Alberg drawings, models etc

[Dixon Hemphill]

Some of you may have heard that no one bid on these Alberg items at the auction at Swann Galleries on Sept 30th. Their price will now be lowered to $8000. plus a 20 % commission plus shipping which brings the price to nearly $10,000. If no one offers to buy them within 10 days they will be returned to the original owner.

I will contact that owner later on to see at what price he will sell the items. If CDSOA is interested in buying, the items may be bought at much less than $8000. --- maybe $5000. or even less.

[Russell]

$8000 is still a lot of money, especially considering the items of most interest to CD owners are blueprints, not pencil/pen sketches. Ever gone to a large and older sailmaker? they have drawers full of blueprints (not photocopies) of our boats. The Cape Dory blueprints are only of sailplans. If they were builder blueprints, with interior, hull plan, etc etc, perhaps of much more value. But all the Cape Dory related items are simply sailplans, of which there are likely scores in existance, sent to every sailmaker who was partnered with a local Cape Dory dealer. Perhaps if as has been suggested elsewhere on this board, if there is a direct Alberg provenance it might ad a little intrinsic value, but they are still blueprints of sailplans.

Now, the pencil sketches of unknown boats may be worth something, especially if they can be attached to boats actually built. These would be artist origonal. But value to CDSOA? Not a lot. To a sailing museam/archive? Perhaps considerable. Likewise the half hulls, intrinsic value only if they were indeed owned by Alberg. The auction house has never stated such though, so I see no need to consider that. And even so, the half hull builder probably made many of the same half hulls for boat owners, hardly a unique item either.

I will be upfront and say, with the sale ended, I did send an offer on.... you guessed it... the CD36 sailplan blueprint. I doubt the seller is willing to part things out, but might as well try. If the owner/auction house is willing to part the item out, I will gladly ad stipulation to my will that it be donated to CDSOA upon my death.

The funny thing is, if the auction house offered these items, parted out, the CD related items alone would probably individually got more then they hoped for the entire lot.

[The Patriot]

... I doubt the seller is willing to part things out, but might as well try ... The funny thing is, if the auction house offered these items, parted out, the CD related items alone would probably individually got more then they hoped for the entire lot.

And then again maybe not. In the majority of cases involving archives of artist-related background materials (authors' notebooks, sketches, drafts, plot outlines, correspondence, etc.), it is almost universally the case that entire collections are inherently worth more than individual items sold as separate lots. This is so for many reasons, but two are usually paramount. First, a collector is by temperament interested in complete collections, and any action that affects the completeness of a collection can only be detrimental to its value. Second, scholars and researchers place a high premium on being able to do research in a collection that is as complete as possible, and preferably located in one place.

A current example of this situation is the long drawn out battle over the papers of Franz Kafka (see the article in last week's NYT magazine for the gory details). The difficulties that ensued after the sale of the original manuscript of The Trial have cast a heavy shadow over the entire transaction, and will ultimately affect the long term historical and financial value of the collection. Of course the papers of an artist of Kafka's stature have much more significance than drawings of plastic boats by a naval architect most ordinary people have never heard of, but that doesn't mean that the nature of the game has changed.