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Believe it or not, when we stopped producing full-color glossy catalogs, the first thing I heard from readers was, "I loved the catalogs, what will I read on the john now?" While we had our reasons for discontinuing the printed catalogs, taking away someone's bathroom reading material seemed almost cruel and unusual punishment.

The ever candid and thought provoking Rod Walck, editor of Bottles and More, (bottlemagazine@bottlemagazine.com), the latest and greatest successful effort in the ongoing world of bottles and glass, wrote an excellent article in his June issue talking about this very subject. Rod points out that producing a color catalog is expensive for the auction house and this cost is often passed on in the form of a 12% buyers fee.  It's also time consuming and, with the advent of the Internet, a burden not as imperative as it once was.

American Bottle Auctions was the first of the four bottle auction houses to fold their full-color catalogs and go purely web. Looking back, we were also the first auction house to begin using full-color pictures. Also don't forget, we still send out over 100 full-color printouts each auction, which we print in-house and mail free of charge to those people out there who still don't have a computer, which we dutifully respect. One of them however is not Jack Pelletier. At any rate, I agree with Rod and will add my opinion since he has solicited thought provoking responses.

The catalogs used to cost us anywhere from $7000-12,000 per auction. We sold maybe 500 and sent out another few hundred gratis to antique stores, publications, etc. In addition to the cost of printing the catalogs, we had envelope and mailing costs. This was another fifty cents or so per copy if we sent them out bulk mail, which sometimes took three weeks to reach the East Coast. Since we didn't know how many we would sell, we almost always overprinted, which was like throwing money out the window. In addition to the catalog, we printed a mailer announcing the auction and sent it to over 2,000 people. The printing and mailing was usually around $1500 for the mailer alone. If we had 1000 printed and charged $10 apiece, we would lose $7500 before we sold a bottle.

In addition, it took over two weeks to photograph, layout and prepare the catalog for the printer. For those of you who don't know, putting it together consists of taking the photographs, writing the text and combining them in a computer program such as PageMaker. After that, we take the entire file to a lithographic company who turns our computer file into a tangible form known as color separations. Color separations are four transparent celluloid pages, one red, blue, yellow and black, which, when layered on top of one another on a white background, form the basis of every color in nature. Betcha didn't know that. We would then take all of that to the printer who would turn the separations into a printer ready layout called proofs. They would also provide a blue-line, which is a facsimile of the final magazine, but in a non-reproducible format. In other words, it fades in time, just in case someone got the smart idea to copy it and skip town. From the blue-line we would make any corrections (very expensive) and, if need be, have new proofs made for that particular signature. A signature is four pages laid out side by side in a manner that, when combined with the other signatures, form the entire magazine. By the way, your final magazine has to be an even number of signatures or pages. You can go 16, 32 or 64 and you can also add a signature in the middle of a 32 page magazine but it gets more expensive. If you've ever wondered why you see four color pages in the very center of black and white publications, it's because it contains one color signature with the others being the much less costly black and white.

Eventually, you have a magazine, which, after all this work, inevitably has errors and problems with colors. Taking a color slide and going from that to the computer, then the lithographer and finally having it printed can often lead to some disastrous results. I'm sure those of you who ordered our catalogs remember some problems with color. When you are dealing with something like antique glass, a few shades off and the price can vary by thousands of dollars.

Which brings me to doing it on the computer. For that, we take a digital color photograph, in fact a few of each bottle. We write the description and, for $500 bucks, a webmaster combines it and it goes on the website and out into cyberspace and into your computer. We also, as I pointed out, print color copies at a cost of maybe $100. If there are any errors on the auction website we simply go in and change them, no more difficult than changing a word on the page I'm writing now. Color wrong? No problem. Take another picture or adjust the one you have using a picture-adjusting program like Adobe PhotoShop.

When people go to our website and look at the auction, they can sort through various bottle types, use the search engine to look for a particular bottle or just browse through the whole auction. If they like, they can print out a copy of the auction or just one picture of a bottle. By the way, there are multiple pictures of each bottle and, depending on the size of your computer monitor, average eight inches apiece. With a color catalog, the single picture averaged about two inches in size.

Another factor is the bidding process. When we did the catalogs, we could only take bids by phone, mail or fax. We had an 800 number (another first) and ended up with about $1000 in phone costs. We needed six lines and four people to man the phones the day of the auction. Labor amounted to another $500 for the day and we usually gave bonuses depending on the success of the auction. With the online auction, most bidding is done in cyberspace and costs us zero dollars. It's more efficient since the bidder puts in the bids and can refer to their own bid page, adding or changing their bids whenever they want. In addition, when we did just the catalog, if someone wanted to know what the current bids were on 50 items, it was a tedious task. Now, click a button and every current bid is displayed.

So, clearer, larger and truer-to-life color pictures in an environment that begs for accuracy. Instantaneous access to current bids, including your own bidding page. An ongoing library of past auctions with a search engine to find a particular bottle. A lower buyer's premium since there are no printing costs for the auctioneer (although we never passed that cost along). Most of all, the time and money saved by the auctioneer not having to go through the above described ritual each auction is wonderful.

I still have customers who bemoan the lack of a catalog on our part. With all due respect, humbug! I remember when we first abandoned the catalog, I got a letter which I believe I kept somewhere around the office. It said in essence that they would please like to be taken off the mailing list since we no longer had a color catalog. It also inferred we were cheap, disrespectful of our customers and a menace to society. It bothered me a little bit but everyone has their right to say how they feel. I wonder if the same person ever got around to buying a computer. They might find, like our other readers did, the incredible advantage of online auctions. Not just ours but Ebay, Glass Works Auctions, Norm Heckler Auctions, The Galleria, Bottleshow.com, the inexhaustible Reggie Lynch's site and a new sales site run by Ed and Kathy Gray at www.GreatAntiqueBottles.com, Historic Glass House featuring the knowledgeable Chris House, and many, many more. Not to mention, the vast number of sites that talk about bottles and offer bottles for outright sale. I've included a list of websites to check out for auctions and other places of interest at the end of this article. And, for those of you who still miss our catalog, there's always the newspaper or your favorite magazine in the morning while you're taking care of business.

By  Jeff Wichmann