Heritage Auctions is one of the houses rewriting expectations for the world of collectible works on paper.  If fifty years ago the world was mostly books with emerging specialties in maps, manuscripts and ephemera today these specialties are rich and complex in their own right and there is another iteration – collectible comics that was important twenty years ago and is literally exploding today.

How else to explain Heritage's ten million dollar sale of 2,637 lots of Vintage Comics and Comic Art on July 26^th that saw all but 8 lots sell.  These days we recognize sales over a million dollars, sales that reach or exceed 100% of their total high estimate, and those sales where 80% or more of the lots offered sold.

For those sales archived to the AED this past week Heritage threw the baseball equivalent of the perfect game.  For their sale on the 26^th:  99.7% of the 2,637 lots offered sold for $10,461,283 in what was effectively an unreserved sale.

Other sales this week did well and were more in line with summer expectations.  Comic books, it seems, have become significant.

For the week ahead 8 sales are scheduled:

Tuesday August 7   Bruun Rasmussen.  Modern Prints [1232].  53 lots

Wed. August 8           Leslie Hindman.  Fine Books and Manuscripts [208].  452 lots

Thursday August 9   Heritage Auctions.  Rare Books online bidding [201232].  355 lots

Friday August 10      Addison and Sarova.  The Last Book Sale Day 2 [81112].  100 lots

Saturday August 11  Addison and Sarova.  The Last Book Sale Day 2 [81112].  100 lots

                                    Clars.  Prints and Photography [81112].

Sunday August 12    Clars.  Prints and Photography continued [81112].

It’s August and it’s quiet but it doesn’t feel that way.

Bruce McKinney

AE

 August 5^th, 2012