Move over, Sotheby’s. There’s a new auction house in town, and it’s here to make sure you never feel normal about your own collection of antique spoons ever again.
Potter & Potter Auctions recently wrapped up its gloriously titled ‘Weird Tales! UFOs, Curiosities and Tattoos’ auction, and the catalog reads less like a bidding list and more like the inventory of a Victorian gentleman who absolutely should have had more friends to talk him out of his hobbies.
Let’s run through the highlights, shall we? Wooden boxes filled with glass eyes — because apparently someone decided the creepiest possible container for the creepiest possible items was still not creepy enough without plurality. Human skulls, because why display a fruit bowl when you could display THAT. Death masks, which are exactly what they sound like and somehow even more unsettling when you realize someone paid good money to hang one near their breakfast nook.
But wait, there’s more! The auction also featured quack medical devices (the ‘quack’ doing some very heavy lifting there), pickled medical specimens in apothecary jars, binders full of mugshot photos, books on pseudoscience, and exotic weapons. Oh, and the Lord’s Prayer inscribed on a single grain of wheat — which, honestly, compared to everything else, feels almost refreshingly wholesome.
The UFO literature and curiosities rounded out a collection that can only be described as what would happen if a carnival sideshow, a medical school, and a conspiracy theorist’s basement had a very productive yard sale.
The truly wonderful part? People actually bid on all of this. Competitive, enthusiastic bidding. Somewhere out there, someone is very proudly unboxing a pickled specimen and finding just the right shelf for it.
We salute them.
You can browse the full auction catalog at Potter & Potter Auctions to see exactly what sold and for how much, which is either a fascinating anthropological exercise or a shopping list, depending on the kind of person you are.
*Source: Boing Boing*
Original story via Boing Boing
