Take two: Sotheby’s: Bidding for Class, Robert Lacey

For a fuller review, see my Patreon. 

I decided to do something different for the cover shot this time, taking a hint from someone on Twitter who uses the handle @LloydLegalist. On 14 May he said, “I think folks should be required to read a book for every 10 selfies they take.” It gave me the idea to put up selfies of my own reads, to accompany my secondary reviews. I wish people would write more reviews on books they read. Selfies are fine as far as they go but what do they tell us about the person inside? What about my loaf? Is it acceptable now I’ve lost 30 kilos?

Dad had this volume in his library and it had sat on a bookshelf in my bedroom, having come from Pyrmont in the January move. I brushed the dust off the tops of the pages before reading. Sotheby’s sold my house and sold me my new place, so I thought that I’d take dad’s posthumous advice and learn more about the company that’d had so much to do, in recent months, with my finances. 

I don’t know how much of the book dad read before he succumbed to dementia (no bookmarks were in place to show me how far he’d got, but something had spilled on some pages so parts of the book had definitely been read) and I thoroughly enjoyed it since it supplemented other knowledge I had, especially about the 18th century, which was when the company was founded by a second-hand bookseller named Baker.