Ten departments.

The six principal departments are the fields we buy in continuously. The four specialist departments hold material that comes up less often, usually through a private route rather than the open market, and a good deal of it is placed before it reaches this catalogue.

Every department is catalogued to the same standard, whatever the value of the object. The classification, condition report, documentary position and the questions a buyer should be asking are set out on each department page, because what matters in a fossil is not what matters in a manuscript and a single house standard written in general terms would be useless to both.

If an object interests you and it does not sit in any of these, it is still worth asking. The departments describe what we hold most often, not the limit of what we will consider.