Northwest Collector

Reference

Dealing with dealers, Part 2

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When sending images of an item to a prospective buyer (i.e., a dealer) or consignee (an auction house), it helps to photograph it next to a ruler or or standard-size object to give an idea of its dimensions.

After you learn as much as you possibly can about an item you want to sell or consign, the next step is finding a prospective buyer or an auction house that will not just put your treasure on the block but get you a good price for it.

In order to advance to that stage, you need to

Take some really good photos!

The fastest, easiest and cheapest way to get a response from dealers or auctioneers is to send them pictures of the goods. If you don’t have a good digital camera—or if you are like me: really bad at taking photos—then get a friend to help you. If you are able to take high-res images, try to compress them so they’re easy to send by e-mail and you won’t shut down the recipient’s mailbox.

A dealer or consignee will want to know as much as possible about what you are offering. First and foremost, that means its condition: It’s not enough for you to describe something as “in great shape” or “only slightly soiled” or “with only minor wear,” especially if you’re a layman; you have to prove it. There is almost always a specific terminology used to describe each type of collectible—coins, baseball cards and comic books have very clearly defined grading systems—and good photos will do the talking for you. Meanwhile, I note that eBay listings with lousy photos don’t attract as much interest as similar listings in which the photos are crisp and clear. It’s not just that serious collectors are distrustful of muddy, unfocused images (the seller may be trying to hide or gloss over something); people respond better when an item is well presented.

With autographs, currency, ceramics, some vintage newspapers, furniture, artwork—virtually anything of value—authenticity is always in question. Be sure to take close-ups of signatures, seals, stamps and other hallmarks.

Take a bunch of photos—not just one or two—from different angles and distances and showing all the important details, both positive and negative. If there’s any damage, be sure to show it, because it will only mean problems later on if the purchaser or auctioneer receives it and is unpleasantly surprised.

Take the photos in a clean, well-lit place, but take care to avoid glare, especially if you use a flash. Try to do justice to the object’s colors—you don’t want nice, bright hues to look washed-out—and photograph it against a black or white backdrop, whichever will create better contrast. When size is a consideration (isn’t it always?), some people put a common object—a pencil or a coin, for example—next to the object for purposes of comparison. (Or just lay a ruler beside it. Duh.) For larger items, you can just measure it carefully and include the dimensions in your written description.

If your item is handwritten—a signed photo or letter, say—or is printed or has a maker’s mark, be sure to photograph it up close: With autographs, currency, ceramics, some vintage newspapers, furniture, artwork—virtually anything of value—authenticity is always in question. Be sure to take close-ups of signatures, seals, stamps and other hallmarks. Anyone who watches Antiques Roadshow  knows that the collectibles market is rife with fakes, forgeries, and adulterated artifacts. Modern editions of antique Japanese ukiyo-e prints have been made using the original woodblocks—it usually takes an expert to spot the difference—and photographs are reprinted as well. Rock posters from the 1960s—which can fetch a lot of bread if they’re really ’60ssurvivors—are frequently pirated, and a premier dealer in boxing memorabilia (a professional authenticator himself) once told me he flat-out refused to trade in Muhammad Ali autograph material because more than 90 percent of what’s being hawked as hand-signed by The Greatest is in fact forged.

Take the photos in a clean, well-lit place, but take care to avoid glare, especially if you use a flash. Try to do justice to the object’s colors—you don’t want nice, bright hues to look washed-out—and photograph it against a black or white backdrop, whichever will create better contrast.

The work of famous furniture makers may be reproduced with or without the intent to deceive—but by the same token your old highboy need not have been made by John Townsend or Thomas Chippendale to be a highly desirable piece: I think one of the reasons people love Leigh and Leslie Keno, the identical twin appraisers on Antiques Roadshow, is their enthusiasm for any piece of great craftsmanship that has served generations of owners well and has been handed down in as close to its original state as possible.

Books, of course, can go through any number of editions, printings, impressions and states. Bibliographies and collector’s checklists can tell you how to identify a book’s state based on, say, a misspelling or piece of broken type on a particular page that was later corrected. If you have gotten that far in your research, be sure to photograph those fine points as well. In fact, with books, you should photograph both front and back covers and the spine; the same parts of the dust jacket (if present) as well as the flaps; any inscriptions and/or bookplates; the title page; the copyright page; and the frontispiece (the picture facing the title page) and several of the illustrations, if there are any. Even the tissue that used to be inserted over engravings to keep them from bleeding into the facing pages—they count too. All of these details will give an expert a clearer idea of what you have to offer.

Speaking of illustrations, consider the case of Mark Twain’s masterwork, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), which Ernest Hemingway and many others have called the greatest novel ever written by an American. Some clown working at the printer’s added a little something to one of the illustrations—actually, he drew a small erection on the character of Silas Phelps—just before the book went to press.

if you still aren’t sure about your item, don’t commit to selling it to the first guy who shares a little of his expertise: if you have something truly unique and valuable, like a ticket on the Titanic, it’s still in his interest to relieve you of it at the lowest price possible.

There are various versions circulating of what happened next. I’ve read that the altered plate made its way into 3,000 copies of the prospectus for the book (i.e., the salesmen’s samples of the incomplete novel), of which some 250 copies got sent out—getting a rise, so to speak, from bookshop proprietors and their pals. The publisher issued a recall; the dirty plate was cut out of the returned copies and the other 2,750 prospectuses not yet sent out; and a new, cleaned-up plate was pasted in.

I’ve also read that 30,000 copies of the first edition were printed and bound with the illustration before anyone spotted the offending member. Talk about Victorian horror! After the alarum (to use the antiquated spelling) was raised and the machinery of book production screeched to a halt, and naughty Uncle Silas had to be cut out copy by copy and replaced with a revised illustration, delaying the book’s release.

Supposedly, no copies of the complete first edition of Huckleberry Finn survive with the picture of an exposed Uncle Silas—and may never have been produced—while one copy of the prospectus is known to exist. (For this reason, the first of the two versions above seems more likely, as any number of people would have seized the chance to pocket one or more unexpurgated copies of the first edition from such a large print run.) Needless to say, if you happen to have either a prospectus or a true first edition of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in your home library with Uncle Silas in all his glory (small as it was), you are well on your way to owning that Lamborghini you’ve been fantasizing about.

I tell you all this just to give an indication of all the tweaking, cutting, correcting and adjusting that go into preparing for and actually making a bound book: the example of Huckleberry Finn happens to be an off-color one. Knowing something about these distinctions will help you better understand what edition you have as well as its uniqueness and value.

Of course, if you still aren’t sure about your item, photos will help a knowledgeable person identify it. However, as I indicated in part one of this series, don’t commit to selling your item to the first guy who shares a little of his expertise: if you have something truly unique and valuable, like a ticket on the Titanic, it’s still in his interest to relieve you of it at the lowest price possible. An auction house, at least, has a vested interest in getting you top dollar for your collectible if you will consign it to them.

Dealing with dealers, Part 1

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Frans Francken the Younger (1581–1642), Flemish, An Antique Dealer’s Gallery (between 1615 and 1620), Galleria Borghese, Rome. Don’t be that monkey!

The following post focuses on selling to dealers. I’ll preface it by saying that I’ve met some incredibly nice dealers over the years, so please don’t think I’ve got a thing against dealers in general. They are just like other people: some are wonderful people and some are money-grubbing, unscrupulous sociopaths. Both kinds are in the business of making money. The nice ones are more likely to treat you fairly, even if you’re not really sure about the value of what you’re selling. They may even tell you—as Rick Harrison did on Pawn Stars (at least when the cameras were rolling)—what its real value is. Don’t expect that from the sociopaths. If you rely, Blanche DuBois–like, on the kindness of strangers, you may well come away with a more dismal view of humanity. Caveat venditor!

Some time ago a gentleman who read one of my posts e-mailed to tell me to say he had a Union Pacific Railroad poster from 1869 and wondered how to determine its value. On another occasion, a woman contacted me about selling some correspondence between Lady Clementine Churchill (wife of Sir Winston) and Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery, whose World War II legacy includes the command of all Allied ground troops on a little mission known as D-Day.

Exciting stuff! I only wish I had the expertise and experience to tell these folks what their collectibles were worth, but at least I could offer them a course of action:

Do. Your. Homework.

If you’d rather be lazy and simply ask a dealer or even another collector what your item is worth—and if you really don’t know them well or have good reason to trust them—beware: you are ripe for fleecing.

I am distrustful of first offers from dealers unless I know how they price their inventory, as it gives me a general idea of their profit margin. If I sound cynical, it comes from experience. No matter how sincere a dealer seems—no matter how “high-class” their shop or website looks—if you have no clue to the value of your item, you run the risk of seriously underselling it.

A high-end autograph dealer I once knew would buy cheaply in a way that, I assume, allowed him to sleep at night: he would ask what you wanted for an item, then hoped you’d be dumb enough (as I was) to undervalue it. What bugged me then—and still does—is that I actually trusted him to truthfully say, “Look, it’s a nice piece, but I need to make a profit. Let me offer you X number of dollars for it, which is a fair price and as good as you’ll get from another dealer.” He didn’t do that. When I offered him an autograph letter written by a certain early photographer of the American West, he played dumb and asked me what price I had in mind. I suggested $200. He jumped at it, then listed it on his website for $1,200, describing letters by this photographer as “shockingly rare.”

Was this unethical? Arguably no. This guy would no doubt say, “Business is business, and I didn’t break any laws or lie to you. You should have researched it.” But I felt taken advantage of.

Make good scans of the item you want to sell and send them to several dealers and auction houses that specialize in that kind of collectible. If it is a unique item—as opposed to, say, a coin or limited-edition plate with a book value—you’ll be surprised at the range of offers you’ll receive.

How do you guard against this? As I told the fellow with the Union Pacific poster: Ask around. Make good scans of the item you want to sell and send them to several dealers and auction houses that specialize in that kind of collectible. If it is a unique item—as opposed to, say, a coin or limited-edition plate with a book value—you’ll be surprised at the range of offers you’ll receive.

Also, there’s a wealth of information online. Google your item and see what comes up. Sometimes you will find the same item or a similar one on a dealer website and can get some idea of an asking price. (But take it with a grain of salt: the item may be overpriced, which is why it hasn’t sold.)

On Antiques Roadshow, the appraisers often talk about “comparables,” the prices at which auction items have sold for. You can check individual auction websites for their hammer prices, or you can cast a wider net—which, of course, is why WorthPoint is such a valuable resource: it’s a tool the professionals use. However, you can also see past sale prices on LiveAuctioneers, Invaluable, and some auction houses, like Heritage Auctions. (For all of these you’ll need to start an account.)

Then there’s eBay. No matter what nasty things brick-and-mortar collectibles dealers say—that eBay and other online auction and dealer sites are killing their businesses—most of them buy and/or sell online. If you find a comparable eBay item, it may give you a sense of the price it can fetch, especially if there are bidders. If the item is up for auction, click on the little heart to “watch” and see what it sells for. If it is listed on “Buy It Now” and no one’s purchasing, it may well be because it’s overpriced. (Be sure to take condition into account.) If your item is nowhere to be found on eBay, you may have to watch over a period of months or even years before a similar one is listed. That may give you some idea of its scarcity . . . because, sooner or later, virtually everything comes up on eBay.

Finally, if you have a genuinely rare piece, contact libraries and museums that have similar holdings in their collections. Institutions are not in the business of pricing collectibles, but a curator or researcher may be nice enough to give you some information on it or a lead on who to contact. And while most public and university museums and libraries don’t have the budgets to buy items, especially in lean economic times, private institutions may. Or they may ask you to consider donating your item for a tax write-off. If you are able and willing to do so, I doff my hat to you: scholars can study it and the general public can enjoy it.

Hollywood and the thing with . . .

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The original photographic wanted poster

Before there were wanted posters in the Old West—those standard props in Hollywood Westerns, featuring mug shots of glowering, greasy-haired murderers and train robbers, bushwhackers and cattle rustlers, card cheats, horse thieves, and all manner of other evildoers—there were wanted posters offering rewards for information leading to the arrest of the conspirators in the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865.

A wanted poster for the Lincoln assassination conspirators. Note that actual photos were applied. Other wanted posters for the collaborators in the plot lacked the photos. Courtesy of the Library of Congress.

I’ve seen these broadsides with and without photographs. In America, at least, the version with photos is believed to be the first to feature real images of wanted men. Small surprise that the newest technology would be employed: it was in the service of a nationwide manhunt for the murderers of the president, after all. (I’ve seen an earlier poster from England with a skillful engraving of a fugitive thief, which was no doubt rare and would have been costly, but it happened that the crook ripped off the sister of the engraver, so he volunteered his artistic talents to the pursuit.) However, the photographs are not printed on the paper but are albumin prints affixed to the poster, of which a very limited number of copies were made: the technology to print photos on paper for wider circulation (as in books and newspapers) had not yet been invented.

Wanted in the West

The great Marshall Trimball, official historian of the state of Arizona, True West magazine columnist, prolific author, and an authority on the Old West whom I’ve consulted in the past, was asked by a True West reader when photos were first used on wanted posters.

“In the classic era of the Old West—1870s and 1880s—most reward posters were just handbills or postcards sent to law enforcement officials with printed descriptions of the wanted men. No photos . . . ,” Trimble replied.

“Authorities rarely placed wanted posters in public places. A reward or wanted notice would occasionally be printed in a newspaper, but for the most part, they were not intended for general consumption.”

—Marshall Trimball

A postcard from Iowa in 1882 offering $100 for the arrest of a horse thief. Here, too, an albumin photo was pasted on. Wanted postcards were an easy way for peace officers to get the word out on wanted men (and the occasional woman). Author’s collection.
A great example of a pre-photographic handbill from San Francisco in early 1897, advertising a $500 reward for a murderer. Image courtesy of Gene W. Baade Books on the West, www.booksonthewest.com.

He pointed out that it wasn’t until the late 1890s or early 1900s that entirely printed handbills and wanted posters featuring images of outlaws began to appear as printing technology evolved: “For example, the Pinkertons put out several posters of the members of the Wild Bunch, complete with pictures.”

Prior to that, “some lawmen carried photos made of criminals when they were in prison,” Trimball observed. “The backs of these mug shots featured descriptions that included height, weight, hair and eye color, scars and identifying marks. But these were put together by hand, and the photos were originals, not prints. I’ve seen these saddlebag circulars, and they are amazing. You can see the seeds of the later wanted posters that we think of when we watch Western movies.”1

I’ve seen the Wild Bunch posters that Trimble mentioned, issued by the Pinkerton National Detective Agency: they are double-sided “circulars” (the Pinkerton agency’s own term) loaded with information on Butch Cassidy, Harry Longbaugh (the Sundance Kid), and other members of the gang, and they all seem to date from 1904—relatively late. Also, they don’t look like the kind of things that would have been put up on a wall or lamppost, and in fact Trimble notes: “Authorities rarely placed wanted posters in public places. A reward or wanted notice would occasionally be printed in a newspaper, but for the most part, they were not intended for general consumption.”2

So that’s two myths exploded: wanted posters in the Old West weren’t put up on Main Street in Big Bug, Arizona Territory (which used to be an actual place but is now a ghost town), and they didn’t feature the likenesses of bad guys, either drawn or photographed—at any rate, not prior to the turn of the twentieth century.

Kirk Douglas as Howard Nightingale, a Texas marshal and aspiring U.S. senator, in the 1975 film Posse, with a wanted poster for train robber Jack Strawhorn (Bruce Dern). The press kit indicates the story takes place in the 1890s. The format of the poster may be a little off, but at least it’s close to the time when a poster with a printed mug shot might have been produced. Photo from the Douglas Foundation Archive. Used with their kind permission.

Early posters with printed photos

Since the Butch Cassidy/Sundance Kid/Wild Bunch posters of 1904 are often cited as among the earliest wanted posters with printed-on photos, I started looking for earlier ones from west of the Mississippi. The oldest I’ve found so far dates to 1900, but I’m certain that there are earlier ones. Some examples follow. They are often found on book dealers’ websites and on eBay, as are earlier ones with applied photos. The ones on this page that are from booksellers were still available at the time of this writing.

Not exactly exactly a wanted poster but an early image nonetheless, of a man missing from San Francisco in 1900. Author’s collection.
A 1901 poster from Chicago for a guy who embezzled from American Express. Image courtesy of David Hamilton Americana Books, www.americanabookstore.com.

Notes

  1. Marshal Trimball, “When Were Photos First Put on Wanted Posters?,” True West, June 10, 2013, accessed August 2, 2025, https://truewestmagazine.com/article/when-were-photos-first-put-on-wanted-posters/.
  2. Trimball, “When Were Photos First Put on Wanted Posters?”

COLLECT THIS EXPERIENCE! While researching the above story, I came across a great website called I Review Westerns. These are thoughtful, intelligent, earthy, no-holds-barred assessments of Westerns—films and literary works—by someone who is clearly devoted to the genre. You may not agree with all the reviews, but they are an awful lot of fun to read. I encourage you to visit IReviewWesterns.com.

Why I bid by phone

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This article appeared in slightly different form on WorthPoint in 2019.

Art auction at Christie’s, New York, by Bernard Gotfryd, November 18, 1981. The painting is Primeval Landscape by William Baziotes, which was used as the cover illustration for the auction catalog. Image courtesy of Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division Washington, D.C.

I’m always surprised when an item comes up for auction and the bidding goes through the roof two weeks before the closing date. Maybe it’s a contest of egos, like T. rexes (their brains the size of walnuts) fighting over a piece of carrion, with the winner roaring in triumph as the losers stomp away.

Rational bidders, however, want to commit the least amount of money to winning an auction, and that means exercising self-restraint. So it makes sense not to start a bidding war. Mindless counterbidding only amps up the competition, like throwing chum to sharks. Better to let someone else have the high bid for as long as possible: they may become complacent or forget about the auction altogether, giving you the chance to win with a last-minute “stealth” bid. Or you yourself may have second thoughts about how high to go—or even whether to bid. By waiting, you keep your options open.

My advice is: Apart from eBay—where an early bid (again, keep it low) should prevent a seller from considering “Buy It Now” offers—don’t bid in an online auction until the last possible moment.

But not all auctions are online only: Many auction houses, large and small—even those that use online bidding platforms like LiveAuctioneers and Invaluable—still hold traditional in-person auctions with live telephone bidding on their premises in tandem with live online bidding. Or the online bidding portions of their auctions may close before the live “cattle rattle” begins.

That’s why phone bidding is well worth the effort: If you can’t fly out to, say, Hooterville (or the nearest county with an airport) and bid with the locals in someone’s barn, then phone bidding is the next best thing. There’s even the bonus of a lower buyer’s premium than the bidding platforms charge—what Mr. Ziffel and his clever pig, Arnold, would pay by bidding from the floor. (Bear in mind, though, that you may have to arrange for third-party shipping if the auctioneer doesn’t handle it in-house.)

It makes sense not to start a bidding war. Mindless counterbidding only amps up the competition, like throwing chum to sharks. Better to let someone else have the high bid for as long as possible: they may become complacent or forget about the auction altogether . . .

With phone bidding, someone on-site will call you several lots before your item comes up and serve as your eyes and ears in the auction room, asking you if you want to continue if you are outbid by someone in the room, a previously placed absentee bid, or another phone bidder. In my experience, the smaller the auction house and the more out-of-the-way it is, the less competition you can expect from the people actually attending.

But there are other reasons why I prefer to bid by phone, even if an auctioneer has simultaneous live online bidding along with on-site, in-person bidding:

  • You may experience a computer glitch. Just as on eBay, a server problem or a lost Internet connection can mean you’re out of the running. In one case, even with my Internet connection fully functioning, my bid on one of the big auction platforms didn’t register in the final moments, and I lost an item I probably would have won.
  • Some auctioneers give preference to in-person bidders. Suppose you leave an absentee bid on an online bidding platform: Surely the auctioneer will give it priority over an equal bid by someone in the auction room—a bid made hours or days after you placed yours—right? Not necessarily. I actually thought I had won an item—the winning bid was the same as the absentee bid I’d left earlier—only to learn that the auctioneer had awarded it to somebody sitting ten feet away. (House policy, he said.)
  • An auctioneer may fail to check the highest bids on the online auction platform they use. Maybe they’re new to online bidding, or maybe they’re just distracted, but an auctioneer may award a lot to a lower in-person bid just because they neglect to confirm what the highest absentee bid was. In one case it was mine.
  • You may think you won an item during live online bidding, only to see the bidding reopened. That happened to me once as well: One of my favorite auction houses started using a live online bidding system that still had some kinks in it and I won an item at a low price—even saw a message saying I had won the lot—then stepped away from my computer, only to return to find that the bidding had resumed in my absence and I had lost the item. When I complained, the auctioneer claimed that reopening an auction for delayed bids is common industry practice. Whether that’s true or not, I don’t think it would have played out the same way if I had been bidding by phone.

But beware: Even phone bidding is not error-free. In one case, I and my proxy bidder on the other end of the line were waiting for my lot to come up—and the bid caller skipped it. Apparently, he decided to award it to an absentee bidder without realizing that a phone bidder was waiting to join the auction. Needless to say, my proxy bidder and I were both stunned. There was a happy ending, though: I immediately raised the issue with the auction house—with the very person who had arranged for me to bid by phone (always get their name!)—and she notified the auctioneer, who awarded me the item for the next bid increment.

The upshot: Before bidding in an auction, read the terms carefully, including the ways you can bid. If phone bidding is available, and you have reliable telephone service, you might consider it. It takes a little planning—you must register ahead of time and be available to speak with the proxy when your lot comes up, even if it’s at an odd hour—but it’s well worth the effort.

Study your auction catalog!

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I love auction catalogs: Even if I can’t afford to bid on what I really want—and how many collectors can?—the catalogs make for fun reading.

Catalogs are also a great resource for collectors. Over time, they can give an idea of what’s out there on the market and—if you bother to check the hammer prices afterwards, which I strongly advise—what certain items may fetch. The operative word is “may,” of course; more on that in a moment.

The catalog for the 2023 Western Art and Wine Auction at the Museum of the Mountain Man in Pinedale, WY. The cover art by Tucker Smith (TuckerSmithArt.com), Morning on Ditch Creek, is a signed artist’s proof giclée print on canvas made from one of Smith’s spectacular oil paintings. “All art is donated specifically for the auction, mostly directly by the artists, to be auctioned to benefit the museum collection, and all proceeds go to the museum,” according to Clint Gilchrist, the museum’s executive director. “The cover art is always one of the pieces donated for the auction.” See all the catalogs at https://museumofthemountainman.com/artauction/. The next auction will be on July 11; the catalog will be online on June 1. Catalog cover image used by permission of the Museum of the Mountain Man.

If you collect within a narrow field, you may even see an item come up for auction more than once over a period of a few years. If it’s a rare or one-of-a-kind piece, it can help you to know what it sold for the last time it went on the block.

Lot descriptions are also informative, both for what they contain and what they don’t. A really good auction house with knowledgeable experts—Heritage Auctions in Dallas, say—will publish beautiful catalogs with insightful descriptions that contain valuable details about an item’s uniqueness, provenance, condition, etc. But don’t let that stop you from doing your own research: If you collect Theodore Roosevelt memorabilia, for example, and a letter from Teddy to a Mr. Joe Blow comes up for auction, do your homework and try to find out who Joe Blow actually was, if the auctioneer hasn’t done so already. Special associations often go unnoticed and only add to an item’s worth.

Hard-copy catalogs are relatively inexpensive collectibles in their own right—and well-illustrated ones are as good as any coffee-table book . . .

Here’s an example: Some years ago, a short 1909 Christmas greeting written by legendary 19th-century boxer/Civil War veteran Mike Donovan to a Captain Jack Crawford came up for auction. Donovan’s handwriting wasn’t so legible, and the lot description querulously noted that Donovan referred to Crawford as “the Poet Scant.” “Scant”? I was confused too.

So I Googled “Captain Jack Crawford, Poet Scant.” It turned out he was Captain Jack Crawford, known as the “Poet Scout,” who was a lot more famous than Donovan (at least, outside of pugilistic circles). Both men had been born in Ireland and served in the Union Army, so they obviously had some common bonds. Crawford became a cavalry scout in the Indian Wars and was among the first to arrive at the site of the Little Bighorn fight after Custer’s 7th Cavalry were killed. Crawford was also famous as a frontier poet, hence the moniker: He used to pen his verse at campfires—while his compatriots were drinking, eating beans and farting, one imagines—published several books (pretty avidly collected today) and was active on the public reading circuit. And he was a pal of Buffalo Bill Cody, with whom he later worked the Wild West show circuit.

All of this evaded the writer of the lot description, but it greatly enhanced the note’s value—both to your humble correspondent and the guy who outbid me!

Hard-copy catalogs are also relatively inexpensive collectibles in their own right—and well-illustrated ones are as good as any coffee-table book—in addition to being great reference material and useful as “provenance” if you acquire something that has been auctioned off in the past. Here’s a great 2020 movie poster auction catalog from Heritage Auctions in Dallas. Image courtesy of Heritage Auctions (HA.com).

Anyway . . . bear in mind that while hammer prices may provide an indicator of an item’s fair-market value, nothing’s written in stone. Just as on eBay when two goons get in a bidding war and drive an item’s price ski-high up five days before the end of the auction, people in an online or live auction can get crazy and bid far beyond what they reasonably should. (Figure in the buyer’s premium as well.) So take hammer prices with a few grains of salt.    

Conversely, you may get lucky—as I have more than once—and find a great item BURIED in an auction catalog among unrelated items: for example, an uncommon film star autograph hidden among sports memorabilia. Not only will other collectors of that film star miss the autograph (unless they collect sports memorabilia too) but the sports people will probably ignore the film star as well. Then you have the opportunity to nab a great item far below what it would ordinarily sell for.

In a nutshell: Look hard for those hidden gems among the other lots!

A final word . . . I originally wrote a version of this story about 15 years ago. Catalogs, for the obvious reasons of lower cost, speed, and convenience, are nowadays often sent out only as pdfs or links to web pages. Occasionally you can find them online on Google Books. If you don’t want to download and keep the pdfs on file, you may be able to view past sales on an auctioneer’s website.

On collecting Japanese woodblock prints: An interview with Peter Gilder

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There’s a learning curve for any novice collector, and it can be expensive—not just because one can overpay for a collectible before knowing enough about rarity or scarcity, or even buy a counterfeit item, but because new collectors tend to buy a lot of stuff on impulse before deciding to specialize.

Kuniteru, “The Steamship Carrying the Chief Priest of Higashi Honganji Temple in Kyoto Is Welcomed to the Port of Hakodate in the Northern Island of Hokkaido,” 1870, oban triptych (29″ X 141/2“). (The black boat at the right edge of the center sheet has the American Consul on board. The American consul. Mr. Rice, came to Hakodate in 1857.) Courtesy of Peter Gilder, Arts and Designs of Japan.

Having collected 19th-century and early 20th-century Japanese woodblock prints for a number of years and seen the prices climb steadily on dealers’ websites, my advice from the get-go: Read up on Japanese prints online, view the wide range of themes and the works of individual artists, and try to collect prudently. If you plan to collect prints seriously—that is, not just pick up a samurai image as a gift for a martial artist friend, or a nostalgic landscape of a place you may have visited on a trip to Japan—I believe it’s better to collect narrowly and then expand your range than to buy widely at first and then focus. At the very least, you’ll potentially save yourself a lot of money.

“It’s best to store prints in acid free folders in acid free boxes. No exposure to light.”—Peter Gilder

I also strongly believe you should learn something about preserving the prints, information on which I’ve found to be pretty elusive on the internet. For example, I think it’s a bad idea to buy matted and framed prints, as you won’t know what the borders look like. Furthermore, you need to be careful about framing and displaying prints, as Japanese printmakers used “fugitive” ink that can fade over time when exposed to light, even if framed under UV-light-resistant museum-quality glass. (I read somewhere that museums that display framed Japanese prints do so for only two or three months at a time, under low- or non-UV-light conditions, then rotate them out.) Granted, it may take years for the ink of a framed print to fade noticeably in ambient (indirect) light, but do you really want that when your print’s colors have already remained vibrant for 125 years or more?

Another word of advice: Try to have an idea of what your print should look like. That won’t be possible for all prints, as there are many thousands of images, but you may find that the colors of the print you are considering are not as nice as another example you have found online—or you may discover, as I have, that that the oban-size (roughly 10″ x 15″) print that you bought is actually only one panel of a two- or three-part print, which the seller failed to mention.

And needless to say, just as the real estate mantra is “Location, location, location!” in collecting it’s “Condition, condition, condition!”

Kuniyoshi, “Katsuenra Genshoshichi Protecting Himself from the Government Arrows with a Tiger [Leopard] Pelt,” from the series “108 Heroes of the Popular Suikoden, c. 1827–30,” published by Kagaya Kichibei, oban-size (101/8” x 145/8“). Courtesy of Peter Gilder, Arts and Designs of Japan.

When I have the itch to buy a new print, I have my main go-to people, and at the top of my list is Peter Gilder of Arts and Designs of Japan, a San Francisco–based specialist in prints from the 18th to the 20th centuries. Not only are Peter’s offerings invariably in excellent condition—something a collector really has to watch for—but they are very reasonably priced, and he sends out an email with new offering on the first day of every month, which is a huge convenience.

A criminal lawyer for two years, Peter quit to live in Japan for several years, becoming an amateur master second-degree go player. On returning to California, he started a Japanese print business, which he’s been running for 47 years. He is an associate (i.e., overseas) member of the Ukiyo-e Dealers Association of Japan.

I asked Peter a number of questions intended to provide new and prospective collectors of Japanese woodblock prints with some basic information on these beautiful works of art and hopefully save them some aggravation and money in the process.

Q: How widely collected are Japanese prints, and have they become more popular in recent years? 

Peter Gilder: Japanese prints are collected wherever there are human beings. There are always new collectors appearing and old ones disappearing. I would say they have become less popular recently partly because of the rise in interest in other Asian art particularly Chinese, and with the much greater monetary abilities of Chinese collectors. Sotheby’s New York ended their Japanese department in the last 10 years, after more than 100 years of auctioning Japanese prints.

Q: People often think “ukiyo–e” is synonymous with “Japanese woodblock prints,” but that’s incorrect. Can you explain? 

PG: “Ukiyoe” simply means pictures of the floating world, a kind of Buddhist concept of the transitoriness of life. It was taken to mean images of the pleasures of life, whether courtesans of the pleasure quarters, a beautiful landscape, etc. So “ukiyoe” would embrace woodblock prints, paintings, lacquer, ceramics, and other art forms.

Q: Is it true that 19th-century Japanese didn’t consider block prints to have much artistic merit? 

PG: Japanese prints were essentially the art form for the emerging middle class: merchants, who had money but little status in the societal hierarchy. That’s why such a large part of the art is devoted to the theater and the pleasure quarters. Also, landscapes and warriors, myths, ghosts, etc. Among this group, Japanese prints were important. No doubt, they thought that the art form was less important than the official schools of painting that the nobles might favor.

Q: When did Japanese prints become popular in the West? 

PG: Japanese prints have been filtering west since the late 1700s through Deshima, in Nagasaki Harbor, a Dutch outpost at that time. After Japan reopened, in the 1860s, the prints became popular through visitors from other Western countries. I once had an album of prints that were collected by one of the sailors on Commodore Perry’s ship [in the early 1850s]. The great influx, though, started in the late 1800s and has continued since.

Hiroshige, ”Onagigawa Gohonmatsu [Five Pines, Onagi Canal],” from the series ”100 Famous Views of Edo,” July 1856, published by Uoei, oban-size (93/4” x 141/4“). Courtesy of Peter Gilder, Arts and Designs of Japan.

Q: Where were prints traditionally made, and how many people were involved in the process? 

PG: Woodblock prints were produced throughout Japan, but the great majority were done in Edo (the old name for Tokyo). Osaka was number two, probably Kyoto number three. Nobody knows exactly how many people were involved in the production of any particular design. But of course there was the artist (or artists, if more than one collaborated) who produced the finished sketch. Then the carvers who incised the design into wood blocks. More experienced carvers did the faces and hands; less experienced carvers did the rest. After that, there were the printers who mixed up the dyes and applied them to the blocks. Finally, there was the publisher who hired and paid them all and presumably supervised the whole process, then sold the prints in his shop.

Q: What distinguishes Osaka prints from others? 

PG: There was a certain amount of cross fertilization between Osaka and Edo prints. A number of artists, like Toyokuni I, went back and forth and worked in both places. The prints were fairly similar until the late 1840s when Osaka prints changed to a mostly “chuban” (half-size) format and were lavishly printed. Maybe they weren’t as affected in Osaka by the sumptuary laws that forbade such things. They were also almost exclusively theatrical in Osaka.

Q: Is it true that prints were often used to illustrate sensational crimes and events—like 19th-century tabloid journalism? Is there a tangible connection between traditional block prints and modern manga? 

PG: Prints illustrating sensational events were common in the Meiji period and must have been popular. No doubt, there is a strong connection to manga. I’m sure many manga artists are very familiar with the older prints.

Q: What are the most popular themes and artists among, say, American collectors?

PG: I don’t think there are really any significant differences between collectors geographically anymore.

Q: What determines the prices of prints? What’s your advice on the acceptable “collectible condition” or prints? 

PG: The market is of course the final determinant of print value. But I think each dealer should have a certain spectrum of values in mind when they assess particular print.

There are three areas to look at when determining value:

  1. Identification. Where does this particular print reside in the entire field? For example, if it is something like Hokusai’s “Great Wave,” we know immediately where to place it. For other less well-known items, one has to make a determination, based on artist and subjective estimate of its beauty.
  2. Impression. How early in the printing process is it? How elaborate are the printing techniques and how special the inks and paper?
  3. Condition. That means everything that has happened to this particular piece of paper since that day it was printed: wormage, stains, trimming, foxing, etc.

Yoshitoshi, “Osen and Otoku on the Veranda of the Isegan Restaurant at Shibaguchi,” from the series “Kaito Kaiseki Beppin Kurabe [Comparison of Specialties at Restaurants in the Imperial Capital,” April 2, 1878, published by Kobayashi Testujiro, oban-size (91/8” x 137/8“). Courtesy of Peter Gilder, Arts and Designs of Japan.

Q: How do you advise storing or displaying Japanese prints? Is it all right to frame them? (My understanding is that real collectors don’t frame their prints, even under Tru Vue Museum Glass—not just because of the “fugitive” aspect of the ink in traditional block printing, even under low-light conditions, but because of the tactile experience of actually handling the prints. Is this true?) 

PG: It’s best to store prints in acid free folders in acid free boxes.  No exposure to light. Handling prints is a tricky area as touching the paper with fingers is likely to transfer skin oils to the paper. Best to minimize touching and exposure to light.

Peter Gilder’s website is www.artsanddesignsjapan.com. Sign up for his monthly list, which he usually sends out on the first.