$$$ in the Attic

By Sally S. Stitch

When my 93-year-old mother-in-law died several months ago, my husband and I did three things with her personal property. First, we took what we wanted and then hired an estate liquidator for the rest. Finally, we bought a paper shredder for the boxes of stuff that took up most of her basement--old handwritten receipts, meticulous business ledgers, military correspondence, personal (but not too personal) letters and even my mother-in-law's report cards from Brown University (then Pembroke, class of '33).

The estate liquidator quickly rendered the paper shredder almost unnecessary. "There's a strong market for ephemera," she told us. "I can sell whatever you don't want to keep." We went through the boxes carefully, taking out what was personal or meaningful. The material we otherwise would have tossed has since brought in more than $500 and is still selling. Not a record-breaking amount, to be sure, but enough to make a point: as we baby boomers tackle our parents' personal effects, including the paper trails of a generation taught to save everything, we could be throwing away cash--and history.

According to Sylvia Link, a Denver-based estate liquidator with 30 years' experience, the average estate has marketable paper items worth at least $500. (Estate liquidators typically charge 25% to 30% of the sale.) Consider the items that sisters Donna DeRosato, 52, and Carol Pogue, 54, found in their mother's attic in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.: the stubs of two sets of Beatles concert tickets (1965 and 1966), a concert handbill (Rolling Stones, 1968) and some Beatles fan books and figurines. The sisters gave them all to a local eBay consignment shop, and when the online auction was over, they pocketed more than $5,000.

Not every attic contains old Beatles tickets, of course. But people will also buy more mundane relics such as autograph books, railroad timetables or sets of love letters. Why? They do so for many reasons, say experts, not the least of which is living history. "People are intrigued by the past," says Jaben Broach, owner of CollecTons, an eBay drop-off shop in Boulder, Colo. "And often letters, diaries or ledgers reveal a time and place much better than any history book." Professional auctioneer G.G. (Gwen Glass) Carbone, author of How to Make a Fortune with Other People's Junk, sold four Civil War diaries--not written by anyone famous--for $3,500. "The family that owned the diaries had no idea they were so valuable," she says.

The calligraphy or quality of the paper on which something was written can also confer extra value. "As we head toward a paperless society that communicates in an abbreviated, computer-generated style," says Debbie Gordon, founder of Snappy Auctions in Nashville, Tenn., "many people are drawn to the attention to detail in penmanship, expression and beauty of paper that reveals a slower way of life." And eBay, along with eBay drop-off centers for those who don't want to run an auction themselves, has made selling ephemera easier than ever.

So what's hot? Anything with cross-collectible value. Postcards, for example, are sought by both postcard collectors and stamp collectors. There's also a market for anything connected to transportation (think cruise-ship programs, trolley tickets and the like). Invitations to events like a presidential Inauguration are in demand. In fact, anything relating to topics of historical interest--a war, the moon landing, a World's Fair--can bring bucks. Even some old magazines can command a fair price at market (not National Geographic, however--too plentiful). Carbone recently sold more than 100 issues of Ladies' Home Journal from the 1890s, bundled in sets of six, for between $100 and $300 a set.

What may seem to be the least valuable--the day-to-day memorabilia of an ordinary life--may be a hidden treasure. Retired banker Arden Peterson, 62, who is in the process of downsizing, let his son Mitch, an iSold It trading assistant in Lakeville, Minn., put a 1929 $10 bank note from his collection on eBay just for fun (but also because a very rare 1905 $10 bank note had sold on eBay a month earlier for $27,000). The fun turned serious when Peterson's bank note fetched $1,037. Going through a lifetime of boxes may be an onerous task, says Peterson, but it can reap rich rewards--both personally and financially.