Knock-out

Mitchell Kennerley, President of the Anderson Galleries, returned, dapper and beaming, from London where he had engineered his sensa tional coup to bring the Leverhulme collection to the U. S. He was willing to talk about it, a little. . . . Yes, the sale had been an nounced for London, all plans made, before the trustees of Lever-hulme's estate changed their minds and sent him a cable. What had made them change their minds?

Why, they were lawyers. They had not known about the knock-out system which British dealers use to get graft out of a sale.

Pressmen nodded sagely, though it is unlikely that many of them knew any more than Leverhulme's perplexed trustees about the knock out system. Knockout, in the ar got of the U. S. collegian, is a floating superlative used to qualify any object whose speed, efficiency or sex-appeal appalls rhetoric. In England the pressmen soon ascertained it is something else entirely.

There "knock-out" is a kind of smart chicanery by which art dealers reap illicit gains. Instead of bidding against each other, they obtain valuable objects at insignificant cost by forming a pool and appointing a representative to bid for them. Whatever is bought in the interests of the pool is sold again to private individuals or at other auctions and the profits divided. It was an open secret among the Trade in London that the Leverhulme "knock-out" would net its participants approximately half a million dollars out of the pockets of the estate.