Ask ArtInfo: Escalating Print Prices

Escalating Print Prices

Photo courtesy Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl

John Baldessari, "Person with Guitar (Yellow)" (2004). Edition of 45, from Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl

Photo courtesy Phaidon Press

Stephen Chambers, "Roderigo and Lucrezia B. (Dawn)" (2006). Edition 20 from Flowers Graphics

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Well, WBPB, I had a good, hard look at this one, and the answer came back loud and clear: “That’s the way the art world works.” In fact, everyone I spoke said it is an entirely routine practice.

I started by talking to Joni Moisant Weyl of Gemini G.E.L. at Joni Moisant Weyl. Her three-part explanation, as with others I spoke with, was phrased in terms of good business.

“Both Gemini and the artist are beneficiaries from the proceeds and profits from any given edition,” Weyl said. “First, we try to establish a publication price which, if anything, is on the low side of the right price. Then we monitor the sales of an edition, and as it starts to gather momentum in terms of selling out, we want to be fair to ourselves and to the artist and so we start to raise the price.

“The second factor,” Weyl continued, “is that if we feel that there is a certain amount of speculation fuelling the buying of a particular edition, we want to be sensible about the pricing to slow down that speculation. The third factor is that we like to retain a few impressions towards the end of the edition, so by raising the price we’re able to do that.”

Well, that seems fair enough. Then I thought I’d check out whether this is something that happens internationally, so I spoke to Sophie Hall who is director of Flowers Graphics in London. She confirmed that, so far as she knew, this happens everywhere.

“The way that I have always perceived it is that as a specific work becomes rarer it becomes more desirable, and you have more demand for it,” Hall said. “If there is only one copy remaining, as opposed to 10 copies, then obviously the price is reflected in that.”

Then she made an interesting comparison: “It’s like if you have a new book. If you subscribe to a pre-publication edition of a book, it would work in the same way, the reason being that it enables the publisher to recoup some of the heavy costs involved in making that edition. Then when it hits the market, it might come out at a slightly more expensive price.”

That seemed a good comparison, so I checked it out with Lance Speer at 21st: Publishers of Fine Art Photography Books, which produces beautiful, small-edition specialist books. I asked whether 21st uses a similar system.

“Absolutely,” Speer told me. “We do it routinely, and it’s part of our business model. In fact we bank on it.”

I asked him to give me an example. “Well, we’ve a book that a year ago was $8,500, and it’s $14,000 right now. [This approach] works for our tried and true collectors,” he went on, “who get a ‘pre-publication courtesy,’ so they see the books that they have purchased escalate in price as we sell them down because they’re becoming more and more rare. If we kept them all at the opening price, we would sell them all out right away. Clearly, there’s big difference in investing in the same book at $14,000 [as opposed to] $8,500. But people do understand that when there are only six left or four left, the price is going to go up.”

Next, I thought I’d enquire with a publisher that works at both ends of the pricing scale, and I spoke to Catherine Thomas at Phaidon, which obviously sells thousands of copies at the Barnes & Noble end of the market, but which also have a specialist-edition division, which is Thomas’ responsibility.

“That’s just the nature of the business,” Thomas told me, “and that’s the advantage to collectors of moving quickly. Our specialist books—which we typically publish in an edition of 100—do increase in price. We’ve just released a Luc Tuymans book, and we’ve had a great response. We’ve sold about half of the edition, so the price is increasing and it will continue to go up.”