Word: auctioner
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...grimy Manhattan warehouse last week, the long-lost oil paintings of famed Illustrator Gustave Doré went on sale. Like the auctioneer, none of the 150 cautious dealers and enthusiastic old ladies on hand for the auction had any clear idea of what the paintings were worth...
...many at the auction, Doré's paintings looked like tremendously outsized Sunday school chromos darkened by varnish and dirt. In the general murk, Moses could be discerned gesticulating at Pharaoh, a sad-faced monk daydreamed over an organ, pagan gods fell in a heap beneath a cross, and Paolo and Francesca embraced in hell. Critics wondered how the great illustrator could possibly have turned out such daubs...
...auction was a slow, staid, unexciting affair, and individual bids had reached a total of only $10,829 when a man named John M. Holzworth, identified in Who's Who as a lawyer and big-game hunter, offered $12,500 for the lot. The auctioneer promptly canceled all previous bids in favor of Holzworth's and shut up shop. But next day Gustave Doré's paintings were still gathering grime in the warehouse. As a final twist, which Balzac might have appreciated, Collector Holzworth was arrested, charged with passing phony checks...
Curtain Up. In Leningrad, the Russian fur trust held its first public postwar auction. The Russians, who frown on large foreign embassy staffs and restrict the number of U.S. newsmen to eight, consider fur traders birds of a different capitalistic feather. Among about 100 foreign fur brokers invited were 40 Americans. The guests bought $7,000,000 worth of sables, ermine and muskrat and bid up Siberian Bargusinsky sable to a postwar high of $550 a skin...
...himself as a "road trader," driving all over the Midwest in a covered wagon and swapping animals with farmers along the road. That sharpened his trader's eye; now he can tell an animal's value as soon as it takes a few steps in the auction ring...