As you might by now know, every Thursday morning, I have a breakfast meeting (sometimes Zoom, sometimes in person) with several dozen other older and mainly retired men, with each week one member making a presentation of their own choosing. In about a month, I am scheduled to give a presentation on community organizer Saul Alinsky – I am sure you will see more about that here.

Today, our oldest member who is now 99 going on 70, gave a presentation on J.P. Morgan’s original art advisor and assistant, Belle de Costa Greene, a Black woman who passed as White. It’s a mesmerizing story, much of which involved Greene’s success as Morgan’s agent at various rare book and art auctions.

And it reminded me of my best auction experience.

I moved to Washington in 1969, and shortly after that (I don’t remember exactly when) I was wandering through downtown DC, I passed an auction house and the sign told me it was auction day. I went in and saw a about 30 people waiting for the start of the weekly auction and saw that being auctioned were various items consigned by people for sale. A miscellany.

You could wander through and look at the various numbered lots and figure out what you might want to bid on. You had to register to participate and for some reason, I did. It was certainly not a time in my life (living in a small apartment as I was) that I was looking to collect anything, and so I just casually examined things as I passed by. When I got to the books, I saw that they were being sold in groups – one group might include six books, one might include ten books.

None of the books looked very interesting to me until I got to a box of books that included a number of ordinary books and one that looked sort of special. It was an older (published in 1881) coffee table sized (did they have coffee tables in 1881?) book entitled “The History of the St. Louis Bridge”. The bridge is now known as the Eads Bridge, the oldest bridge over the Mississippi River, completed in 1874.

The book had a heavy embossed cover, and is about 18 inches by 12. It has hundreds of pages, which include a lengthy narrative history of the bridge from concept to completion. But wait – there is more. The book contains many photographs taken in the 1860s and 1870s of the bridge under construction. But wait – there is still more. The book contains full pages with all of the engineering and construction specifications of the bridge.

So, clearly this is a special book. But wait – there is even more. The book is inscribed by James Buchanan Eads. Eads, a cousin of the 15th president of the United States, was – believe it or not – a self-educated engineer, a man whose last schooling ended when he was 13, and who became a world known ship and bridge designer, largely through self-instruction. The inscription by Eads clearly made this book more desirable.

But wait – yes, there is more and more. To whom did Eads inscribe this book? The book was inscribed to Supreme Court Justice L. Q. C. Lamar in 1882, when Lamar was a United States Senator from Mississippi. In 1885, Lamar became the Secretary of the Interior and in 1888, was appointed as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court. (Before his career as a United States governmental official, Lamar was a Confederate official and army officer, and he remained a racist throughout his life.)

Moving back to 1869, as I said, this book was part of a group of books set to be auctioned the day I was in the auction house. As I was looking at the book, the auction itself started with Item #1. The box in which the book was sitting was something like Item #200. I didn’t want to spend all day at an auction house.

So what did I do? I took the book out of the box, went to one of the auction assistants and asked if this particular book could be auctioned separately. To my surprise, he said he would see. He disappeared and came back saying that the auctioneer agreed to sell it next.

I sat down in the auction room. The auctioneer held up “The St. Louis Bridge” and said “I have a book here called “The St. Louis Blues” – will anyone give me $10?”

I watched to see what would happen. Nothing happened. I had no competition. I was emboldened (one of the few times in my life) and said “I will give you $5”. The auctioneer gave me the evil eye. But no one said anything, and he followed with “Sold for $5”.

And that’s how I got a copy of “The St. Louis Bridge” inscribed by James B. Eads to a future Justice of the United States Supreme Court.

I do have a few other auction stories, but they pale by comparison. Maybe some other time.