Right across the aisle from my stall at Beaulieu was a line up of 5 cars, all for sale (naturally), : An MGA, a Healey 3000, a brace of Jaguar XK140s and the flakiest rustiest looking Mercedes 190SL you had ever seen.
The MG and the Healey were driven in and both looked lovely. The Jags and the Merc came by tow-rope.And didn’t, to be frank. All had been imported from Virginia by NORTHERN JAGUAR and within ten minutes of them all being lined up and the price labels being tucked under their wipers, the Merc sold. For Forty Grand.
Apparently someone took a quick phone-pic, emailed a freind (or maybe client) who said “Buy it”.
If only all sales were than easy – and lucrative!
By the end of the weekend one of the Jags and the Healey had also gone. Pretty good hit rate wouldn’t you say?
So it goes – if you are lucky – at Beaulieu. Of course the opposite could just as easily have happened if three specific people had not walked past that stand. Yes the crowd is big, but it’s never the volume of people that makes the event go (or not), it’s almost that old saying they had at Brooklands in the 1930s “The Right Crowd and No Crowding”. Most people would not be looking to spend £40,000 in a total resatoration ‘barn find’ but it only takes one. Likewise the items on a smaller scale. Next to me was a pedal car of the kind I think I remember as a 5 year old. Much smaller than an Austin J40, quite flimsy really, but it was priced at £175. Not actually a lot for a proper pedal car of it’s era but it, unlike the Mercedes, didn’t sell.
I had a large 1924 book on car bodywork design and fitment. It wasn’t cheap by any stretch of the imagination- in fact it was one of the most expensive titles on my stand but it wasn’t exactly a book that would appeal to most people. Finding a likely buy would be tough normally, but not here – it sold. Conversely I brought along two programme for wonderfully obscure and little known hillclimb events on the Channel Island of Alderney . How many people have even seen one of these? I had a serious race programme collector coming onto the stand to take a look . He didn’t have them, he had never seen them, was unfamiliar even with the venues but after due thought and consideration, acknowledging that the only way to find similar would be to actually attend the event himself (involving flights, hotels, parking and other costs) he decided against buying them. They were £3 each. Such is life.
Late on Sunday afternoon I had a visit from Tom Warth, one of the biggest names in motoring books in the USA for decades. We met a few years ago when he was travelling the country in the company of the European booksellers, doing a modern day literary version of ‘the grand tour’ .
We discussed the way things had changed in the meantime. The rise of Amazon and ABE the way eBay isn’t quite what it was. Tom was the first bookseller I can remember who embraced smart-phones with internet access and it was ironic that here, some five years later, he wasn’t the only one who struggled to get the no-longer-new technology to work. My neighbouring stall holder Elinor of HERGEST DESIGNS was ‘cut off from the world’ all weekend. Neither her phone nor her credit card terminal seemed to be able to locate a signal.
The wonders of the IT age!
