Let me tell you about Adam Niswander. He was a book dealer turned writer who loved the Cthulhu mythos work of H.P. Lovecraft, and he received one of the best deals of which I’ve ever heard. He had decided to try his hand at selling books because of his large, but not particularly expensive, collection. In his early thirties, after getting out of the military, he rented space in a strip mall, put his books out, and hoped that he’d make some needed cash. He had about ten thousand dollars in savings, which he thought would be enough to cover him for about a year; if by the end of the year he was edging toward being broke, he’d find something else to do.
One week after opening his doors a woman came in. She wanted to know if he bought books, and he admitted he did. She asked him to come to see a garage full that she wanted to get rid of. He warned her he didn’t have a lot of cash available for buying, only a thousand or two, and she said that’d be no problem. Expecting a bunch of library discards and mildewed items, he arrived at her home the next day.
She opened her garage… and told him that she was leaving back to the Middle East because her husband had cheated on her. He had agreed to leave her the house, the car, and everything else… Adam never pressed, but it sounded like she may have had relatives who would have reacted poorly if he’d failed to do so… and he’d gone away. She, in turn, had had enough of America. She was selling the house, and she wanted to purchase her plane ticket back with her husband’s book collection.
That book collection consisted of a full run of Weird Tales in prime condition, a full run of Arkham House first editions, a full run of Gnome and Fantasy Press books, a full run of Astounding… to put it in perspective, in 1976 dollars it was worth well over a million. She wanted less than two thousand for it. After carefully verifying that she was in fact the rightful owner, he made the purchase, and that single deal set him up as a very successful small business owner and eventual author.
I tell you that story, which I heard from Niswander, to tell you this: a much better deal was arranged recently. A man in Hong Kong made a purchase at the equivalent of $65 US dollars for something worth $297 million. In this case, it was stolen merchandise, which was the reason the seller was willing to let the property go at greatly reduced prices. One of the thieves, having acquired something far beyond his ability to fence, resorted to selling the item go to a collector just to get some cash for it. (Three of the thieves have since been arrested, with two more sought.)
The property in question was a scroll with handwritten calligraphy by Mao Zedong. As the founder of the communist People’s Republic of China, Mao is known to many Western scholars as a dictator who arranged the slaughter and virtual enslavement of millions of his own people. To many Chinese citizens, he is instead the revered leader who brought their nation into the 20th century and set the stage for its eventual position as a major world power.
His written documents have been carefully duplicated for decades, and many Chinese nationalists are pleased to own a well-crafted replica of one of his works. This is why it’s not surprising to learn that someone might purchase the stolen scroll, and why it’s also not surprising to learn that they thought it was merely a high-quality reproduction. The notion of getting the real thing for such a low price, even as stolen merchandise, seems preposterous.
The buyer can thus be excused for making the assumption that it was fake. Unfortunately for historians, art lovers and the Chinese government, the buyer only had a limited amount of display space… and he sliced the scroll in half.
On the whole, Niswander came out ahead.
Question of the night: What’s a great bargain you’ve purchased?
