'The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.' So wrote L.P.Hartley in his 1953 novel, The Go-Between.

This is certainly true of auction catalogues which changed from being akin to pamphlets with plain covers and minimal information in the 1960s to huge, hefty doorstops, awash with colour plates, French ends, fold-out pages and sometimes even multiple volumes by the early 2000s. However, the onset of COVID in 2020 and the online only sales of the following two years saw many houses reverse this, often dispensing with the physical catalogue altogether, saving them on the bottom line but leaving us the poorer. 

Yet whilst much of the basic information in an auction catalogue is available online, this tells us nothing about the sale itself; was it a strong auction or poor, what trends were showing in the room, who was buying, or just as importantly, underbidding? Modern auction catalogues offer amazing production values, essays by renowned specialists (sometimes!), but are largely seen as disposable. But if you own a painting included in a past sale, or are researching that painting, or writing about it, the old catalogues can be a very valuable resource, especially those marked up by people who attended. They are also an enlightening document of their time - which artists were included and what do relative values at any point tell us about an artist's collectability? 

Step forward this most underrated tool of the art market, the catalogue of the landmark (and more mundane) auctions!