Word: auction
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Died. Hiram Haney Parke, 85, art appraiser and auctioneer who in 1937 co-founded Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries, which became the U.S.'s largest auction house, handling paintings, books, furniture, tapestries, stamps, etc.; in Mt. Airy, Pa. Parke brought down his hammer on some of the most grandiose sales in art history. Maintaining an air of disinterested opulence, he could up bids hundreds of dollars with a shrewdly timed word, thousands with a sentence. In 1928 he sold Gainsborough's The Harvest Wagon to Lord Duveen for $360,000, also peddled such miscellaneous treasures...
...Wolfe collection came to Harvard largely by chance. Shortly before World War II, Aline Bernstein, Wolfe's onetime mistress, the Mrs. Jack of the later novels, sold the manuscript of Look Homeward, Angel at a public auction, to raise funds for the relief of Jewish refugees (a bit of irony for Wolfe had an avowed tendency toward anti-Semitism.) The book was sold under the stipulation that it was to go to a university, and the buyer gave it to Houghton...
Former Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden, following the titled Englishman's traditional way to pin money, put some furniture on sale at Sotheby's auction rooms in London, realized $271.60 for a pair of four-poster beds, $1,232 for two 18th century bookcases...
...given to Wood to care for. Last week, Holy Cow, grown to a 925-lb. steer, won the grand championship in the Chicago International Livestock Exposition. Wood collected $1,010 in prize money, plus $23,125 from Restaurant Owner Howard Johnson Jr. who bought the steer at auction and will use it to promote his roadside chain...
Most conspicuous sign of the times last week was an auction at Manhattan's Parke-Bernet Galleries. In just one hour. 29 middling-good impressionist and post-impressionist pictures were sold for a whopping $1,528,500. The auction was so crowded that 5,000 people were turned away, and half of the 2.000 ticket holders were forced to watch the bidding on closed-circuit television. The lot had been collected in a hurry over the past few years by Hotelman Arnold Kirkeby (Hampshire House, Beverly Wilshire. Saranac Inn, El Panama). He was selling them off faster...