Dig This Treasure!

Right before Thanksgiving, Sarah found a listing for an auction in Toledo and convinced me that we had to go.  I had just started feeling ill the day before the auction, but went anyway.  It was my last hurrah before I was laid out for a week with a sinus and ear infection.  I’m glad I sucked it up and went though, because it was fun!  And we got treasures!

There was a lot of glassware and furniture.  Everything was old and collectible. 

There was an entire set of Johnson Brothers “The Friendly Village” and some “Game Birds” plates, which I ended up winning.  

One of the coolest items at this sale was an old tapestry of George Washington.  I wanted this so badly!! It ended up selling for like $400 though.  Here it is while up on the ol’ auction block:

I did make one large purchase here; a $500 Confederate bond.  I paid $100 for this because it came with a Certificate of Authenticity from Sotheby’s from when it was originally sold.  I also bought this because I had recently sold Confederate bills on ebay and did really well on them.  If you remember, I bought these bills for $1 each.

Anyway, the $500 bond I bought was HUGE, and will look really incredible framed.  I don’t plan on selling it, and will most likely gift it to my father-in-law (I hope he doesn’t secretly read this blog).  I saw some collectors’ blogs listing its value anywhere from 300-475 dollars.

The best moment of the auction was when Sarah bid on and won an antique stereoscope.  It was a tough battle for her, with someone else in the audience bidding her up relentlessly.  When she finally won the item, and the auctioneer brought it over to her, she looked up at him with exasperated doe eyes and said:

“THANK YOU. I DROVE ALL THE WAY FROM MICHIGAN FOR THIS.”

I died instantly.  All the way from Michigan?  Toledo is like 15 minutes from the Michigan border.  I exclaimed, “OH YES, ALL THE WAY FROM MICHIGAN.”  This set off a chain of giggles among the patrons and auctioneer, and Sarah and I laughed about it several times during the ride home.  

Listen people, she may not be the smartest, but she has a good heart.  And a good eye apparently, because those stereoscopes can be quite valuable.  I’m sure she will tell you all about it.

Another great moment was after the auction.  Both of us were starving, but the only place nearby was this:

It was immediately clear that Inky’s would only be one of two things: REALLY REALLY good, or REALLY REALLY bad.  When we walked in, there was a lot of signage referencing Inky’s award-winning pizza, including hand-drawn illustrations by children celebrating said pizza.  For a reason unknown to both of us, we didn’t order the pizza.

Instead, Sarah ordered lasagna and I ordered a manicotti (which for the record is a cannelloni but with cheese not meat–I had to ask).  Here is what we got:

This is the sauciest sauce fest I have ever seen in my life.  I even think that the tablecloths are red because people spill sauce all over them.  There was no way to contain the sauce.  There were no sauce levees.  

We both ate what we could and then asked for carryout boxes.  The waitress scooped our food into the containers and then proceeded to scrape every morsel of sauce off the plates and into the containers too.  Each box weighed like 16 pounds.

-Erin 

Update from Sarah: I did a really bad job of photographically documenting both the auction itself and my purchases, but I’ll summarize them for you anyway, using stolen photos from the Internet. The first thing that I bought was a group of Josef Originals birthday angels like this one: 

I overpaid for them but that’s because I was confused and thought they were these birthstone dolls, which look nearly identical but are more collectible: 

OH WELL! 

As Erin mentioned, the main reason I wanted to go to this auction was that there was an antique Monarch stereoscope and stereoview cards up for auction. I don’t have a picture of it but it looks just like this: 

Isn’t that totally rad? Anyway, I won it after a drawn out battle with another guy who I swear was just trying to bid me up like Dave on Storage Wars. Then, as she also mentioned, I said a really dumb thing that I still can’t stop laughing about. I couldn’t believe how bad she made fun of me in front of a group of strangers for that, though. She’ll get hers.

The stereoscope came with a big group of stereoviews, some of which I’ve already sold on eBay. The really awesome part is that one week later, I went to an auction with my parents and found ANOTHER stereoscope that was in much better shape, so I’m going to sell the first one. In case you’re totally confused, a stereoscope is basically an antique Viewmaster

but you have to manually change each card/slide (two images per card make one 3D looking image.) 

I also ended up with a Victorian photo album on a stand, and an old school desk. I thought the school desk could be used as a table because the seat part folds up, but so far it’s not been a very good investment. Cool looking but not at all practical.

One final piece of information: This was the second auction we’ve been to in the span of a month where Erin ended up having a crush on the auctioneer. In both instances, the man was a middle-aged dad wearing a grey sweatshirt and stonewashed jeans. Maybe I’ll get Zach a pair of these for Christmas: