Graham Arader III is perhaps the largest and most significant dealer of rare maps, prints and natural history watercolors within the United States. He established his business in 1974, bringing a high-charged, trading floor mentality to the print market. His business began with maps and Arader is credited with creating a market where formerly there was much less, and of bringing the world of cartography to the collector and not just the purview of academics and librarians. In The Island of Lost Maps, author Miles Harvey credits him with transforming what had been an "insular realm of aficionados," giving maps "unprecedented visibility, not only as investments... but as mass-media artifacts." Arader has brought a similar acumen to the sale of natural history prints, books, and watercolors and is the largest dealer ofJohn James Audubon’s highly-prized double-elephant folio prints from The Birds of America.
His success is founded upon remarkable enthusiasm for history and innovative sales techniques as well as an eye for quality. In 1981, he established the Arader Grading System to establish the worth and importance of rare maps, prints, and books, and as defined by conceptual importance, aesthetic quality, condition, and rarity. This system, combined with “original color” (as opposed to the modern hand-coloring of prints), has become Arader’s by-word for superiority.
Arader also invented a method of selling by syndication, a form of retailing with an added touch of gambling. For a fixed amount, clients purchase shares in the distribution of a set of prints or watercolors. By process of lottery, numbers are drawn to determine the order in which clients make a selection. Such a method was used by Arader in the fall of 1985, when he stunned the world of art auctions by buying the original watercolors for Pierre-Joseph Redouté’s masterpiece, Les Liliacées. Sotheby’s planned to auction off the flower watercolors one-by-one, but Arader created one of his sydicates and, in a remarkable coup, purchased the whole group with a single, unchallenged bid of five million dollars. Each of his investors acquired four watercolors for a share price of $63,250.
Often regarded as a maverick, Arader has been described as “abrasive and solicitous, argumentative and engaging, unscholarly yet imposingly knowledgeable, charming when he absolutely needs to be and flatly rude when it suits him…” His forceful and highly competitive personality has rankled many of Arader’s competitors.
