My Auction Process - The Research Phase

The Research Phase – shortlisting and researching at book auctions

Part One of Two on Auctions: How I prepare before each auction

Before I walk through my auction process, there's an important piece of context for any rare book dealer or collector: having a focus area. I'll write a longer post on this soon, but Ink & Signature Books is currently evolving, narrowing toward philosophy, and toward the ideas that challenge us and the ideas that propel us forward. I've started simply calling this genre "Thought." It's not philosophy alone, not economics alone, not sociology, education, or science, but the wider family of books written by people trying to change how their readers saw things. That's the lens every book I consider now gets held up against, including how I approach an auction.

Having a narrower lens is enormously helpful at an auction. Until recently I took a scattergun approach, which was time-consuming and took some of the enjoyment out of it. A narrower focus has let me assess a much greater volume of material in auction catalogues each month, because my first pass is now just a quick scan. The process starts, always, with the theme already fixed in my head before I open a single catalogue. Am I looking for Enlightenment political economy this month? Early dissident and émigré literature? A gap in the natural philosophy shelf? The theme comes first, and it does most of the filtering for me before I've even looked at a listing.

From there it's a fairly methodical process. I track upcoming sales at exactly the kinds of auction houses likely to carry this material — regional houses, specialist book auctioneers, deceased estates, bankruptcy sales. I've already learned some lessons here. What's available at an auction, and the outcomes you get, are closely tied to the type of house running it. Generally speaking, a specialist book auctioneer has assessed, catalogued, and priced a book more accurately, while generalist and regional houses tend to give a much higher-level assessment. That usually means it's possible to find a better deal at a non-specialist house — though there's rarely a free lunch in life. With that reduced expertise comes a higher risk that a book is miscatalogued, or that the condition isn't quite as stated. I've also found that the genuinely rare material tends to gravitate toward the specialist houses in the first place. As with anything specialist, the knowledge and the network go a long way.

Once I've identified an auction worth assessing, that's where the real work begins. I shortlist by theme first. Then, for each shortlisted lot, I go looking for the edition points that separate a true first from a later or pirated printing, I read the condition report as closely as I'd read the book itself, and where the catalogue description leaves a gap — a photo that doesn't quite show the spine, a condition note that's vaguer than I'd like — I email the specialist and ask. More often than not, that one extra question is what turns a maybe into either a firm yes or a relieved no. This is a lesson learned the hard way, through experience. It's also shaped how we describe our own stock: our preference at Ink & Signature Books is to overstate any defects or condition issues, so that a buyer is pleasantly surprised if a book turns out to be in better condition than expected, rather than the other way around.

1. Books Have Been Sold This Way Longer Than You'd Think

The book trade and the auction room are almost the same age. English book auctions go back to the 1670s, when a bookseller named William Cooper sold the library of a deceased clergyman, lot by lot, to the highest bidder, because it turned out to be a more honest way of finding a fair price than simply pricing a shelf and hoping. Samuel Baker started what would become Sotheby's in 1744 doing exactly this: selling libraries, not paintings, not furniture, but books. For its first century and a half, Sotheby's was, essentially, a book auction house that occasionally sold other things.

There's something clarifying in that history: long before rare books were an "asset class," before anyone was thinking about condition grading or association copies as investment vehicles, the auction room existed to solve one specific problem — nobody actually knows what a book is worth until you put it in front of the people who want it and let them tell you.

2. How Having a Theme Does More Than Just Filter

It would be easy to assume this is mostly a filtering exercise — theme in, irrelevant lots out — and on one level, it is. But I've noticed a strong theme does something else too: it teaches me to recognise a book faster each time, and it helps me spot other interesting items as I research — cues, hints, and connections I (and others) might otherwise miss. Once you've spent enough hours looking for, say, first English translations of Enlightenment political economy, you start to see the shape of a relevant lot before you've even read the full description — an imprint, a date range, a name half-glimpsed in a thumbnail. The shortlist gets faster to build the more specific the theme becomes, which is the opposite of what I expected when I started narrowing the shelf.

3. What the Shortlist Actually Filters For

Not every lot that fits the theme makes it past the research stage, and the reasons it drops off are almost always one of three things: the edition turns out to be later than the catalogue implies, the condition report is hiding something the photos don't show, or — the most common cause of a "no" — the specialist's answer to my follow-up question tells me the book isn't what I'd hoped. None of that is disappointing anymore. A shortlist that gets shorter is the process working, not failing.

4. The Ones That Survive

The lots that make it all the way through — correct edition, honest condition, questions answered — are the ones I actually intend to bid on, and by the time I get there I usually already know, almost to the dollar, what I'm willing to pay. That number gets decided in this quiet research phase, at my desk, days before the sale, not in the room itself — which is probably exactly why it needs to be decided here, because the room is a very different environment. That's a story for next time.