Rare books were sold at the Literary Fund auction: “Every page is either an elephant or a lioness”
The Litfond auction house held an auction of collectible publications of the Silver Age and Russian avant-garde from private St. Petersburg collections.
The auction was held on February 15, 2024. One of the lots at the auction was a lifetime edition of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poem “Every page is an elephant, sometimes a lioness” with illustrations from the Tiflis futuristic group “41°” by Kirill Zdanevich. The leading bid was 400 thousand rubles. In total, over three hundred lots were announced at the auction, held in two sessions, the most expensive of which were early printed rarities from the XNUMXth and XNUMXth centuries.
In addition, a copy of a small-circulation edition of Nikolai Gogol’s “Nevsky Prospekt” with illustrations by Dmitry Kardovsky was presented at the auction. The book, whose starting price was 170 thousand rubles, contains an enclosed handwritten deed of gift from 1944, addressed to Gennady Rakhlin, director of the Writers' Union store on Nevsky Prospekt. Several publications by Anna Akhmatova, futurists Velimir Khlebnikov and Alexei Kruchenykh were also put up for auction.
The intense struggle between Internet users and the audience throughout the auction yielded good results and had a beneficial effect on the overall trading statistics. 36,7% of items were sold offline and 38,9% online. By absentee bid and by telephone, 12,7% and 11,6% of lots were won, respectively. As a result, in less than four and a half hours, 267 lots went under the hammer, or 53% of everything on display, and the total proceeds amounted to 12,4 million rubles, or 51,7% of the average total estimate of the catalogue.
According to the results of the auction, the threshold is 100 thousand rubles. passed seventeen lots. In addition to transactions with obvious leading lots, the auction was not without rapid battles for a variety of publications. For example, the first issue of the handwritten camp magazine “The Bright Path” with a cover by V. Merzlyakov, tentatively priced at 75–80 thousand rubles, began bidding at an absentee bid of 120 thousand rubles, and went to a participant on the Internet for 300 thousand . And the 1897 adventure book “The Red Sea Robber” by James Fenimore Cooper, decorated with five colored drawings, easily exceeded the estimate of 5 - 5,5 thousand rubles. and went to a network player for 38 thousand rubles.
The largest difference between the estimate and the price was achieved during the drawing of a composite lot of four postcards from the “Four Seasons” series (cartoon image by I. Gurro, text by I. Sven). Postcards turned out to be 16 times more expensive than the lower estimate limit: already the first Internet rate was 6 thousand rubles. left far behind the estimate of 1 - 1,2 thousand rubles, and in the end lot 374 was bought by a player in the hall for 16 thousand rubles.
The selection of animation graphics, unfortunately, cannot boast of such results. The tired public did not pay attention either to the materials for the cartoon “Night on Bald Mountain”, or to the working phases and sketches for the wonderful children’s work “Tiger Cub on a Sunflower”, and even the original graphics for the beautiful “Cinderella”, a classic of Soviet animation, could not be found response from auction participants.
Literary fund: https://www.litfund.ru/auction/551s1/178/
Source: https://artinvestment.ru/invest/russia/20180219_Litfond_15_02_obzor.html?ysclid=lsorvc6de8819549658
The news was prepared by Inna Melnikova
