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

The Sacrificed Books of The Ninth Gate: Inquiry into Polanski’s Cursed Book

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By an adept, in the manner of Lucas Corso, surveyor of the bibliophilic margins.

Some years ago I was told about a man in Toulon who owned Latin leaves of the seventeenth century whose provenance was murky. Not murky in the way ordinary bibliophiles mean it: no dubious trimming of the margins, no ill-judged restoration. Murky because these leaves, he said, came from a book that had been taken apart on purpose to make another book, one that had never existed. I noted the name, filed the information under things to check, and then forgot it. Until the other evening, when I watched Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate again.

The film, released in 1999, adapts Arturo Pérez-Reverte’s El Club Dumas. It tells of the quest of a rare-book broker, a trade I know well, commissioned to authenticate one of the three known copies of a book called De Umbrarum Regni Novem Portis, On the Nine Gates of the Kingdom of Shadows, supposedly printed in Venice in 1666 by one Aristide Torchia, and said to have been co-signed by the Devil himself. Torchia, burned by the Inquisition, was supposed to have left three copies identical except for nine engravings which, compared with one another, would yield the keys to invoking Lucifer. The book does not exist, of course. Pérez-Reverte invented it for his novel. Polanski had it manufactured for his film. And this is where the bibliophilic story starts to get interesting.

Three false books, two real ones sacrificed. The production designer of The Ninth Gate is Dean Tavoularis, the man behind The Godfather, Apocalypse Now and Bonnie & Clyde. Oscar, 1975. A man of that stature has a team of prop makers, and the film’s head prop master is called Gilbert Pieri. Pieri had to make three hero copies of the Ninth Gate: the Balkan, the Fargas and the Kessler. Three distinct bindings, nine engravings per volume and, a decisive detail, a Latin text inside that had to look real under the camera, in close-up, open on Johnny Depp’s knees.

Pieri did not print that text. He did what any bibliophile will recognise as heresy: he bought two authentic old Latin books, one of more than five hundred pages, the other of more than eight hundred, and he took them apart. Some twenty leaves from the two volumes were combined, reinserted into the custom-made bindings, and duplicated to serve the three copies needed for the film. The detail is known to specialist collectors, who tell it to one another on forums devoted to film props. Some claim to own original pages from these two books, torn out during production and given to members of the crew. One of them eventually identified the source book by typing a Latin phrase from the film into Google: it was a Latin theological and Catholic work of 1588, from which the production had merely removed a few words to give the illusion of a coded text.

Some twenty leaves of a book of 1588, dismembered to appear in a Polanski film: this should make any lover of old paper tremble. Two real books were immolated on the pretext of making a third, rarer still, since it does not exist.

Then there are the nine engravings. They are, in Pérez-Reverte’s novel as in the film, the central element: each copy contains nine, but three of them differ from one volume to the next, and comparing the eighteen images reveals the secret. These engravings, too, have a bibliophilic history worth attention.

Here is a rare particularity: the engravings already existed in Pérez-Reverte’s novel, where they bear the initials AT and LCF; those in the film take up their formal language. The formal language of these engravings, as everyone knows, draws ostensibly on the Hypnerotomachia Poliphili, the allegorical romance printed by Aldus Manutius in Venice in 1499 and attributed to Francesco Colonna. It is, as everyone knows, one of the most prestigious incunabula ever printed, famous for its one hundred and seventy-two anonymous woodcuts, themselves the object of five centuries of speculation about their author. A copy can be consulted online on Gallica, the digital library of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (bpt6k587910); those who want to see what a perfect copy costs today will remember that a Poliphilo in a fine binding has passed four hundred thousand euros at public sale, and that Jean Grolier alone owned five copies.

To make his cursed book, then, Pérez-Reverte had the formal language of the rarest and most mysterious book of Western printing adapted. It is a choice of great elegance: a seventeenth-century fake imitating a real book of the late fifteenth. The film’s engravings were drawn, engraved and printed like real copperplate prints, nine for each copy, twenty-seven prints in all, not counting the variants that Polanski had redrawn. Those prints exist somewhere, framed at Polanski’s or at Pieri’s, or scattered among the members of the crew.

As for official sales, the record is poorer than for The Name of the Rose. Neither Christie’s, nor Sotheby’s, nor Bonhams, nor Heritage, nor Propstore has seen a hero copy of the Ninth Gate go through. The three bindings made by Pieri are, to my knowledge, still in private collections; one belongs to the collection of a certain “balkan.press”, a discreet figure who runs a specialist website devoted to the object.

But the parallel market is teeming. More than forty official replicas of the book are listed online, sold for between five hundred and twelve hundred dollars depending on quality. A whole tinkerer’s literature circulates, with manufacturing tutorials, reconstructed typefaces, tracings of the nine engravings and of the tenth (the one called the “true ninth gate”, inscribed LCF). The Ninth Gate is probably the most copied prop book in the history of cinema.

And then there are the leaves. Those from the two sacrificed books. They circulate quietly, sometimes on eBay, more often in private transactions between collectors. The bibliophilic status of these objects is staggering: they are at once fragments of real old books (the Latin theological work of 1588), film props deposited by the production, and relics of the shoot co-signed Polanski. Three provenances for a single leaf: for the collector, an object to the third degree.

I do not know whether the man from Toulon really has Latin leaves that passed through the shooting of The Ninth Gate. I did not bother to go and see. But the idea that real old books were destroyed (consumed is the right word) to make a fictional book whose market value reaches several hundred euros today in replica, and incalculably more as a hero copy, should give us pause.

Polanski and his team inverted the bibliophilic equation. Where the usual market pays for the old manuscript and despises the modern copy, their film does the opposite: it buys and destroys a theological book of 1588 to make a modern fake that resells for more than the pages it is woven from. The cursed book has done its work. The real work has dissolved into the matter of the fake. And the leaves now in circulation are, as in the film, fragments that must be compared with one another to guess where they come from.

Burned books vanish, but those that are shut away always end up coming back.

Guild shelfmark: GBO-C/2 — Le Livre Démembré [The Dismembered Book]

Document classified: restricted circulation — Bureau of Litigious Props.