Phillips Auctioneers

Harry Phillips set up this famous auction house in 1796 and, we are told, conducted sales of collections which belonged to Queen Marie-Antoinette, Beau Brummel and Napoleon among others. Today in the UK alone Phillips conducts over 800 sales a year.

SPECIAL FEATURES

This is an extensive website in which you will probably wish to start by clicking on London & UK, as opposed to the other options in rather faint print on the homepage, namely New York & USA, Sydney and Zurich. The London page now loads against a sophisticated brown background. The left-of-page index offers some basic history in Welcome to Phillips, and then Auction Catalogues, a list of forthcoming Phillips sales worldwide.

Buying & Selling briefly explains the bidding process, which can be conducted by fax, and then, under the headings Discovering What's On, Buying at Phillips and Selling at Phillips, such items as 'Obtaining a Sale Catalogue', 'Bidding if You Are Unable to Attend' and the reassuringly titled 'In the Unlikely Event that your Goods Don't Sell.'

Auction Calendar lists forthcoming auctions by category, starting with Aircraft and ending with Writing Equipment, via such other enticements as Mechanical Music, Postcards and Cigarette Cards, and (unique to Phillips as far as I know) Scripophily & Bank Notes. Selling fine wines is another important feature of Phillips sales, mainly though not exclusively conducted in the USA.

The next few items in the main index are purely practical, such as how to subscribe to receive catalogues and how to contact Phillips around the world by various methods, including email. Buried among these, however, is Phillips News, which has a few well chosen items of news at any given time, usually with illustrations of special objects either on display in exhibitions or coming up for sale.

To interrogate Sales Results you need to know exact details of both sale and lot numbers. Valuations On-lin is not quite what may be implied, as valuations are in fact normally conducted in person, verbal valuations being free and written ones charged. Here Phillips also offers its Inventory Management System, which consists of valuations delivered on CD using both text and images, a handy way of managing large collections. Trusts and Estates Departments is aimed mainly at those, such as the executors of wills, who may have large amounts of property to value and dispose of, or to list and protect.


Finally Phillips-Selkirk transports you to the plum-coloured North American part of the website, where the wine auctions are a special feature. In all other respects the information available duplicates that in the London & UK section, and a similar pattern fits Sydney (unexpectedly on almost the same background as the USA) and Zurich (green) also.