Put it in print

Three sales furnished with the ever-rarer paper catalogues featured intriguing lots, including a North Carolina map by John Ogilby and a wine glass gibbeting Admiral Byng, the unfortunate scapegoat for the British loss of Minorca

- Huon Mallalieu

AT the beginning of this week, I had a nostalgic time working my way through a pile of new auction catalogues—actual, physical catalogues. That used to be the way all of my weeks began, as it helped me to plan forthcoming visits and viewings. There are significant advantages to online catalogues when they are intelligently laid out, with illustrations from different angles and showing the backs of pictures, especially when there is a good quality zoom facility. The innovation of showing a person standing next to a hanging picture to demonstrate its ‘liveability’ is an excellent adjunct to sometimes easily overlooked printed measurements.

However, even if you have mastered the skills needed to juggle split screens, it is much easier to compare lots in different sales when one has the printed catalogues side by side—not to mention that a good catalogue in the hand is a pleasure in itself. Naturally, too, it may be easier to look up things from past sales when one has the catalogues on one’s shelf than it is to struggle through online archives.

As far as the international auction houses are concerned, however, catalogues are almost extinct, except for limited-run vanity editions for owners and favoured clients in an ever-more limited range of categories. For the time being, middle-sized businesses around this country are still publishing them—thus my recent postbag—and this may be connected to the fact that they continue to offer a wider range of specialities and have taken on specialists discarded by the internationals. As long as it lasts, I shall be happy to use both formats. Here, then, are a number of items drawn from recent catalogues of Woolley & Wallis of Salisbury, Wiltshire; Reeman Dansie of Colchester, Essex; and Dreweatts of Newbury, Berkshire.