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9000 auction results

11 Dec 2006

After more than 9000 successful online auctions have been recorded (but they do also include the results of the Bassenge auction in October), here are the relevant statistics (and some irrelevant ones, too):

There are 9,013 successful auctions recorded in our database, resulting from 16,083 auctions started, so the success ratio (i.e., auctions resulting in a sale) has fallen for the third time in a row to 56.0% from 56.3% last time.

The number of successful auctions is now down to to 311 per month (after 8,000 auctions it was 315), a continuation of the trend noted last time.

We have now seen 891 different editions in at least one successful sale (up from 852 last time) - the Bassenge auction helped a lot (no pun intended, really!). As there are 1030 different editions and versions in the database, a mere 139 have not sold on eBay or other online auction houses since we started. 120 editions have a single sale only.

Generalgouvernement is still the most sold edition, with 74 sales (last time 65), but the second place is now shared by three volumes, each with 64 sales - not surprisingly they are Italy from the Alps to Naples 2 (1909), Belgium and Holland 15 (1910) and Great Britain 7 (1910). The best-selling French edition is as before Sud-Est de la France 9 (1910), now in 20th position (down from 19th) with 39 sales.

The total sale price for the 9013 books was €342,693.10, giving an average price of €38.02 (significantly up from €32.57 last time - this is all down to Messrs Bassenge.). If all the books had gone for their BDKR guideline price, the total sales would have been €750,975, so the ratio has jumped to 45.6% from the previous 41.3%, which goes to show that the BDKR guidelines for the rarer books probably need updating.

Finally, the average number of bids per sold book is still 5.6 - but don't take this or any of the other stats too seriously!

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