In the flyer for this talk I called sale catalogues ‘unassuming’ and ‘half-hidden’. ‘Unassuming’ because they often are simple lists of works, ‘half-hidden’ because, in the British Library at least, they are not always catalogued separately and therefore are easy to miss. They are, however, extremely important for the study of the provenance of works of art and for the history of taste and collections, an area that has been much studied in recent years.
