Antique Sword Values
Perhaps a long-lost great aunt has recently bequeathed you an antique axe in her will or you’ve just found the Tipu Sultan’s cache of weapons in your attic and you’d like to know more about values. Well, you’re not alone because what value their antique weapon holds is most people’s burning question—I certainly get asked it a lot online. Whilst the answer is not straightforward there are methods you can use to find an estimate of value for most of the weapons you might encounter.
First, you can check the current stock and past sales of the specialist dealers online. Now, dealers’ prices are usually the highest and that’s because they have a well-established network of buyers, more overhead costs to satisfy and, frankly, it’s their job and they deserve a paycheque in exchange for their years of study. Also, in a hobby that suffers from fakes, dealers can guarantee an item’s authenticity to many buyers (sometimes erroneously so but that’s another story). While most of the dealers in the UK are fantastic—and I’ve bought from most of them over the last decade—if you actually want to sell to someone doing this professionally then I strongly advise you to contact a few of them in order to acquire a more accurate picture of value. I’m sorry to say this but a minority of dealers will lie and tell enquirers that their item is worth very little in order to maximise their profit margin—I have had personal experience of this from an established dealer who clearly didn’t know I was a collector.
Ask a collector. Collectors like me often sell to other collectors as some (I am especially guilty of this) are fickle and once we’ve ‘experienced’ a particular weapon or weapon-type we get the itch to find the funds to discover new ones. Collectors’ prices are usually a step down from those of dealers as many transactions are done between friends or by people who don’t need an item to see a profit, and advice from this community is usually safe and reliable. Some of the websites that can help you in this regard are listed in another of my articles: Historical and Antique Weaponry Websites.
Go to an auction house. Most towns have a local auction house and it’s often the first thought when people think of selling unwanted antiques. Their prices are fairly erratic but are still commonly low enough to provide the sources for most dealers’ stockrooms. Of course, the price when the gavel falls is not the amount of money your bank account ends up receiving as there are fees involved, usually payable as a percentage of the hammer price. These salerooms sometimes have free valuation days and they can give you a decent idea of what your weapon is and how much it might make at an auction but remember some are sales-driven and so less interested in authenticity.
As an example of all of the above, the exact same sword might sell for these prices:
Dealer: £300
Collector: £225
Auction: £150
Affecting all of this is personal taste and which country you’re in. Taste accounts for a lot and someone who collects Fairbairn-Sykes fighting knives would naturally value one of those far more highly than someone would who only concentrates on Ottoman yataghans. As for geography, the market for 19th century Bowie knives is far larger in the USA than it is in Belgium, for instance, and this will alter their value. Also, some countries outlaw certain weapon-types entirely and that knuckleduster you discovered under the floorboards during a renovation might be completely unsellable or even require immediate handing in at your local police station.
I hope that’s helped to illuminate, in a rather warts-and-all manner, what is very much an inexact science. If you found this article useful you might also like to read Antique Sword Cleaning.
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