Word: auction
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...began with strawberry tarts, fresh orange juice and a Dixieland band. Fine priming for the nearly 1,200 people, most of whom had paid $250 (applicable to any later purchase) to attend a three-day auction billed as "the greatest collection of architectural antiques ever offered for sale by anyone-anywhere-at any time." Assembled under six tents and a former Two Guys store in a remote corner of Los Angeles were, roughly counting, 4,000 windows, doors, ceilings, entryways and greenhouses of stained, beveled and etched glass, 200 paneled rooms, bars, pubs and shop interiors, and more than...
...ninth auction put on by John P. Wilson, 40, a former precision-instruments salesman who switched to the nostalgia industry nine years ago, when he turned an unexpectedly tidy profit on a surplus lot of 1,000 old pull-chain toilets -a $100,000 windfall now memorialized in the name of his company: Golden Movement Emporium...
...crowd around the breakfast bar -cleverly constructed in the semi-antique mode from old railroad baggage carts-admiringly described Wilson as "the P.T. Barnum of the auction business." Barnum, it will be remembered, held it true that "there is a sucker born every minute." To encourage five-figure bids, Wilson provided shuttle buses, disposable toothbrushes in rest rooms, free phones, simultaneous translation for a group of 25 Japanese, and $300,000 worth of frankly fabulous food catered by Los Angeles Restaurateur Robert J. Morris. The wine flowed like water, and so did the Perrier. "I think...
...royal (Britain's Princess Alexandra) and the pop (ex-Beatle Ringo Starr). But the real stunners were the prices being paid for the glittering collection of French antique furniture and objets d'art that were on the block in what Sotheby Parke Bernet hoped would be the auction of the year...
...sale were 201 antiques from the 18th and 19th centuries that once belonged to the famed Wildenstein family of art dealers. The collection was bought in 1977 by Akram Ojjeh, a Saudi Arabian entrepreneur who lives in France. Even Sotheby's normally unflappable chief auctioneer Peter C. Wilson was astonished at the frenetic pace of the bidding, which often drove prices three or four times as high as most dealers had expected. A pair of Louis XV corner cabinets went for $608,920, and a folio cabinet fetched $655,760. But the most breathtaking buy was a garishly ornate...