vagaries

Pacificana vagaries

Attempting to decide what you should pay at public auction in Australia for a secondhand book on the Pacific Islands is no simple exercise. The collector needs more than a knowledge of the market— he needs to know something of human nature and the state of the weather, and have Chinaman’s luck.

Australian Book Auction Re cords 1969/70, just published privately by Sydney bookseller Margaret Woodhouse, will help give him an insight into the state of the recent market, but what this useful catalogue won’t tell him is what he will actually be faced with when he starts his bidding. Aus tralian Book Auction Records can only warn him to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and a study of its pages is a salutary experience.

Why, for instance, should the two-volume edition of D’Albertis’

New Guinea have been sold for $45 in March last year and for $l9O nine months later? Why anyway, should anybody have to pay $l9O for a book that appears frequently enough in the cata logues and at auction?

On the other hand some lucky fellow, despite what might appear to be a high price for a very small book did very well in paying only $25 for Hugh Hastings Romilly’s A True Story of the Western Pacific, at auction last December when Romilly’s three other books

i Were fl? 180 red, L an i. brought less than $25 each. The three Rom i U y books are not difficult tO get al fbough one certamly has to search—but his True Story, which is a ghost story about Rotuma which Romilly swore was true - is a rari| y and most collecthe keen collector wanting to complete a set of Romilly that young En Bbsh dandy who left his mark on several Pacific territories.

Why should Wilfred Beaver’s Unexplored Ne W Guinea have fetched $B5 last December at the £ uct j on ch z t lenry on New Guinea exploration pub- F"

Cannibal 8

■ ln k <~ * he pa ' nt ? r ?«ing now to the difference^S-M)'"not SB5 t_ e oiuerence. MO, not $B5, is a

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record of Australiana and Pacifica books sold at auction in Australia). Auctions and auctioneers

vary, and so do the bidders.

Atmosphere can be different.

“The excitement preceding the sale,” Mrs. Woodhouse notes, “and the frequent attacks of auction fever—that indefinable act of madness which keeps our eye brow or hand raised when our pocket says no, cannot be gleaned from reading a price-list such as this.”

What, for instance, does the bidder do when there are two copies of the same book on offer?

Mrs. Woodhouse has found bid ders divide into three schools— those who get the first copy at whatever price to make sure they have it, those who concentrate on the second after having seen the market tested, and those who play it by ear. Mrs. Woodhouse’s ob servations are that, in most cases, the second copy brings the greater price.

Despite the vagaries of the market, Australian Book Auction Records does prove clearly what none of us doubted—that in Aus tralia as overseas the prices for Pacific books are getting no cheaper, as more universities enter the market and the original volumes become scarcer.

Probably in future editions of Book Auctions even this first Woodhouse catalogue will be listed as having changed hands at treble its price—as I notice that Maggs Bros. 1964 catalogue did in Mel bourne in December, 1969. That’s not a bad investment, and think of the fun and puzzlement you’ll have studying it in the meantime —SI.

(Australian Book Auction

RECORDS, 1969/70. Published by Margaret Woodhouse Bookshop 133 Macquarie Street, Sydney. $7.50)