The Reserve Price, or the Art of Selling Without Wanting to Sell

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Olympe Marcelet, inspector of platforms, emphatic keywords and the priced miracles of the digital bibliophilic market.

I came across it 3 times in under a year on the Alde website (Alde is a Paris auction house specialising in books), always under the same title. The Description des festes données par la ville de Paris, issued for the marriage of Louise-Élisabeth of France to the Infante Philip, is a large folio printed by Le Mercier in 1740, with the 2 views of the fireworks fired over the Seine and of the illuminations of the Hôtel de Ville.

The copy is a presentation copy, bound in red morocco for the city itself. I opened the 3 catalogue entries side by side: same joints, split and restored, same consolidated tear at leaf A1. The book has not moved from one sale to the next. Its estimate has. It lost 1,000 euros at each passage, and on 4 June 2025 it went for 2,000 euros hammer price, 2,500 fees included. The page for lot 86 is still online on Alde’s website.

Alde, sale of 4 June 2025, lot 86. DESCRIPTION DES FESTES données par la ville de Paris, à l’occasion du mariage de Madame Louise-Elisabeth de France et de Dom Philippe, Infant et Grand Amiral d’Espagne.
“Paris, P.-G. Le Mercier, 1740. Large folio, red morocco, gilt fleur-de-lis roll, fleurs-de-lis at the corners, gilt arms at the centre, spine decorated with fleurs-de-lis, decorated board edges, gilt inner roll, gilt edges (contemporary binding). […] Presentation copy luxuriously bound in red morocco with the arms of the city of Paris. Joints partly split and restored, headcaps and corners worn; some stains, foxing and slight dampstaining of no consequence; repair at the foot of a plate, consolidated tear at leaf A1.” Estimate: 2,000 – 3,000 €. Sold: 2,000 €.
See the lot page on Alde’s website

The entry gives the estimate, the hammer price, the condition of the joints. It does not give the figure that weighed on everything else, the reserve, which the room never hears.

The French Commercial Code provides for it in article L. 321-11: “the minimum price agreed with the seller below which the property cannot be sold.” If the property has been estimated, this price cannot exceed the lowest estimate announced to the public. The text obliges no one to publish the amount, nor even to set one: the reserve is agreed between seller and auction operator, lot by lot, and it may sit right at the low estimate or not exist at all. That of the festival book is impossible to know, as is whether there was one. I know only that it could not exceed the low estimate, and that this ceiling went down from 4,000 to 3,000 and then to 2,000 euros in 3 passages.

I wanted to know whether this festival book was alone on that slope. In the same sales, Frederik Ruysch was following it down. His Thesaurus anatomicus, printed at Amsterdam from 1701 to 1716, 10 parts in one quarto volume bound in vellum, was estimated at 5,000 to 6,000 euros on 30 January 2024 and found no buyer.

It came back on 20 June at 3,000 – 4,000 euros, under the same entry down to the pale dampstain on pages 55 to 58 of the ninth part, and it went for 4,250 euros, fees included.

Barbey d’Aurevilly fell more steeply. The first edition of Une vieille maîtresse (Cadot, 1851, 3 volumes bound in 2, half green calf, in a slipcase), estimated at 5,000 to 6,000 euros on 26 March 2024, was not sold. Back on 17 December at 2,000 – 3,000 euros, it went for 2,500 euros, fees included. The low estimate had been divided by 2.5, and the ceiling of the reserve with it.

These 3 books do not make a market. Alde publishes its results lot by lot (and my thanks to them for that), with the estimates, and the entry does not change when the book comes back: all it took was to count. I went through all its sales from January 2024 to September 2026 and looked for books estimated at 1,000 euros or more, left without a buyer, then put back on sale under the same entry. There are 96. The evening went on it.

For 89 of them, the low estimate fell on their return, for 6 it did not move, for one alone it rose (“if it goes, it goes”). In median value, the low estimate of the second passage is worth two thirds of the first. Of these 96 books, 59 sold the second time, 56 of them with the reduced estimate, and 37 went unsold once more. Of the 7 books that came back at the same price or higher, only 3 found a buyer. Whoever keeps an eye on an unsold book will therefore, most often, get it cheaper on its return. A risk worth taking?

One of these 96 made me look up. The 1942 Voyage au bout de la nuit illustrated by Gen Paul, in wrappers and unopened, was estimated at 4,000 to 5,000 euros on 26 March and was not sold. On 17 December, estimated at 3,000 to 4,000 euros, it went for 5,000 euros fees included, or 4,000 euros hammer price once the 25% fees that Alde’s prices let one read are taken off. The hammer fell on the low estimate of March.

Alde gives me only columns of figures. Bibliophilie.com, for its part, has kept the trace of an older unsold lot. On 7 December 2004, at Pierre Bergé & associés, Fables choisies by La Fontaine in 6 volumes of morocco bearing arms, estimated at 7,500 euros, were declared unsold. The lot was recorded on this site in April 2013, along with 2 copies without arms sold for 6,000 euros at Piasa in 2005 and 3,600 euros at Robert-Baille in 2011.

The expert for the 2004 sale was Dominique Courvoisier.

Put yourself in the room in 2004. You have only the catalogue figure. You raise your hand, the bidding climbs, then stops without the auctioneer bringing down the hammer. It is harsh. At Drouot, the main Paris auction house, they say the lot is ravalé (bought in); the record of the sale, drawn up at the latest one clear day afterwards under article L. 321-9, declares it unsold. You made your offer in public, before the whole room, and you leave empty-handed without knowing by how much you missed your book.

The same article L. 321-9 then allows the operator, at the owner’s request, to sell by private treaty a property declared unsold, at a price that may not fall below the last bid made, unless an amendment to the mandate is signed after the sale. The last bidder must be “informed beforehand if known.” If you left your name, you will be called. If you stayed at the back of the room, with neither name nor number, no one is obliged to.

The seller, for his part, is protected. On 28 February 2017, the Paris regional court (tribunal de grande instance) condemned a sales operator who had knocked down a property below the reserve price agreed with his client. Paying the seller the difference was not necessarily enough to discharge his liability, according to the judgment. The sale was not annulled for all that, since the reserve did not appear in the catalogue and the buyer could not know it.

One does not, then, sell one’s book below one’s figure, and an operator who does so answers for it before the court.

For 2018, the Conseil des maisons de vente (the French auction regulator) recorded 35.9% of lots unsold across 670 sales by 12 operators, against 33% in 2017. It puts the blame on reserves: kept secret, they may discourage buyers; and since the buyer counts the auction fees in what he is willing to pay, he stops earlier, so that a lot with a high reserve stays unsold.

The owner who puts a book up for sale “to see” asks for a reserve right at the low estimate and takes the book back if the room does not climb high enough. Economists have followed paintings that stayed below their reserve. Sold later, they fetch less than those that were not offered in the meantime, and among the possible explanations the authors cite a reserve that the seller ended by lowering… but it is also true that a book exhibited and not sold at a sale leaves a trace, and loses value almost automatically in the age of the internet and its flawless memory.

The reserve… Wanting to sell without really wanting to?

Editors’ note. Survey of Alde’s results from 1 January 2024 to 16 September 2026; a book is counted as put back on sale when its entry is identical from one sale to the next, so the count is a minimum. Prices fees included, except the hammer price of the festival book; the hammer price of the Céline is deduced from a fee rate of 25%. Lots of 2004, 2005 and 2011: article on this site of 6 April 2013. Judgment of 2017: Conseil des maisons de vente. Unsold lots: Conseil des maisons de vente, 1 March 2019, and Marie Potard, Le Journal des Arts, 10 April 2022. Paintings that stayed below their reserve: Alan Beggs and Kathryn Graddy, CEPR working paper no. 5811.

GUILDE · OM/RESERVE

Reserve price for the present document: not disclosed. Document classified: restricted circulation.

À lire ensuite

What is bibliophily? (and what is a bibliophile?)

Dear bibliophiles, good day.

By Mathieu Lenoir, scourge of received ideas, reader of present usage and appointed contradictor of bibliophilic confusions for the Guild of Bibliopolices.

People think they know what bibliophily is, and they are almost always wrong. It is neither snobbery, nor a rich man’s business, nor the cult of everything old. It is something else, and it is finer.

Bibliophily is the love and study of the book as an object, and not only as a text. The bibliophile does not merely read: he is interested in the edition, the printing, the binding, the paper, the condition, the provenance, in short everything that makes one copy that copy and no other. That is how he differs from the simple reader, who loves the text without caring about the medium, and from the bibliomaniac, who accumulates without measure, sometimes without even reading, and in whom passion has turned into mania. One can be an excellent bibliophile without a fortune, and a very poor one with a great deal of money.

What makes a fine book for a bibliophile is the meeting of several qualities: the edition, since the first edition is sought after; real rarity; condition; the quality of the binding; and provenance, meaning former owners, bookplates, dedications. None suffices alone; it is their conjunction that makes the desirable copy, the format placing the type of work at once.

A few received ideas deserve a twist. First: bibliophily is mere snobbery. No, it is an attention, and loving the way a book is made is no more snobbish than loving the way a house is built. Second: one has to be rich. False, one can build a coherent and learned library on modest means provided one chooses well. Third: only old books count. Wrong again, for there is a bibliophily of the twentieth century and even of the contemporary, age not being the criterion, but care and interest.

One does not become a bibliophile by buying dear, but by learning to look. Read, compare, frequent booksellers and bouquinistes, learn to recognise a format, a first edition, a binding, and even an incunable: taste comes as the eye is trained, and, when the moment comes, you will know how to value and sell knowingly.

This guide is the entrance to a small lexicon continued by our pages on formats, first editions, bindings and incunables.

True luxury is not owning everything: it is knowing exactly what you love, and why. GUILDE · ML/BIBLIOPHILIE.

Document classified: restricted circulation.