The Clocks", which had the irresistible murder of an unknown man who was to be found by a temp hire arriving at the house of an elderly blind woman whose home has been filled with clocks she does not own, all set to the same wrong time.
It became glaringly obvious that these were all red herrings and the murderer was fairly apparent. The motive was unsportingly peripheral to the story, and the eventual identity of the victim was never really a point of interest. It almost seemed an academic problem Agatha was solving, the premise made from words thrown improv style at her. Even if the victim is unsympathetic his death should inspire some sort of empathy in the reader. He was as inert as the clocks. Absurdly, after the murder was solved the blind woman turned out to be some sort of spy which in no way had anything to do with the victim.
Less skillfully, Edmonde Roux's prickly, defensive bio of Chanel largely consisted of extraordinary suppositions, diaphonous sources and a sense that Roux had no interest at all in fashion. So many sentences ended half-way through or trailed clauses into vaporous nothingness that the narrative shuddered to a stop. Additionally its poor translation into stilted English gave one the sensation of falling down a staircase.

From "William James in the Maelstrom of American Modernism"

a race of dogs bred for generations, say in the Vatican, with
characters of visual shape, sculptured in marble, presented to their eyes, in every variety
of form and combination, ought to discriminate before long the finest shades of these
peculiar characters. In a word, they ought to become, if time were given, accomplished
connoisseurs of sculpture.
What this leaves out, of course, is the factor of active interest. The mind must have some interest in a given subject before it even begins to register impressions, let aone form opinions. "My experience is what I agree to attend to" is how James puts it. What the dogs will attend to in the scculpture gallery is "Who peed on this pedestal?"

Conrad

"Mr. Arnold Bennett recently protested against those people who, when Conrad is mentioned, exclaim "Ah, Conrad!" as if that were a different thing altogether, as if you were now talking about something that mattered. It is a form of exclusiveness that is very irritating no doubt, especially if you happen to be a novelist yourself."

_Virginia Woolf, Collected Essays

Hugh Trevor-Roper on Scotland

I suppose that the great crisis caused by the Rape of the Stone has been reported even in Italy. The upper classes (feel) if such things are to be allowed, where will they stop? Are not the halls and castles of the Scots aristocracy stuffed with relics and objets d'art dubiously conveyed thither from distant origins far more recently than the 13th century? If everyone is going to claim his own, there will be scenes like the competition for disputed limbs and organs in the great day of the Resurrection of the Flesh.

Jacobean furniture

From the book "The Practical Book Of Period Furniture", by Harold Donaldson Eberlein And Abbot McClure: For those whose needs embrace Jacobean furniture the authors have endeavoured to offset all difficulties and make its study as easy as possible by treating it in the most practical and systematic manner. They would also cheer the reader by assuring him that the subsequent periods are much simpler and less varied in their characteristics.

Before treating of Jacobean furniture itself it is necessary to say a few words regarding the terms used,when we speak of the Jacobean or Stuart period, with reference to furniture, we ordinarily include everything between 1603, when James I ascended the throne of England, and 1688, when the second James fled before the victorious approach of William of Orange.

The contour and style of the furniture of the Jacobean period, as of every other period for that matter, more or less faithfully reflected the social, intellectual and religious temperament and manners of the times. The furniture was stout and staunch, even to clumsiness and severe in form and line even though bedizened with a superfluity of ornament. It matched the coarse manners, abrupt morals, and vigorous theology of the day with all their grotesquerie, terrible earnestness and redundancy of polemics, brimstone anathema and persecution. Contour and style were both thoroughly in accord with the genius of the people.

The Paris Universal Expo of 1867

From "The Judgment of Paris"
Among the new inventions were: a typewriter, a phonograph, a tire made from rubber, a refined hydrocarbon oil called petroleum, and aluminum. There was also dynamite and a new invention from America, the rocking chair. Displayed as well was a brass horn called the saxophone, invented by the Imperial Instrument maker, Adolphe Sax.