43
Appraiser at library
HUBBARD
James Giles of Boardman considers himself a church-sale aficionado.
Estate sales are better yet.
Garage sales, he doesn’t like so much — maybe if they’re close by.
Giles left a crowded room Monday evening at the Hubbard Public Library with a bag full of collectibles that Jeff Byce, an auctioneer and appraiser from Byce Auction and Realty of Youngstown, had just looked over for him.
An old drafting set from Germany that he got at a church sale would go for $20 to $30, Byce had told him.
A silver coffee server with its original wooden handle had its first home at the Youngstown Country Club on the North Side before Giles found it on one of his treasure hunts. It’s worth from $60 to $80.
An old metal square with ornate designs was pretty far out of Byce’s frame of reference, he said. So he advised bringing it by his gallery at 755 Wick Ave., where he could take a more in-depth look at it.
Byce wasn’t sure what it even is, or what it was a part of.
The only thing Giles knows for sure about it is that it’s beautiful.
He got it at a Goodwill Store, where he found it in a bin. He paid $1 for it.
“That’s why I bought it — I think it’s beautiful, he said. “I like old stuff. Older women are all right, too.”
While Byce made no attempts at matchmaking for Giles or anyone else, he did manage to appraise more than 40 items in about three hours at what was the library’s second-annual appraisal event.
As people hung hopefully onto his every word, he gleaned what he could out of each item to tell a story about it and to determine its worth.
Sometimes he couldn’t. A Victorian doll in what he believed to be original clothes needed an appraisal from someone more versed in dolls, he said.
“I’m out of my element on this,” he told its owner, venturing a guess that the doll is worth “several hundred dollars.”
What makes a piece valuable anyway, he asked the crowd. Then he proceeded to tell them: condition, portability and scarcity.
He also said that value isn’t what someone asks for an item. Rather, it’s what someone has paid for it.
Adding to the trickery is that a frame could be worth a lot while the picture in it is worthless, and an album cover could be worth more than the album. The clothes on a doll could be worth more than the doll.
Some of the treasures on his appraisal table included books that were old but not scarce, though a yearbook from the Trumbull County School System could pull a nice buck.
“There’s a lot of money to be made in yearbooks,” Byce explained. “They’re coveted.”
A sterling silver child’s cup’s melt value would be $60, but the hand-pounded and numbered cup is worth more intact at $120, he said.
A cranberry cut-to-clear highball glass was a nice item. It and its five companions at home are worth $6 to $8 a piece, he said.
Glass, however, unless it’s well-made by a company such as Steuben or Waterford, is “pretty much target practice,” he said.
Ouch.