In celebration of National Library week and this year’s theme of “There’s More to the Story”, each member of the APRL staff was asked to write about what that phrase meant to them and the APRL.
Our first submission comes from Alicia Leathers, APRL Library Assistant. Alicia has been with us for almost two years assisting members and patrons with their library requests as well as processing incoming materials for the collection. Alicia has considerable cataloging and preservation skills and her “there’s more to the story” thoughts led her to auction catalogs, something not necessarily exclusive to philately, but certainly something unexpected to those new to the hobby.
In her own words, Alicia walks us through these uniquely philatelic items by first providing some background and then describing their value for research.
“Auction catalogs are made available ahead of a sale as an advertisement to buyers, either in print, through email, or listed on the auctioneer’s website. Modern catalogs frequently include high quality images, written descriptions of each lot (either an item or collection of related items), and some historical sale information if available.”
You might expect to find catalogs like these at an art or museum library used to research paintings and other works of art, but we have a large collection of philatelic sales catalogs here at APRL.
“Once a sale is complete, the prices realized from an auction is an excellent way to see the current, or at least recent, market price for a specific item. Stamp catalogs like Scott’s, Stanley Gibbons, Michel, and others use them to help assign values, dealers use them to set prices, and other auction houses use them as a guide for price estimates when bidding.”
Any collector may do the same when using prices realized for the most current values, and it can be especially useful if a specialized catalog has not been updated in a few years.
“The nature of fine art makes provenance, or tracing the history of an object, much easier than the commercial production of philatelic material, but the more unique an item the easier it will be to trace, especially errors like the Inverted Jenny or Port Hood bisects."
Ferrary, Roosevelt and Erivan Catalogs from the APRL Collection
"If an item was sold in what is called a name sale, like Ferrary, Roosevelt, or the recent Erivan Haub series, it’s more likely that history carried through over the years.”
Modern name sales and auction catalogs can be a wealth of information for specific items or collections.
“The amount of detail in sales catalogs can vary over the years and is not necessarily consistent even within the same auction house, but this can still have a benefit for the researcher. Early catalogs have extremely brief descriptions with no images at all, but provide an insight over time as to how collecting tastes have changed. For example, if the item a buyer is looking to find is a cover, an early description may concentrate more about the postage than the route or other markings. In ether case, the catalog provides even some unintended but often useful information.”
The auction catalogs in the APRL collection are truly more than listings of sale items but often provide much “more to the story” for the collector and the researcher. Read Alicia's article from the American Philatelist here.