Sale-rooms
Penny wise
Alistair McAlpine
Aquick look through the previews for March and February issued by Sotheby's and Christie's and it becomes very clear that Sotheby's are rather more than auc- tioneers of 'literary property and works illustrative of the fine arts' and that Christie's have headed in the same direc- tion. The auction houses have changed in the last year. The emphasis has moved away from fine art. The massive sales of modern and Impressionist paintings are not the good news that they once were.
The speculators who followed that mar- ket like a flock of seagulls after a shoal of herring have disappeared into a seemingly empty sky. The sale-rooms are looking to the real collectors, the sort of people who have every known baseball card except the 1886 St Louis Browns pendant presented to B.J. Bushong to commemorate the world championships (estimate £25,000- 40,000), or, for instance, the Cy Young from the complete unnumbered set of 209 T205 gold-border cards of 1911 (estimate £20,000-30,000). Both these lots are from the Copeland collection of important base- ball cards and sports memorabilia to be sold on 23 March, as is the amazing T206 Honus Wagner, circa 1910, 2.5" by 1.5", estimate $65,000-80,000.
Looking at these images of baseball heroes and the prices that they fetch it is not hard to see why a painting of Chairman Mao or Marilyn Monroe by Andy Warhol fetches £250,000. Inch for inch it is a real bargain. However, it is hard to see why a painting of 40 two-dollar bills by the same artist should fetch £165,000 and the equiva- lent printed by the United States Treasury should only fetch $80, especially as the Treasury thought of it first.
Money, however, is a good investment, especially if it is old and made of gold or silver. At the beginning of April, Sotheby's have a sale of coins, medals and paper money from the Dark Ages to our own century. A penny piece of Edward, the elder King of Wessex, 899-924, a portrait- type penny, a late East Anglian issue on a wide flan with blundered legends, is described by the auctioneers as very fine. I am not sure whether all this would have made any different to the Wessex tycoon who owned this coin, but with it he could have bought one sheep.
Today, the seller of this penny will get around £400, which will buy him a dinner for four in Annabel's club off Berkeley Square, providing that he is modest in his choice of wines and has another couple of Wessex pence to pay for his membership and cocktails. If by chance you put on an old suit, one you had not worn since 1946. and find in the pocket two single shillings from Rhodesia, you will be able to sell them for £800 and double the size of your party at Annabel's. You could have acquired for a shilling in the Rhodesia of the 1940s six cream buns or two bars of chocolate.
Bonhams had a sale of bygones and curiosities earlier this week with some extraordinary curiosities amongst the lots, including a stuffed mermaid. These are extremely rare, although the British Museum has one and the Natural History Museum in Venice has three. Christie's have what they claim is a new category of collecting, 'scientific and engineering works of art'.
All of this leads me to believe that if you have any money it should be immediately directed towards the sort of objects that collectors treasure, for collecting is about impulses, the desire to buy, to complete a set, the desire to make patterns. Collectors' actions are affected by these impulses and are unrelated to market trends, world eco- nomics or the state of various stock mar- kets; it is a matter of how much a collector wishes to own any object. Humans, being essentially disparate, will put different val- ues on different goods and services, and so where you have a market, whether it is in cigarette cards or second-hand money, it is hard sometimes to assess what these goods or services may be worth. A few weeks ago Venice uncharacteristically was covered in snow. Transport was difficult and the streets slippery. An elderly and extremely eminent Venetian, arriving by train from Rome in the late evening, was worried how he would walk home without falling. Well known to all at the railway station, he was greeted by several porters, not station porters but the porters who carry baggage right across the city. 'Take my arm,' he said to one of them, 'and help me home.' The porter agreed and after a slow walk lasting half an hour delivered the old man to his front door. 'How shall I pay you? What will you charge?' he asked the porter. The porter thought for a moment and then said, 'Shall we call you three suitcases?'
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