Association is the value
A button, ribbon or broadside is worth what its link to a campaign or event can be shown to be. Bidders want the candidate, the year and the evidence for the attribution.
Markets · Historical & Political Memorabilia
Campaign buttons to signed documents, catalogued for the collector
Political and historical material is bought on association: the campaign, the event, the person. Auctionomy gives each lot space to establish that association and its history, on a website that is yours.
How your bidders buy
What your bidders read for
Period or reproduction
Celluloid and lithographed tin buttons have been reproduced for decades. In the United States, imitation political items must be marked with their year of manufacture, and collectors check for it.
Close browsing by type
Collectors work through buttons, posters, pennants, documents and photographs in sections, and expect sizes and printers' marks to be stated.
Catalogued your way
Every line of the entry has its place
Description, estimate, condition and provenance are separate parts of every lot on Auctionomy, and each one shows on the lot page. The entry shown here is an illustration, written the way the trade writes it.
Illustrative lot · fictional
1904 presidential campaign jugate celluloid button, the two candidates within a patriotic shield
Celluloid over metal, 1¼ in. diameter, with the maker's back paper intact. Printed in red, white and blue with eagle and stars above the portraits.
Estimate $250–350
- Condition
- Light foxing at the rim, no cracks to the celluloid. Pin present, back paper complete. No reproduction date mark.
- Provenance
- From a Pennsylvania collection assembled before 1980.
Your sale on Auctionomy
Run the way your house runs it
Provenance with its own place
Record where a piece came from in the provenance note, separate from condition, so the evidence for an association is easy to find on the lot page.
Sections your collectors use
Arrange the catalogue by campaign, era or object type with categories you define, and bidders filter and search across it.
Images that show the reverse
Add images of a button's back paper and pin, a document's watermark or a poster's printer's line, as many as the lot needs.
Timed sales with a fair close
Run long button and ephemera catalogues as timed sales. The close extends when a late bid lands, and absentee bids follow your increment table.
Your trade, your house
Fluent in the trade, and unmistakably yours
Civic Ledger Historical Auctions is a demonstration house: fictional, built on Auctionomy to show how a house specialising in historical & political memorabilia looks on the platform. Its name, colours, typeface and page layout are its own, assembled from the same components every house uses. Yours would carry your name, your logo and your look, on your own domain.
No commission on the hammer price
A flat subscription, agreed with your house. Your bidders register with you, and the buyer's premium you set is yours.