Auction house catalogues are multi-faceted publications. Primarily, of course, they’re sales tools, reassuring buyers that something is what it says it is, that it can legally be bought and where to do just that. Yet, they’re so much more. They can be a simple full stop to one of life’s chapters or, alternatively, a celebratory exclamation mark.
An anonymous 1895 house-contents catalogue (of which there are only four known surviving copies) for a Chelsea abode on Tite Street bears secret testament, through a haphazard compilation of loose-lotting, to the Icarus fall of one Mr Oscar Wilde. Conversely, the accompanying volume to Sotheby’s 1996 landmark auction of the Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis collection proved such an iconic salute to the late first lady’s style it made the New York Times bestseller list.
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