The “Ring” in the Bookselling Trade

A bibliophile writes the following complaint: “At the recent sale of Swinburne’s library, certain lots, chiefly signed presentation copies, fetched extravagantly high prices. But the outsider is generally puzzled at the extreme variation in the prices, a variation which passing fashions in taste do not explain. There is an explanation, as one would-be purchaser was made somewhat rudely aware. He wanted a book by a modern poet, a poet of delicate talent and little recognition; and he asked a bookseller to bid for the lot. He was willing to spend between ten and thirteen shillings on it. The agent who was to bid arrived late, and another bookseller bought the lot for five shillings. So the would-be purchaser asked his bookseller to approach the man who had bought the lot, and find out if he would sell it. The book was cheap at five and would be rather dear at ten shillings. When approached, the purchaser informed his colleague that ‘he had had to pay a good deal more for the lot than the price given in the rooms, and that he could not part with it for less than eighteen shillings.’ Such are the blessings of the ‘ring’ at Sotheby’s.

“The ring consists of some of the largest and best-known members of the bookselling trade—all honest men—and their plan is this: they never bid against each other, except for show; lots go at small prices, thus robbing owners and executors of their right profit; and subsequently these cheap lots are put up again and resold among the members of the ring. The auctioneers can, of course, do nothing to stop the practice—and it is as legal as it is dishonourable. At times an outsider with a big banking account gives the ring a good deal of trouble; but it has survived all private attacks, and is likely to—though a private buyer with a confident manner and a quick power of decision can occasionally get a great deal of amusement by running lots up, and so forcing the ring to pay exorbitant prices for things they do not want.”

It is true. There exists among the second-hand booksellers precisely such a ring as gave rise to so much discussion a few years ago when the scandal of the art-dealers’ “knock-out” was widely discussed. For some time I myself have been trying to get information about it. But it is not easy. You can find out from booksellers who are not in the ring (few of these lone wolves are important) who the booksellers are who are in the ring, but that is about all. But the method is simple. The attendance at book sales is not large. Private collectors are lazy people; it is not now fashionable—as it was in the Duke of Roxburghe’s day—for the Old Nobility to crowd the salerooms, bidding desperately amid groans of anguish and cheers of triumph. The result is that very often one will attend a sale and be the only private person there, and it is a matter of chance (especially when the sale is a comparatively small one) whether any one at all is there except the members of the ring. The ring, pro forma, will run a book up to about a third of its value and leave it at that. At the close of the proceedings its members will adjourn somewhere—I don’t know where, but let us say a back room in the Charing Cross Road—and hold a “knock-out” auction of the books they have bought. The difference between the sums paid here and the sums paid at Sotheby’s or Hodgson’s will be pooled and divided, so as to equalize the spoil; and the owners of the libraries sold will have got only, perhaps, a half of what they really ought to have got considering the prices that the ultimate purchasers are willing to pay.

But I don’t see what is to be done about it. As my correspondent remarks, the auctioneers can’t stop it. They also must suffer as their work is done on a commission basis. It must not be assumed that all the booksellers like the system, but the minority cannot help themselves. I remember that one very well known bookseller, now dead, tried for several years to keep out of it; but in the end, by co-ordinated bidding against him, he was forced in. There the thing is; the dealers find it profitable; it is not easy to keep out of it unless you are a prince of the trade, with rich customers and great resources, or a person with special knowledge who is after a special kind of book and will be let alone; and there is no short cut to reform. How can Parliament interfere? If one dealer who buys a book can sell it to another after the sale, how can six or a dozen dealers be prevented from exchanging their purchases similarly. It would be all very well to make the “knock-out” illegal, but how many does it take to make a ring and how many detectives could be spared? The only conceivable remedy is for persons who habitually buy old books to make a point (when the war is over and they are released from their present occupations) of turning up at the salerooms and bidding against the pros. Even at that the remedy would only be efficacious as long as it was actively applied. It might be worth a guinea a box, but you would have to take a box every day; there would be no permanent cure. Directly the strangers slacked off again the ring and the “knock-out” would revive, and my unfortunate friend (for I presume that the disconsolate buyer he refers to is himself) would have once more to pay for his books much more than the price recorded at the rooms. “There is no cure for this disease,” as Mr. Belloc’s poem puts it, unless auction-frequenting again becomes a popular form of amusement.

But, if I may digress, I must say that, for persons of a bookish turn of mind, there is nothing more amusing than an occasional visit to Wellington Street or Chancery Lane. I shouldn’t care to do it every day; the combined mustiness of books and booksellers is a bit overpowering. But it is exciting to bid occasionally, and the books that come into the London auction-rooms are of such quality that sometimes you might almost as well go to Sotheby’s as to the Exhibition Rooms (now shut up so as to pay for two minutes of the war) of the British Museum. The bindings that great collectors put on their books are in themselves wonderful. And the booksellers, rich and poor, glossy and seedy, as they nod to the rostrum and paw the goods, are a sight to which only Balzac could do justice. They all wear looks of settled gloom as though they were on the verge of bankruptcy; they all (if one speaks to them) swear that “it is impossible to get anything to-day as everything is going so dear”; and they all have a sovereign indifference to everything but the commercial value of the books they deal in. I say all: there are exceptions; but the crowd as a whole is utterly depressed and completely free from the remotest concern with literature. But possibly when they get in that back room somewhere and assess the margin between what executors have got for books and what they ought to have got for them, their morose countenances may brighten. For all I know, every “knock-out” auction may end with the circulation of the punch-bowl, jolly songs, and toasts to the damnation of all the idiots who waste their money on rotten old books unfit to read and thereby keep in affluence a set of honest men who read the Daily Mail in the morning and never a line for the rest of the day.