Auction Update Review
It's called a vacation
Heritage Auctions is one of the houses rewriting
expectations for the world of collectible works on paper. If fifty years ago the world was mostly books
with emerging specialties in maps, manuscripts and ephemera today these
specialties are rich and complex in their own right and there is another
iteration – collectible comics that was important twenty years ago and is
literally exploding today.
How else to explain Heritage's ten million dollar
sale of 2,637 lots of Vintage Comics and Comic Art on July 26th that
saw all but 8 lots sell. These days we
recognize sales over a million dollars, sales that reach or exceed 100% of their total high estimate, and those sales where 80% or more of
the lots offered sold.
For those sales archived to the AED
this past week Heritage threw the baseball equivalent of the perfect game. For their sale on the 26th: 99.7% of the 2,637 lots offered sold for
$10,461,283 in what was effectively an unreserved sale.
Other sales this week did well and were more in
line with summer expectations. Comic
books, it seems, have become significant.
For the week ahead 8 sales are
scheduled:
Tuesday August 7 Bruun Rasmussen. Modern Prints [1232]. 53 lots
Wed. August 8 Leslie Hindman. Fine Books and Manuscripts [208]. 452 lots
Thursday August 9 Heritage Auctions. Rare Books online bidding [201232]. 355 lots
Friday August 10 Addison and Sarova. The Last Book Sale Day 2 [81112]. 100 lots
Saturday August 11 Addison and Sarova. The Last Book Sale Day 2 [81112]. 100 lots
Clars. Prints and Photography [81112].
Sunday August 12 Clars.
Prints and Photography continued [81112].
It’s August and it’s quiet but it
doesn’t feel that way.
Bruce McKinney
AE
August 5th, 2012