A Healthy Obsession

I admit to being mildly obsessed with bicycles. I have a friend who is (or at least was) mildly obsessed with toucans. He once owned them, studied them, read about them and collected books about them. However it was now time for him to downsize and I willingly accepted his invitation to help sell a treatise of his, entitled Monograph of the Ramphastidae by John Gould. It quickly became apparent that this was not your usual eBay item and before long, I embarked on a sleuth’s trail to establish the book’s true value and to determine how best to sell it.

The value of this particular volume was hopefully enhanced by its provenance: it had been purchased by, or for, Philippe, Count of Flanders (1837 – 1905), 2^nd son of Leopold I of Belgium. The Count's Royal monogram was on the cover.

I talked to both Sotheby’s and Christies in New York, several dealers on the East Coast and Henry Sotheran in London. The latter dealer had purchased most of Gould’s residual inventory and lithographic plates etc. following his death in 1881 and is unquestionably the world’s leading authority on him. Although very valuable, the book was not of a rarity that would justify shipping it to London and, taking Sotheran’s advice, I then contacted Donald Heald in New York.

Heald is a specialist in 19^th century natural history lithographs. Based on what little pricing data I could find, I made the assumption that the “retail” value of the book was about $60,000. Given that an informed bidder would discount the book by the 25% buyer’s premium at auction and then taking the 11.5% seller’s premium/handling into account, that would result in net proceeds of about $39,800, assuming it sold as expected. It seemed to make sense to give Heald first “kick at the can”. Once I had convinced a reluctant UPS to accept the book for overnight delivery to New York, Donald Heald was able to make a cash offer of $40, 000 which I thought was fair. My friend duly accepted the offer and the cash was wire-transferred to his account within 24 hours. Mission accomplished.