The Celebrated Goldman Sale

Martin Chandler | 9:20am GMT 21 January 2024

Published: 2002
Author: Rosenwater, Irving
Publisher: Bodyline Books
Rating: 4.5 stars

This is probably my favourite Irving Rosenwater monograph of them all, aligning as it does the main interests that Rosenwater and I share; cricket, bibliography and the legal profession.

Joe Goldman was a successful solicitor and was, through the immediate post war years, unchallenged as the leading cricket collector in England and, probably, the world. His practice being in London Goldman lived in Finchley, before moving out to the leafy Surrey suburb of Egham and Rosenwater knew him very well indeed, and his admiration for his subject is evident from the biographical essay that takes up 20 or so pages at the start of the booklet.

The collection that Goldman assembled is described in detail. It contained all of the known classics of cricket literature, including an Epps*, and as many eleven of the fifteen issues of Britcher’s Scores**.

By 1966 Goldman had decided to sell his collection and the first part of it, containing all the classic books and pamphlets, came up for auction in November 1966. The second part of the booklet reproduces the catalogue, containing 300 lots and, as interesting, the list of prices achieved with, in those pre Data Protection legislation days, the name of the successful bidder for each lot.

The prices achieved are remarkable. The total take, based on hammer prices, was a few pounds shy of £3,750, the equivalent of around £55,000 today. The eleven Britchers cost Leslie Gutteridge of Epworth books £350, so around £5,000. In 2022 a collector, were he able to find a copy available anywhere, would likely pay the whole £55,000 and more for a single Britcher.

At the time of the sale Rosenwater himself was 34, and the record shows that he was successful in just one bid, the hammer coming down on his bid on Lot 299 of £2.25 (approx £35) for a copy of a souvenir of Sir Julien Cahn’s team’s tour of Malaya in 1937. More than forty years later the very same item turned up in Christopher Saunders’ second selection from the Rosenwater collection with a price tag of £275.

The Celebrated Goldman Sale was one of just two Rosenwater limited editions that were published by Bodyline Books (now Sportspages). By no means the rarest nor, by virtue of that, the costliest. There were a total of one hundred copies printed, the first fifteen in a special binding.