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Love (letters) for Sale

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I’m trying, with mixed success, to get back into the routine of writing every day. Even though the heavy lifting has just begun, it can help to catch your breath, so today I’m turning the blog over to Tamara Kant-Waite, Past President Pro-tem of the Future Historians of America.

I believe she has an inspirational message for us all!

Dear Prospective Primary Sources,

You may think you’re a dull nobody today, but once you’ve become part of the unalterable past, you and your things will turn into objects of fascination for historians of the future.

For example, on the lower east side of Manhattan, there’s a wonderful place called the Tenement Museum where the lives of poor immigrants of the 19th and early 20th century are immortalized through conservation of the building where they lived and worked. You can visit the dingy, crowded apartments that generations struggled to get out of! The people who lived in these tenements would no doubt be flabbergasted to see well-fed tour groups shuffling down their narrow hallways.

And I’m guessing when Elizabeth Taylor was 17 years old, in love, starring in the movies and writing ten page long gushing mushy letters to her fiancée, she wasn’t thinking about being dead and having those letters published in national newspapers and sold to the highest bidder.

But there you go. That’s what time will do – it magnifies everything. Whatever purpose you had in mind for that mundane thing you just did, you can be sure history will see it as a fascinating window into another era.

So remember, anything you touch today could become an artifact! Be attentive when you interact with things because that cherished object of yours could have a glass case in its future. Tomorrow’s archivists have just one request – be sure to develop a story about your object and by all means write that story down.

And please, for the sake of historians and auctioneers of the future, use paper.

Yes, e-mails are easier and they supposedly last forever, but the history that impresses us most has to do with things we can pick up and hold, carry around, frame, encase and send on tour. Nobody would buy a ticket to see King Tut’s blogs.

That reminds me – if you ever get the chance to completely cover something in gold, do it!

And remember – these historic objects and artifacts will need to be categorized by curators. That’s honest work for Future Historians of America, a group of people who are mostly unemployed at the moment, and in many cases not even born yet. So do something good today for the economy of tomorrow – write a crazy love letter to someone who you think would be shallow enough to sell that honest expression of devotion to an auction house.

Make it something special, and the scholars of nexter-year will make sure it lives forever!

You’re a dead celebrity. What have you touched or produced that collectors will want to buy?

72 thoughts on “Love (letters) for Sale”

  1. interesting – thanks to Tamara K-W for her question about dead celebrity. certainly i will be the former, and even more certainly not the latter.
    i have some things that Steve wrote to me – but i don’t think i’d sell them unless Antiques Roadshow came to Blackhoof….

    a gracious good morning to You All

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    1. Barb, you might want to consider collecting celebrity goat artifacts. You have no way of knowing if one of your kids will someday become America’s Ungulate Idol! Can you save hoof clippings?

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  2. Stuffed animals. Way too many. I should probably write a little tag for each with their name on it. Yes, they all have names.

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    1. Well, of COURSE they have names. And expressions. And opinions on who gets the chair and who’s stuck on the shelf…oh, wait, that’s just me, isn’t it?

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      2. I think some of these stuffed toys have people who speak for them using their accents. They say things like “Ay, yous beta na mess wid da big ol bear”.

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  3. Rise and Shine Baboons!

    I figure that the future will want my laptop. That way they can access all those emails, my writings from the TB, my bank accounts, and the photos stored in it. And sometimes, when the tape adhere, the laminated picture of my BBC goat it stuck on to the side of the screen. Let the future historians figure that out!

    I think my logic here works.

    I am so glad to be home and facing warmer weather. Despite the snow while we were away, the ginormous snow pile in the back yard was gone when we returned!

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      2. If there are rules changes tell me in brief. I am so overloaded this week, I won’t read back-blogs until the weekend. Our remodel and expansion at work was done while I was away. It is chaos there. I’m drowning!

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      3. Read “Machinery on the Mississippi” for guidelines on word usage. “Bachman’s” with one “n,” especially as a trade name in reference to flowers, is allowed. “Bachmann” (two n’s) is not allowed, at least in polite company. “Ginormous” is on the sketchy list as is “like” as conversational filler. And regardless of others fears, a well-placed semicolon is a thing of beauty.

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      4. I am advocating for limitations on certain words, as opposed to their complete eradication. Sort of a quota system-Ginormous once a week is fine, once a paragraph-too much.

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  4. I have a collection of burned out light bulbs of different shapes and sizes. Someday when incandescent’s have been outlawed and are antiques I’ll have the market on burned out light bulbs…

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  5. Good morning to all:

    The stuff that I have touched that might be of interest to collectors in the future is probably found in my basement, or my garage, or in storeage areas. There are piles of odd stuff in these areas. Most of this stuff should have been discarded years ago or never even saved at all.

    There are the remains of all kinds of home improvement projects, old useless toys and games, magazines and books that have no value to me, and a lot of other kinds of junk. I supose future collectors might find some of this stuff interesting. Most of it probably wouldn’t be of interest to anyone, now or in the future.

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    1. We had to clean out my in-laws house a few years ago… it seemed a monumental task as they had both saved a lot of things in the first place and then as they got older more things piled up as they simply weren’t able to keep up.
      My favorite story is the bowling ball bags. In the bottom of his, under the ball was a bottle of vodka. In hers, under the ball, was the rule book.

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      4. maybe the vodka and rules were each being hidden from the other-he swiped her vodka and hid it where she would never look, she took his rule book and did same.

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  6. I think they would want my cookbooks and back issues of Gourmet. They would see the actual stains and spills, and the notes written as reminders of changes. An astute researcher might try to trace the waxing and waning of spills as they correspond to differing cookbook holders (or the total lack of cookbook holders). I suppose they might want some of my cooking utensils and equipment as well.

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      2. Ha ha… YES! I have two very old cookbooks (Diet for a Small Planet and Betty Crocker Cookie Book) that are in sad shape and need outside support. We should get together and compare collections one of these days.

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      3. I find that even the hard cover copies of Mastering the Art of Frech Cooking were particularly poorly bound. We are on our second set.

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      4. My Enchanted Broccoli Forest and my Betty Crocker are both in tough shape. The cover of my EBF has been taped and re-taped. The spine is so broken that pages fall out. I have written all over it and I don’t want to lose a single page.

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      5. I find that clear packing tape, a couple of inches wide, works well for mending and holding together paperbacks… Joy of Cooking (well that took a double wide strip) and Moosewood Ckbk. among them…

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  7. Good morning, Baboons! Is it spring yet?

    I’m trying to imagine what I have that anyone would want to collect. I write a letter to a friend each morning, a letter three to five pages (single-spaced) long. She prints the letters and returns them to me in boxes. After 11 years the stack of letters is surely taller than I am, and in there you will find stories about everything I have encountered, from my earliest recollection to the story of the teacher who fell into a wastebasket and got her butt stuck. Really . . . anything that ever crossed my mind is in that correspondence.

    Taking a lead from the NY Times and StarTribune, I think I shouldn’t give that stuff away. Like the web pages the newspapers want us to pay to see, my old letters are “content.” You pay or you don’t get to peek.

    My problem is pricing. Some letters tell stories that are pretty boring and some tell stories that make me blush. Should I have one price for all? Or do I go to the StarTribune system in which there is “Premium” content? (Premium here means the story is so private and humiliating that you would have to know me mighty well before I’d share it.)

    I can kill a lot of time trying to price this stuff right. You can have the story of the “Tom Jones incident” at the end of my undergraduate years for $4 or $5. I’ve told it a few times, and I’m not that embarrassed after all these years. To get the story about the girlfriend and the Audubon hooting owl clock . . . well, that one’s just not for sale. But I might think about it if you gave me a bottle of the right single malt. We could bicker and barter.

    Of course, being dead will raise complicated issues of how I collect or what I’d do with the profits. People like to pretend most things in life are worth more than money, but it’s my experience that a little money can get you a little love and respect wherever you might be, and I think I might need every possible advantage to get by in this next gig.

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    1. I’ve always heard that you can’t take anything with you when you die. Life after death is a big question for some of us and others don’t believe in it at all. If there is no agreement about life after death, maybe we shouldn’t rule out taking money there to gain a little influence.

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      2. Okay, maybe the devil would accept a pay off. On the other hand, you might find yourself at the pearly gates and I don’t think you should try to buy your way in if you end up there.

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      3. On the other hand, it could be nice being the only guy in heaven with a Platinum card. Or if you show up at the Pearly Gates and they are locked, but the lock is like the one on my cabin . . . any raccoon with a credit card can pop that sucker and get in.

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      4. OK, I’m sitting here grinning, thinking of all of us breaking into heaven with Steve’s platinum card!

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    2. I’m thinking if the right bottle of single malt were presented for immediate consumption, one might get a bargain on quite a few stories 😉

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      2. oh, I was thinking more of Steve’s stories-me, I got nothing worth a bottle of good scotch (besides, I have sworn off scotch until the s&h turns 18) 🙂

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      4. I’m thinking if the stories were as good as he implies, they would be too good to keep just to my little self 😉

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      5. You’re gonna have to pay and pay to learn what happened in Molly Martindale’s upstairs bathroom. That’s a pricey one, for it was the most embarrassing moment I had before the Match.com days.

        I can cut you a deal on the story of the screaming scene in the Chinese restaurant in Eden Prairie because I wasn’t the one screaming. It just occurs to me now that every woman in that place went home saying, “I don’t want to not have what she is not having.”

        The price is high on the story of the woman who sounded like Betty Boop, but I won’t tell that to anyone who hasn’t known me for at least a year because otherwise they wouldn’t believe it.

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    3. Was just watching a show about Dolley Madison last night on PBS – she wound up almost penniless after her husband’s death due to a profligate son. She finally sold some of James Madison’s letters and papers to Congress, but her friends were careful to keep the money in trust for her so her son could not get it. While you daughter is, no doubt, not the profligate, gambling type, you could put any proceeds from the sale of your papers in a trust to fund a charitable foundation in your name…you may not be able to take it with you, but you can make sure it keeps working. 🙂

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    4. I find myself wondering if the “Tom Jones incident” involves wealthy squires and dead partridges, or a Welsh singer and underwear flung at a stage. I’m not sure, though, that I want to spend the $5 to find out.

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      3. So, all we are left with is the image of seductive chewing and no further explanation. I don’t know if I should be relieved or disappointed to not know.

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  8. What people would find of mine (at least in the current state of my house) – cascades of kid artwork created by Daughter (which may, in time, be valuable), a pile of rechargeable batteries for various tools that no longer hold a charge well, a smattering of books with obscure notes in them (that could be fun for the Future Historians – “what was Anna referring to in this ethnography when she wrote….?”), and a lot of scraps of paper with partial shopping lists and reminders on them. Nothing as organized as cookbooks with notes or stuffed animals with names and back stories.

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    1. Anna, Billy Collins has a fantastic poem called “Marginalia,” about the stuff you will read scribbled in the margins of books. It ends:

      and I cannot tell you
      how vastly my loneliness was deepened,
      how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed,
      when I found on one page

      A few greasy looking smears
      and next to them, written in soft pencil-
      by a beautiful girl, I could tell,
      whom I would never meet-
      “Pardon the egg salad stains, but I’m in love.”

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      1. I shall have to look up the rest of the poem, though I’m afraid I never wrote anything so poignant. More notes to myself about how this relates to that…and now none of it makes sense, even to me. (Though there are a few notes I have uncovered that allowed me the, “gosh, I was smart when I was in college,” thought – but that thought passes quickly.)

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  9. I can’t imagine being a celebrity, now or at any other future historical point in time.

    They might be interested in my rubber band collection. Some of those rubber bands are over 40 years old. You never know when you might need one. The really old ones were made of latex and have kept their elasticity. Some of them are red on one side and blue on the other. Fascinating, I know.

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  10. A couple of antiques are the only thing imaginable for the “want to buy” category, but I think some of my kitchen utensils will make Future Historians wonder. I was given a veggie peeler whose main part is a toucan. If they’ve never seen a corkscrew I’ll be they’d be wondering what the hell? And that cheese slicer that looks like it started out to be a pie server but they put a slit in it (called a cheese plane according to Amazon.com). I could go on…

    Of course, if I really was a celebrity, I might be rich, and would have lots more and different stuff.

    OT: We head out tomorrow on Georgia road trip and April 1 wedding. 🙂 I’ll check in when possible, but it won’t be much, so have a great end of March and April Fools Day, Babooners!

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    2. It will be like time-lapse photography watching spring materialize as you drive south. (Never mind the drive back north.)

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  11. I haven’t mentioned my box full of empty .22 caliber rifle shells… I think there was 1400 something.
    Yeah… I don’t know either….

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    2. I think this calls for a sculpture depicting the alienation and loneliness of our current society and the violence inherent in the class system (or fill in whatever “system” you feel most violent about at the time). Bonus points for making the thing so obscure that even the critics are unsure about it, so it must be both profound and fabulous.

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  12. Sorry for the late arrival this week
    Full dYs with little chance to check in
    I am a collector and the storage palaces I have stuff in is s

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    1. So far from reasonable. I have a 10 x 40 14 foot tall storage shed with shelving to house the stuff that I can’t fit in my 10000 sq ft warehouse. This
      Plus my house garage and stuff from my moms house that needs to be dealt with. Geez I am getting more behind in dealing with this stuff as the day goes on. The anthropologist who digs in would find it am interesting study I am sure. Between stuff I can not throw out like art stories and Notes from time gone by to the items I will get around to dealing with later. I am not a hoard but I am not throwing this stuff out because someone else wants me to. I have samples of products to sell on the Internet, chairs with a broken leg or cane back, books, cassettes, VHr tapes can I still find a player. I think I have one come to think of it. Man I will spend a summer this year going through this stuff. Big consolidation to be had.

      Ot anyone interested and or able to go see the poet doty is it Jim with the pen pals thing in hop king on Thursday night at 730? Tw tickets and passes to meet the author at the wine and cheese deal afterward. Ends about 930 or 10
      In Hopkins not hop king crappy spell checker on this piece of bandaid computer fix.

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  14. I’m a dead celebrity I’m a dread cerebrity I’m a dleb slebbreburry.
    That’s what it sounds like if you say it really fast 3 times … or as many as 12 if you don’t believe in spirits.

    Question of the day: What’s so super about a Super Target that stocks a few varieties of beer but not a single bottle of vino??

    Speaking of super, your puppets yesterday were just that. I have one to add who was snubbed, but he is most forgiving and I know he’d want me to be the same way. I’ll think about it. So! Without further a-dew — ta daaaaah! (I sure hope this sharing thing does what it’s supposed to or will my face be sunburned!)

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    1. Love Grover!!!! Love love love. I had meant to mention him, but got so goggle-eyed talking about Big Bird I figured I had best keep quiet, lest people begin to wonder about me (or at least wonder more than they already do).

      I have been known, at appropriate times, to quote Grover. A favorite remains, “but you did not tell me that it was heavy” (in his almost-over-enunciated careful way of speaking).

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