Whois & Analysis for bonhams.com

Bonhams is a privately owned British auction house and one of the world’s oldest and largest auctioneers of fine art and antiques.

It was formed by the merger in November 2001 of Bonhams & Brooks and Phillips Son & Neale.

This brought together two of the four surviving Georgian auction houses in London, Bonhams having been founded in 1793, and Phillips in 1796 by Harry Phillips, formerly a senior clerk to James Christie.

Today, the amalgamated business handles art and antiques auctions.

It operates two salerooms in London—the former Phillips sale room at 101 New Bond Street, and the old Bonham's sale room at the Montpelier Galleries in Montpelier Street, Knightsbridge—with smaller regional sale rooms in Edinburgh and Oxford.

Sales are also held around the world in New York, Hong Kong, Los Angeles, Paris, San Francisco, Sydney, and Singapore.

A collectable (collectible or collector's item) is any object regarded as being of value or interest to a collector (not necessarily monetarily valuable or antique).

There are numerous types of collectables and terms to denote those types.

An antique is a collectable that is old.

A curio is a small, usually fascinating or unusual item sought after by collectors.

A manufactured collectable is an item made specifically for people to collect.

In European academic traditions, fine art is art developed primarily for aesthetics or beauty, distinguishing it from applied art that also has to serve some practical function, such as pottery or most metalwork.

An auction is a process of buying and selling goods or services by offering them up for bid, taking bids, and then buying the item to the highest bidder.

The open ascending price auction is arguably the most common form of auction in use today.

Participants bid openly against one another, with each subsequent bid required to be higher than the previous bid.

An auctioneer may announce prices, bidders may call out their bids themselves (or have a proxy call out a bid on their behalf), or bids may be submitted electronically with the highest current bid publicly displayed.

In a Dutch auction, the auctioneer begins with a high asking price for some quantity of like items; the price is lowered until a participant is willing to accept the auctioneer's price for some quantity of the goods in the lot or until the seller's reserve price is met.

While auctions are most associated in the public imagination with the sale of antiques, paintings, rare collectibles and expensive wines, auctions are also used for commodities, livestock, radio spectrum and used cars.

In economic theory, an auction may refer to any mechanism or set of trading rules for exchange.

A car is a wheeled, self-powered motor vehicle used for transportation and a product of the automotive industry.

Most definitions of the term specify that cars are designed to run primarily on roads, to have seating for one to eight people, to typically have four wheels with tyres, and to be constructed principally for the transport of people rather than goods.

The year 1886 is regarded as the birth year of the modern car.

In that year, German inventor Karl Benz built the Benz Patent-Motorwagen.

Cars did not become widely available until the early 20th century.

One of the first cars that was accessible to the masses was the 1908 Model T, an American car manufactured by the Ford Motor Company.

Cars were rapidly adopted in the United States of America, where they replaced animal-drawn carriages and carts, but took much longer to be accepted in Western Europe and other parts of the world.