Collecting Smiles

Happy days are here again.

Another auction week is with us and most members of the Grosvenor team are assembling in London to assist with the sales, greeting the many collectors and dealers who will be visiting us. Stuart Billington is safely back from Turkey (shaken but not stirred), Andrew Claridge from the Philippines (in his newly married state), and Charles Napper from Canada where he has been visiting clients in the company of our North America representative, Peter Rennie, a recent addition to the Grosvenor family.

Collectors can be odd animals - but then perhaps so are we who serve their needs. In our experience, for every Tommy Bonkers or Conspiracy Colin intent on causing trouble in our community, there are a hundred perfectly well-rounded individuals.

We may be biased (of course we are) but we have noticed that our clients are generally intelligent and organised, sometimes blessed with special powers such as highly advanced memory skills or an advanced perception of colour shades. In response to the latter we have tended in recent years to alter, sometimes only subtly, the colour of our catalogue covers in order that individual auctions will remain in the memory connected to that particular shade. Useful for us also when hunting for information through piles of old catalogues.

This facility for colour and its accompanying vocabulary can also be beneficial when clothes-shopping with one's wife or girlfriend. Why is it so difficult, though, to find outfits in sensible colours like Prussian blue or carmine-lake ?

One of the things that may also distinguish the true collector is his (or her) approach to money. This is a relative commodity of course and there is essentially nothing that reliably underpins the values in our market. We cannot melt down our Penny Blacks in order to realise on the ashes, for example. Consequently each item that we will be selling this week has an estimated value based only on previous realisations.

Thank heavens then for the collectors who know that true value lies only in what an object is worth to its purchaser, for it is they who bring the auction alive. In the perceptive words of Charles Saatchi " Nobody can give you advice after you've been collecting for a while. If you don't enjoy making your own decisions, you're never going to be much of a collector anyway".

In troubled times, financial or otherwise, the continuation of high auction prices might seem surprising, even counterintuitive, but the indirect consequences of a financial squeeze can sometimes be surprising. After 2008, retail wine outlets found that customers were in fact spending more on each bottle they purchased as they would be dining at home rather than in restaurants.

The true collector knows that he is only a temporary custodian of the treasures that he will purchase and wants to enjoy them while he can, whatever may be happening in the Global markets. He knows that ownership of such items provides the joy of a direct concrete link to philatelic and social history, to the stories and lessons that they provide.

The habit of collecting may mark us as a breed apart but we are a fortunate breed. One more quotation, this time from Goethe, "Sammler sind glückliche Menschen"  - Collectors are happy people.

We look forward to seeing plenty of smiles this week.

JG