news & comment
cherry-picking : the article on Apsley Cherry-Garrard in our Polar issue elicited from Selby Ki V er of Sotheby’s New York the titbit that Robert Pirie’s sale of December 2015 included not only Cherry’s copy of Herbert’s The Temple 1633 (bought by Cherry for £ 850 in June 1953 and now sold for $26,000) but also four works in Pirie’s incom- parable assemblage of John Donne. This came towards the end of a correspondence about the coverage by the book collector of online sales. This was in turn prompted by the omission in our Sales Report of any mention of the Sotheby’s online sale of June 18 at which a presentation copy of the French 1875 edition of Das Kapital had been sold for $150,000, which contrasted favourably with the price of £ 100,000 asked by Peter Harrington Ltd for the 1867 edition, which we referred to. There can be no doubt that online sales are here to stay but at least one London auctioneer maintains that a physical sale often achieves a better result. When a bidder hesitates, he can always try, he says, to hold him with his glittering eye and as it were, prise one more bid from him. There is also the sociable aspect of live auctions and man is nothing if not a sociable animal. It would be interesting to be able to have discourse from both sides of the argument.
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