Hendrik Roos owns a single bookcase in his apartment in the Jordaan in Amsterdam given over entirely to auction-house catalogues. The earliest is a Sotheby's English furniture sale from March of 1957, bought in a Bermondsey junk shop for fifty pence in 1979. The latest is the spring 2026 Christie's New York decorative-arts sale, which arrived in the post the morning of the interview.
There are, by his count, four hundred and twelve catalogues on the shelves. He has read each of them at least once. Some he has read so many times that the spines have given out and the loose pages are held together with cotton tape.
Roos is not a dealer and has never been an auction-house client of any consequence. He bid, twice, in the late 1980s, and went home each time without a lot. The catalogues are his library, not his record. He uses them, daily, as the most useful single research tool the antique trade has produced in the last seventy years.
The argument for the catalogue as research is straightforward and largely unmade. A serious auction-house catalogue, especially from the major rooms before the digital era, is in effect a peer-reviewed publication. The lot descriptions are written by specialists with no commercial interest in over-claiming, because the house's reputation rides on each attribution.
The catalogue is dated, illustrated, and accompanied by a hammer price. The combination of these four elements — description, image, date, price — produces a body of comparable data unavailable in any other format. Trade reference books are written years after the fact and updated rarely. Museum publications are concerned with provenance, not market. Dealer catalogues, when they exist at all, are advertising.
Roos's library is organised by category and then chronologically within category. The English furniture sales fill two shelves. American silver, three. Continental pottery and porcelain, a shelf and a half. The Old Master drawings sales, in which he has no particular collecting interest, fill a single shelf because he uses them for attribution research on related decorative arts.
He acquired most of the older catalogues by mail order from a Long Island dealer who specialises in them. A complete run of Christie's London spring decorative-arts sales from 1962 to 1999, in good condition, cost him in the region of eleven hundred pounds in the late 1990s. The same run today would cost more than four times that, if it could be found at all.
The catalogues are useful in three different ways, and Roos uses them differently for each.
For attribution research, he treats them as a visual reference. A walnut chair turns up in a country sale, the catalogue describes it as Queen Anne, and Roos wants to know whether the description is plausible. He spends an evening with three or four Christie's catalogues from the 1970s, looking at every Queen Anne chair sold in those decades, and decides whether the cataloguer was right.
For price research, the catalogues are still the most reliable record. Auction databases, of which there are now several good ones online, cover the major sales completely from about 2000 forward and patchily before that. For furniture sold between 1960 and 1995, the printed catalogues remain the indispensable source.
For provenance research, the catalogues are sometimes the only source. A piece that passed through Sotheby's New York in 1981 will be recorded in that catalogue and almost nowhere else. If the lot was bought by a private collector and disappeared from the market for forty years, the 1981 catalogue is the last public record of its existence. When the piece resurfaces, the cataloguer who finds the old record can often reconstruct most of its twentieth-century history.
Roos has, more than once, identified pieces in current sales from catalogue entries thirty or forty years old. In one case, a marquetry table sold in London in 1972, lost from view, and offered in Brussels in 2019, was identified by him from a single comparable photograph in a 1972 Christie's catalogue. He sent his findings, unsolicited, to the Brussels house, which added the provenance to its description and adjusted the estimate upward.
The catalogues themselves vary in quality. The Christie's English furniture sales from the 1970s, under the direction of John Lumley, are widely considered the high point of the form, with lot descriptions sometimes running to half a page on a single chair. The Sotheby's American silver catalogues from the same period, under Kevin Tierney, are similarly authoritative.
The 1990s saw a gradual thinning of catalogue descriptions as houses began to assume buyers were also looking at higher-resolution photographs. The 2000s saw the rise of the online catalogue, with much of the supplementary detail moving to web supplements. The printed catalogue survives but is, in Roos's view, less useful than it was. The 2020s catalogues are largely picture books with prices.
What this means, practically, for any collector or restorer is that the old catalogues are a research resource that will not be reproduced. A specialist's description of an eighteenth-century English chest written for a 1973 catalogue, by a cataloguer with thirty years' experience and access to the chest itself, cannot be reconstructed from photographs. The chest itself may now be in a private American home and may not be photographable. The 1973 description, if it exists, is the only available expert account.
Roos buys two or three catalogues a month from current sales, almost always the major decorative-arts and silver sales from Christie's, Sotheby's, and Bonhams. He pays the catalogue subscription rates, which now run to about thirty euros per major sale. He considers it the best money he spends on his collecting interest, by some distance.
His advice to anyone beginning to use catalogues as research is to start with a single category and a single house. Buy or borrow ten years' worth of one specialism — English furniture from Christie's, say, or American silver from Sotheby's — and read them. Not skim, read. After ten catalogues a beginner will be able to date an unsigned piece to within a decade by eye, which is more than most dealers can do.
After fifty catalogues, the beginner will know the names of the specialists who wrote the descriptions and will have opinions about which of them is reliable. After a hundred, the beginner is no longer a beginner.
Roos's bookcase is not the largest catalogue library in private hands, by some margin. He knows of three larger in Europe and two in North America. But it is, he believes, used more thoroughly than most.
He plans to leave the catalogues, on his death, to the library of a small Dutch museum that has expressed quiet interest. They will be, he hopes, used.
The catalogue is the trade's institutional memory, and the trade has been careless with its memory. Most large auction houses no longer keep complete runs of their own publications. The catalogues survive in private libraries, in a handful of major museum study collections, and in the storerooms of dealers who have not got round to throwing them out.