London Holds Its First Auction of Erotica, and It’s a Huge Hit

London’s first-ever auction of erotic art drew bidders--many of them perferring to remain anonymous--who paid a total of $31,870 for 160 lots in a sale that the auctioneers Friday called “very, very successful.”

Bonham’s auction house said it plans to do it again next year.

The top-priced item was an 18th-Century Chinese export porcelain teapot with lovers painted on it. It went for $3,666 during the sale Thursday.

Eight unframed etchings of lovers, published in Paris in 1932, brought $1,156.

Buyers from many parts of the world eyed an array of suggestively shaped ancient oil lamps, decorated chamber pots, books by the Marquis de Sade, loving cups, paintings, drawings, prints and a Roman marble panel fragment depicting what the catalog described as “close encounters of a sexual kind.”

Japanese ‘Pillow Book’

Other items included a Japanese “pillow book” of explicit pictures given to wedding couples and miniature carvings showing lovers in athletic sexual positions.

Such sales are common in continental Europe, but it was something new for London. A guard was posted at the door of the sales room in Knightsbridge district to make sure no one under 21 came in.

“Of course, on the Continent they have always had a much more grown-up attitude to this sort of thing than we Britons,” Bonham’s spokeswoman Isobel Glenny said.

“We got in touch with Scotland Yard some weeks ago and spoke to an inspector in the vice squad who gave us guidelines for the sale,” she said.

“He told us to use our common sense and exclude bestiality, the degradation of women or anything involving children. We did have some things like that, but we returned them to the owners because we didn’t regard them as art or of sufficiently good quality.”

A Present for His Wife

Paul Green of London, who bought an erotic painting, said: “It’s purely sentimental. I’m going to give it to my wife for Christmas.”

John Pennell, a London auto dealer who paid $705 for erotic books and a print, said: “I don’t normally come to auctions, but this one was absolutely worth it. I’m certainly going to put my purchases on display in the house.”

Bonham said the idea came from a Valentine’s Day sale last February, when auctioneer Eric Knowles felt some items were “a bit too risque.” He suggested holding a special auction of erotic art.

He decided to go ahead with the auction whan a French art dealer scoffed, saying, “You English are too stuffy--it will never work.” “When the French throw down the gauntlet,” Knowles said, “the British rise to the occasion.”