For her book Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, Maureen Stanton tagged along with expert buyer and seller Curt Avery. From an excerpt:
As the woman unloads more bottles, Avery picks up each one, asks the price. Same as before, five bucks. Finally he says, "How much for all of them?" He walks away with a shoe box of thirty antique perfume bottles for $100. Probably some woman who collected perfumes died and her collection, her lifelong passion, ended up in the hands of these people, who didn’t know its value, and—it would appear—didn’t care. Avery will later sell the bottles on eBay, most for $20 to $50 each, and one for $150. This is capitalism down and dirty, no guarantees, no regrets. There is a rebellious, outré air to the flea market, "suburban subversive," one researcher called it, "libidinous," said another.
But even antiquing has a code of ethics:
At the next booth, he buys a glass paperweight for $3, a rather ugly translucent blob that he says is from the early nineteenth century, and worth about $150. This seems like finding nuggets of gold in a shallow stream. It’s exciting and addicting, but it’s clear that the breadth and depth of knowledge needed to get to this point is daunting. Knowledge is what makes this robbery okay. Robbery is not the right word, though, because the information is available to anyone willing to study, to do the homework. "If you buy something off someone’s table, you don’t owe them anything," Avery says. The dealer is responsible for setting the asking price. Caveat venditor.
He tells me about a woman who bought an eighteenth-century tapestry "for nothing" and resold it for six figures. The first dealer learned of the six-figure sale, which left her with a sour taste, especially as the buyer had "beat her up" on the price. "That first dealer fucked up," Avery says. "It’s different when you see a great thing and you still haggle down the price. My philosophy is, just give them the money. I don’t bargain then. I just buy it. I never want that person coming back to me and saying, ‘You knocked me down ten dollars, you cheap motherfucker.'"
Evan Burns made the short film seen above to document the Cathedral of Junk in Austin, Texas, created by Vince Hannemann. Melissa Breyer tells the story:
'Twas a sad, sad day in Texas when in 2010, Austin city administrators demanded the dismantling of Vince Hannemenn's ode to detritus, the Cathedral of Junk, as Lloyd wrote about at the time. Known as the Junk King, the eight letters of which are permanently inked across his knuckles à la 'love' and 'hate,' Hannemenn spent more than two decades collecting other's unloved and unwanted dross and debris to shape the construction. Saved from the dump, the cast-offs found new life, both minimizing landfill mass and negating the need for new construction materials.
The Dish 