Under the Cosh or Under the Spear ?

In the auction world the Summer is normally anticipated as the best time to tidy up the office.

Reference catalogues that have slipped under desks in the heat of describing a complicated collection are retrieved and the dust blown off (sorry, I should not have said that, our cleaner is excellent, but the concentration required to not hoover up any stamps does give her a permanently worried expression).  Specialist society journals are rounded up
(some end up in the toilets, I will not say which) and placed in their
runs on the shelves.  We may even clean out the fridge. 

No such luck this year, though.  The collections are rolling in at a fast rate and these tasks may have to wait.  No sooner has the September auction catalogue reached the printers but the November ones start to loom and the completion date of the end of September looks uncomfortably close.  Further details of some of these may be found on our homepage and there are other ‘unnamed’ collections almost as worthy. The pressure is on.

Time will be found though for some auctioneer training in August.  This is a very special skill requiring quick thought, fluency with numbers and the strength of mind not to be easily flustered. The experience of taking an auction can certainly be intimidating. I understand that they train police horses by, amongst other things, standing in front of them and shouting.  Something similar would not be a bad idea for trainee auctioneers. After all, any crowd can turn very quickly into a riotous assembly as we have seen all too graphically in recent days.

 Of course there are no weapons permitted in the Grosvenor saleroom, although once upon a time the Roman army would dispose of its plunder by bidding conducted “sub hasta”, or “under the spear”, the derived term “asta” being still used for Italian auctions. 

I have been told that you are nowadays more likely to be run up in an Italian auction than run through so I assume that the spear is no longer used.

JG