Bloomsbury Rare Book Auction Online
Posted by Richard Gabriel on Fri, Mar 12, 2010 @ 12:31 PM
The rare book auction at Bloomsbury's this week had 293 lots of mostly medical books and some odds and ends at the end of the auction. There were no real surprises at the auction and 77 items out of the 293 went unbid. That's about 26.3% of the total number of lots. You can download a PDF of the auction by clicking on the auction page catalog!
If you were the seller, you netted about £65,000 while on the low end Bloomsbury was estimating that you would net £94,640 (net £80,444) if all lots sold at the low end estimate or £132,670 (net £112,780) if all lots sold at the high end estimate. Average low end book price was £323 not including buyers premium and for the high end estimate £453 not including buyers premium. Actual auction results were an average of £360 of actual books sold without buyers premium and all of these numbers should be multipled by the currency factor of Pounds to Dollars of today's rate of $1.504 dollar to the pound. You can down load the PDF of the auction or go directly to the web site at Bloomsbury. The analysis for this group of books which are moderately interesting would not reflect the overall market for rare book sales but if you were considering putting together a collection of rare medical items and you intend on selling them, the message is keep your average per book price below the the price you could get at auction! The principles of the buy-sell demand still apply, however none of these rare and antiquarian books fall into the extremely rare and high demand book category. It was a good auction for book buyers and some great deals were obtained, proving that buying at auction can still be a good deal.