Finance History | Doelenstraat 3, Alkmaar, 5 February 1637 — The 90,000-Guilder Auction That Was Never Paid

The Orphans' Chamber of Alkmaar sold a dead innkeeper's bulbs in this building on 5 February 1637, and the bidding reached roughly 90,000 guilders in 1637 money. Almost none of it was ever collected. Wouter Bartholomeusz Winckel had died the previous year, probably of plague, leaving seven children; three of them went into the Alkmaar orphanage. The Weeskamer gave permission for the sale in December 1636, once the bulbs had been lifted, sorted, weighed and put back in the ground. Bidders came from Haarlem and further afield to the hall of the Nieuwe or St. Sebastiaansdoelen, the militia house whose 1618 date still sits in a cartouche on the side wall. The day left the best price record the whole episode has. Peter Garber counted 98 sales logged for 5 February 1637 at wildly varying prices, and the tulip book attributed to the Haarlem florist Pieter Cos shows a Viceroy against prices of 3,000 and 4,200 guilders, the difference being the weight of the bulb. The catch sits in the tense. Anne Goldgar's reading of the archives puts it exactly: had the tulips been paid for, they would have raised about 90,000 guilders for the Winckel orphans. Nothing was due on the day. February bulbs were still underground, and money moved only on delivery in summer. By summer the market had gone, and buyers were refusing to turn up and watch the bulbs dug out. The timing in this room is the strangest part. Two days earlier, on 3 February, a tulip sale in Haarlem had not gone as expected, and buyers from Haarlem were still bidding freely here on the 5th. They had not heard. A price signal in 1637 travelled at the speed of a person on a road, and the most famous auction of the mania took place after the thing it crowned had already turned. The building survives on a quiet street behind the Doelenveld and housed the Stedelijk Museum Alkmaar until 2000. Photo: Dqfn13, CC BY-SA 3.0 NL, via Wikimedia Commons.