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Citation

Williams K (2026) Auction Catalogues. In: Green D, Mann AJ, Marshall J & Wingfield E (eds.) History of the Book in Scotland, Volume I, Part 2. Edinburgh University Press.

Abstract
First paragraph: The sale of books by auction [DG1.1]in Europe has a long history stretching back to the later middle ages. As Laura Cruz has shown, the practice was formalised at the end of the sixteenth century by Dutch booksellers who were the first to print "book-sale catalogues for auctioning secondhand books", thereby inaugurating the "modern" book auction (Cruz 2007, 2). The innovations of these early auctioneers, such as the Leiden bookseller Louis Elsevier, were wildly successful with numbers of surviving Dutch auction catalogues rising to over a hundred a decade by the 1660s (Jagersma 2021, 93; Cruz 2007, 3-4). The practice rapidly spread across Europe, reaching the British Isles in 1676 with the sale of the library of the clergyman Lazarus Seaman in London (Alston 2010, 1. 43). Giles Mandelbrote has traced the subsequent evolution of the book auction in seventeenth-century England, noting that from the 1680s onwards auctions involved not only the disposal of "splendid collections and learned libraries", but also "of unwanted stock and unsaleable books in a climate of financial instability" (Mandelbrote 2001, 20).

• 5.1 JACKSON WILLIAMS HOBS Sale Catalogues REVISED JDM First Read Dtg Second Read