Stan V. Henkels was the only auctioneer who catalogued every work himself and cried his own sales too. His humor was irresistible, and the audience would often break out in guffaws of laughter at his many bright sallies.
THOMAS E. KIRBY ON THE ROSTRUM
In 1902 I attended a sale at Henkels’s where the price of a certain volume caused the book world to hum for months afterward. I was late, and entered the room as the bidding began on a little book which was placed in full view of the audience. I asked one of the employés for its number in the catalogue and found that it was The Dying Words of Ockanickon, an Indian King, and was published in London in 1682. It did not seem to be a volume of much importance. I was acquainted somewhat with its history. The highest price it had ever brought was $52.50, at the Barlow sale in 1890. I leaned forward to whisper to a friend in the row ahead of me and he said $200 would be an enormous price for it.
Suddenly the air seemed charged with electricity, and I looked about to see who was bidding. On one side of the room sat a man I knew, A. J. Bowden, who represented George H. Richmond and Company, of New York. On the other I saw Mr. Robert Dodd, of Dodd, Mead and Company. Both were experienced auction bidders, with the set expression of the mouth and the feverish, alert look. I did not know at the time that both had received instructions to buy this particular work at any price. Each had that most dangerous weapon of the auction game, the unlimited bid.
From sixty dollars the price rapidly jumped. Stan V. Henkels, colorful, suave, provocative, naïve, and humorous, kept egging them on. Up and up the price went, until it reached the $900 mark. Then a murmur of consternation swept the room, followed by a hush. Robert Dodd broke the silence with a $100 raise. Bowden followed with another $100 and Dodd added $100 more. When Bowden finally shouted, “Thirteen hundred dollars,” Dodd smiled.
“Fourteen hundred,” he said sweetly.
Just at this moment poor old Bowden exhibited his first sign of weakness. He stopped bidding in hundreds and raised the bid twenty-five.
Dodd saw his chance and brought up his battalion with a crash. Little Ockanickon was wrested from Bowden at the freak price of $1450. When Richmond read in the paper next morning the price at which he had so nearly bought Ockanickon, he fell out of bed!
Speaking of freak prices, think of my surprise when I went to an auction one day last year and saw with amused amazement a little volume of book mysteries I once wrote. I felt self-conscious, uncomfortable, and pleased, all rolled into one, when the bids on The Unpublishable Memoirs jumped up, and it finally sold for sixteen dollars. The joke is that this volume is still obtainable at its published price of $2.50.