Have Auction Fees Really Run Out of Hand, or Is It Simply Organised Fraud?

By Mathieu Lenoir, member of the Guilde des Bibliopolicés by self-co-optation, slayer of received ideas and moralist of bibliophilic vanities.

Dear bibliophiles, good day,

Some bibliophilic complaints are a tic, and others are an observation. Buyer’s premiums at public sales clearly belong to the second category. They irritate, they discourage, they distort the arithmetic, they weigh down the invoice, and they sometimes turn a very simple enthusiasm into an accountant’s grimace. On this point the lover of old books has not been dreaming: buying at public auction has become far more expensive than it used to be.

But we must be precise, because precision is here more interesting than raw indignation.

If one looks at how buyer’s premiums on books in France evolved between 1985 and 2025, comparing them with inflation, one notes two things at once. The first is that premiums have indeed risen faster than the cost of living. The second is that this overheating has not been steady. It played out mostly in one very specific period, between 2000 and 2013. That is where the market changed its nature. That is where the bill ceased to be an accessory and became a heavy, structural, almost arrogant component of the final price.

The overall figure, taken in isolation, might almost seem moderate. In forty years, buyer’s premiums on books were multiplied by 2.66, while the consumer price index was multiplied by 2.23. In other words, premiums rose about 19% faster than inflation. That is not nothing. But neither is it a runaway so extravagant that it would suffice, by itself, to tell the whole story. If we stopped at that final gap alone, we would say: yes, the service of the auction houses has become dearer faster than the rest; no, this is not a delirious explosion bearing no relation to the real world.

And yet the buyer’s unease is real.

Why? Because the final figure hides the trajectory. And it is the trajectory that tells the truth.

From 1985 to 1999, premiums and inflation move more or less together. They are not identical, of course, and the old regime of the commissaires-priseurs (the officers who held the monopoly of auctions in France) cannot be compared perfectly with the universe of contemporary scales. But the general pace is clear: it rises little, it stays contained, it follows more or less the general movement of prices. Nothing in this first period gives the impression of a break. The world of public sales remains an expensive world, no doubt, but not yet one in which the buyer feels seriously jostled at the till.

Then comes the rupture. And it is clear-cut.

Between 2000 and 2013, while French inflation goes on with its small life as a relatively calm country, buyer’s premiums take the lift. They go, roughly, from a little over 10% to about 25% including VAT on the first bracket. In a dozen years they change scale. While the CPI progresses quietly, premiums leap. They no longer follow the cost of living; they follow another logic. That is exactly where the central phenomenon lies. Not in a continuous drift over forty years, but in a structural jump concentrated in a precise period.

And this period has a name. It is called liberalisation, or theft, according to some.

We must here stop reciting the usual legends according to which competition would be, by nature, a blessing for prices. In many sectors it may be. In this one, it consisted above all in bringing into the game powerful, international players, very comfortable with higher fees, and in sliding the whole French market towards their norm. The arrival of the Anglo-Saxons (the British and American houses) did not only bring glitter, networks, more luxurious catalogues and more worldly sales. It also moved the frontier of what it became acceptable to make the buyer pay.

It is there, and not in some mysterious inflationary fatality, that everything is decided.

The comparison with inflation has, moreover, a remarkable merit: it dismantles a very convenient excuse. No, premiums have not simply “followed the general rise in costs.” If that had been the case, the two lines would have gone on walking more or less together. Yet they part brutally after 2000. One sees very well that the weighing down of premiums owes less to a general rise in the cost of living than to an economic reconfiguration of the sales market. Plainly: it is not the price of paper, telephone, rent or electricity that explains most of the phenomenon. It is a change of model.

At this stage, something very simple must be recalled, almost comic in how necessary it has become to say it again. Auction houses are not the only businesses in the country to have expenses.

A bookseller has expenses. A car dealer has expenses. A bakery has expenses. A clothes shop has expenses. A furniture dealer has expenses. All of them have premises, staff, overheads, storage, insurance, logistics, sometimes costly communication and often a profitability less brilliant than one imagines.

Very well.

But when you buy a book from a bookseller, he does not say to you: “This volume is 500 euros, but as you have come through the till, and I have a shop to run and an employee to pay, I am going to add 30% buyer’s fees.” When you buy a car, the dealer does not bring in three other customers to set them against you, let the price climb through rival bidding, then add a good quarter of the amount at the end. And the baker, for his part, does not organise a little public battle over a pain au chocolat before demanding a service supplement from the winner.

The sociétés de ventes volontaires, France’s commercial auction companies, do.

That is even their central privilege, and it is considerable. They do not sell at a fixed price. They benefit from a system in which competition among buyers already drives the price up to the benefit of the seller and, indirectly, of the intermediary. The buyer does not arrive in a shop where the price is offered to him; he enters a device in which other buyers will help him push this price up. Ordinary commerce does not have such a lever. An auction house does. It therefore enjoys an extraordinarily favourable commercial mechanism: the rivalry of desires itself produces part of the value.

And after that, it adds buyer’s premiums on top.

It must be stressed. This is not a detail. It is the crux of the matter. The auction companies profit from a system in which clients fight one another to push the price up, then they levy again on the winner. And as if that were not enough, they levy on the seller’s side too. The seller pays to sell. The buyer pays to buy. The house sits in the middle, organises the meeting, takes a cut on both flows, and profits besides from the emotional character of the situation. From a strictly economic point of view, it is an admirably comfortable model. From a more ordinary point of view, it looks all the same a little like an intermediation industry that has learned to help itself well.

It will be objected, of course, that the buyer is informed. The conditions are displayed. The scales are public. There is no surprise in the legal sense of the term. Very well. But the transparency of a mechanism is not its absolution. An excess does not become reasonable because it has been announced properly. That a levy appears in black and white in the conditions of sale does not stop it being a levy. The argument of transparency is often a slightly lazy way of closing the discussion. The real subject is not the visibility of premiums. The real subject is their level, and that level, over the period 2000-2013, has indeed crossed a threshold.

The sequel is, moreover, rather instructive. After 2013 the landscape stabilises, relatively. Premiums remain high, but the dynamic is no longer the same. We are no longer in the spectacular leap; we are on the high plateau, with nuances from one house to another. Some stand around 26.4% including VAT. Others go towards 27.4%. For a few years one could almost have believed that the market had found its ceiling. A high ceiling, certainly, but a ceiling all the same.

And then no.

The point we do not look at enough is the second threshold, much more recent, and faster than is said. For the market did not only go from a little over 10% to about 25% between 2000 and 2013. It also crossed, in very little time, another symbolic threshold: the move from 25% towards 30% including VAT on certain book sales in 2025. This jump is shorter, less spread out, less “historic” in appearance. It is all the more revealing.

Why? Because it no longer stems from the great institutional transformation of the 2000s. It stems from something else: from the market’s habituation to the idea that one can keep pushing. Having accustomed the buyer to 25%, one taught him to look at 26.4% as a reasonable norm, then 27.4% as a slight variation, then 30% as a finally tolerable possibility. In two or three years a push reappears which, without being as spectacular as the great leap of 2000-2013, reveals something very clear: the buyer’s threshold of psychological resistance continues to be tested.

And it is tested upwards.

This matters a great deal, because it changes the reading of the recent period. One can no longer simply say: the market took off until 2013, then stabilised. That is no longer quite true. It stabilised at a high level, then began climbing again, but by segmentation and by capillarity. No longer in the form of one great uniform movement, but in the form of a slide of the tolerable. The question is no longer: how far can the whole market be pushed up? The question becomes: how far can certain houses go up without losing their buyers?

And the answer, manifestly, is: quite high.

Here comes the small recent paradox. The inflation of 2022-2023 has, in a way, caught up part of the lag. The post-Covid shock sent the CPI up faster while premiums stayed relatively stable on average. Had the graph been stopped in 2021, the gap between the two curves would have been more spectacular still. The excess of premiums over inflation then appeared more brutal. Today inflation has closed part of that gap. The long-term differential remains real, but it has lost part of its explosive character.

Must we conclude that buyers’ complaints are exaggerated? No.

They simply have to be reformulated correctly.

The sense of spoliation expressed by some amateurs is not perfectly confirmed by the comparison with inflation over forty years alone. Over the very long term, yes, premiums have risen faster than the cost of living, but not in proportions so extravagant that they would suffice by themselves to speak of continuous historical racketeering.

The graph does show very well, however, another phenomenon, more interesting and more solid: a structural change in the market, concentrated between 2000 and 2013, then a very recent new slide, shorter but very revealing, between 2023 and 2025, when certain houses begin to regard 30% including VAT no longer as a shameful exception but as a perfectly practicable limit.

Put differently: the buyer has not so much suffered a slow drift as a change of regime, then a new opportunistic push.

And this change of regime has very concrete effects.

It changes the way one bids. It forces one to calculate differently. It pushes one to bid lower than one would in ordinary commerce. It means that the true price is never the hammer price, but the hammer price plus a system of fees that can change appreciably from one house to another. It also introduces a very particular form of intellectual irritation: that of seeing the market present itself as an elegant arbiter when it methodically exploits a situation of emotional competition.

For that is perhaps the bottom of the matter. The book buyer is not a neutral client. He is often a client in a state of desire. He wants a precise copy, an edition, a binding, a provenance, a condition, a stroke of luck, sometimes a fantasy of a library. He does not only buy a product; he buys the opportunity of not letting something pass. The auction house knows this psychology perfectly. It lives on it. And that is why the purely accounting argument is never enough. Premiums do not weigh only on a wallet; they weigh on a situation in which desire has already been put to work.

Hence the parallel with ordinary commerce becomes almost cruel. In a shop, the seller must convince a buyer. At a public sale, several buyers convince one another to go up. That is a considerable difference. And it is precisely for that reason that many bibliophiles bear the stacking of fees ever less well. They have the feeling, quite understandable, that they are made to pay twice for the intensity of their desire: once through competition between bidders, a second time through the supplement applied at the till.

One can of course live with it. Many do. The bibliophile is an astonishingly resilient creature, especially when he thinks he has at last recognised the book he was waiting for. But habit is not proof of justice. One can grow used to a system without having the slightest reason to find it healthy.

The right reading is therefore this. Over the long run, buyer’s premiums on books have risen a little faster than inflation. This excess cost is real. But the real story is not one of a uniform slope. It is that of a massive leap between 2000 and 2013, which redefined the economic model of public sales in France, then of a new slide, shorter but very telling, in the last few years, when the market began to push again towards 30% including VAT. Before 2000, premiums follow more or less the general climate. After 2013, they stabilise at a high level. Then, recently, some judged that this level was no longer enough.

And this last point deserves some thought. For it means that, having got 25% accepted, then 26.4%, then 27.4%, the market is now testing the banalisation of 30%. Not everywhere, not always, not as a universal rate. But enough to send a very clear signal: when one threshold has been admitted, another may be tried.

There is no mystery here. There is a model. An effective, profitable, long-ritualised model, very well installed, and grown familiar enough that many cease even to be surprised by it.

That is perhaps the most worrying thing.

For the day a milieu accepts as natural that an intermediary should set buyers against one another, then levy on the buyer, levy also on the seller, and call this the simple normality of public sales, one should no longer be surprised that some bibliophiles end by looking at the invoice with the very distinct impression of having been, if not robbed, at least treated with a very costly offhandedness.

Or even, in the end, decide not to pay for their purchase… and all this is before having received the painful bill from the sadly well-known “The Packengers,” who will gladly deliver you a duodecimo for €93… but that is another story…

Guild library shelfmark: GUILDE · ML/IDEES RECUES · BIBLIOPHILIE · 04

À lire ensuite

From Bookseller to Billionaire: The Life and Fate of the Quaritch Bookshop

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Olympe Marcelet, inspector of platforms, emphatic keywords and prices one prefers not to display.

In front of Bernard Quaritch’s shop, at 15 Piccadilly, in 1861, a crate set out on the sidewalk offered pamphlets at 1 penny. One of them was Edward FitzGerald’s English translation of the quatrains of Omar Khayyam, which Quaritch had published 2 years earlier in 250 copies, put on sale at 1 shilling and sent down to the crate for want of buyers. That poem is today in every English anthology, and the 250 copies of 1859 rank among the most sought-after books of the century. The greatest bookseller of his day thus sold off for 1 penny a book that he would himself republish in 1868, and then twice more.

Bernard Quaritch was a German from Thuringia, born in 1819, who landed in London in 1842 with no baggage but a letter of recommendation to Henry Bohn, the city’s foremost bookseller. He is said to have told Bohn, on leaving him, that he meant to become the first bookseller in Europe. He opened in 1847 in a street behind Leicester Square, then in Piccadilly in 1860, and in 1884 he kept his word in his own way, at Sotheby’s, at the Syston Park sale.

The Mainz Psalter of 1459 rose to 4,950 pounds, the highest price ever paid for a printed book, and the Gutenberg Bible from the same library to 3,900 pounds. Both went to him, to Piccadilly, in a shop that was not yet 40 years old. At the exchange rate of the day, 4,950 pounds came to 125,000 gold francs.

In 1878, Quaritch had also founded a club of amateurs, the Sette of Odd Volumes, limited to 21 members in memory of the 21 volumes of an edition of Shakespeare. Each guest bore a ridiculous title there, and Quaritch had himself called the Librarian. The menus were printed, and I would give a lot to own one.

At his death, in December 1899, The Times held him to be “the greatest bookseller who ever lived.” His general catalogue, 17 volumes published from 1887 to 1897, can still be consulted, and in 1906 the firm counted among the founders of the association of British antiquarian booksellers. His son kept the shop until 1913, the firm became a company in 1917, and the family remained among the shareholders until 1971. In France, the Auguste Blaizot bookshop, opened in Paris in 1840 and installed in the rue du Faubourg-Saint-Honoré, still bears its family’s name. Quaritch, for its part, has changed hands twice.

A lord took over, and it was still a matter among booksellers. Milo Cripps, Baron Parmoor, ran Quaritch for some thirty years, first as manager, at the end as owner. A bookshop that owns its walls depends on no one, and he had understood that. In 1987 the botanical library of Robert de Belder was dispersed at Sotheby’s, Quaritch bought heavily there, and with the proceeds of the resale Lord Parmoor bought the walls of the building in Lower John Street, on Golden Square. In the early 1990s, when he wanted to lure a young bookseller, Bogislav Winner, away from Maggs, he went himself to John Maggs to ask, in a manner of speaking, for the hand of his employee.

John Koh, for his part, is a financier. A Singaporean born in 1955, he was a lawyer for 19 years and then managing director at Goldman Sachs, and his fortune is estimated at about a hundred million dollars. In 2004 Lord Parmoor sold him the bookshop, without the building. The arrangement fits in 3 lines of the English register: an empty company created on 29 July with John Koh as director, renamed Bernard Quaritch Limited on 28 September, and the booksellers appointed to its board on 1 October. Qatar, for its part, goes to the Parc des Princes (the Paris Saint-Germain stadium). In 22 years I have found neither a library catalogue in his name nor a sale of his books.

Lord Parmoor died in 2008. In 2009 Quaritch left Golden Square, whose walls no longer belonged to it, for South Audley Street, in Mayfair, where Winner counted 135 steps to his office. It was a climb. Winner would say later, with the restraint of a bookseller speaking of his former employer, that the bookshop had changed a great deal under John Koh’s style of management. Between June 2012 and March 2013, 7 directors left the board, Winner among them. On 1 March 2013 only one remained, the owner, who lives in Singapore.

I opened the 8 latest accounts filed at the English companies register, from 2017 to 2025. All bear the same signature, J T L Koh. On 31 August 2017 Quaritch still had 2.66 million pounds sterling of books in stock, but it was living on credit at Barclays, 822,109 £ remaining due, and it paid 150,000 £ rent a year to a property company of its owner. On 17 July 2018 John Koh repaid the bank, 852,000 £, with his own funds and those of entities linked to him. By 31 August the bank debt had vanished and the bookshop owed 597,240 £ to its owner.

The following financial year lasted 15 months, from September 2018 to November 2019, and it is the year of the bloodletting. For an antiquarian bookshop, stock is everything; walls can be rented and booksellers replaced. On 10 June 2019 Quaritch left Mayfair for a townhouse at 36 Bedford Row, in the lawyers’ quarter of Holborn, far from the galleries and hotels; a long lease worth 3,813,015 £ entered its assets and left them in the same year without the notes saying which, the stock melted from 2.39 million to 347,000 £, and the bookshop lost about 2.2 million, which turned its equity negative.

During Covid, John Koh lent again, up to 450,000 £ in 2021, secured by a mortgage on his company’s building. 14 employees remained. Since 2020, Quaritch has made money every year, about 1 million pounds over 6 financial years, and the owner was repaid in 2024. I do not like financiers who buy themselves bookshops. This one paid out of his own pocket when payment was due, and I owe him at least this line. He could have bought a football club; he may have saved a bookshop. The stock was worth 934,985 £ on 30 November 2025, a third of 2017, for 15 employees. Shapero, in Mayfair, carried nearly 11 million at 31 March 2024. Quaritch’s furniture and computers, written down to zero since 2018, were not renewed until 2025, for 12,822 £.

In 2022, for its 175th anniversary, Quaritch invited its booksellers of yesterday to Bedford Row, around a cake in the founder’s likeness. It still exhibits from Boston to Hong Kong, and I keep its printed catalogues, in which I have never seen a book at 1 penny, and which remain the best written in London.

The accounts for 2025 were signed on 24 August 2026 by the sole director. In April 2005 the Financial Times related that John Koh read old travel narratives on the plane from Singapore, and that he was interested in everything that rests on paper and history.

I do not know whether he still reads on the plane.

GUILDE · OM/QUARITCH

No director could be reached. Document classified: restricted circulation.