ballsam ? Antiques: Auction Lots, Including Frank Family Letters, to ...

? A 1960s concrete map of the Gettysburg battlefield, studded with light bulbs that flashed to show troop movements, had been chopped up when the government auctioned it in September. The 12-ton topographical piece had been removed from a battlefield visitor center and stashed in trailers, but after preservationists set up a protest Web site, savetheelectricmap.com, the General Services Administration offered it in an online auction, illustrated with a few grainy photos.

Scott Roland, a developer in nearby Hanover, Pa., paid about $14,000 for it, bidding against an unidentified rival. The segments have been hoisted by crane and reassembled at a 1950s brick bank in Hanover, which is being converted into a conference and visitor center. Mr. Roland?s team plans to reactivate the map by next summer, in time for Hanover?s 250th anniversary and the 150th anniversary of Civil War battles in the region. The mechanisms will be rebuilt from scratch. ?The wiring is all cut and ruined,? Mr. Roland said in a phone interview.

? In March furniture historians were surprised to learn that the Centennial Museum at the University of Texas at El Paso had pairs of 1880s gilded chairs from a Vanderbilt home lingering in storage since the 1960s. A luxury-cabinetmaking team in Manhattan, the German-born half-brothers Christian and Gustave Herter, had produced the armchairs, studded with mother-of-pearl, and leafy side chairs for William H. Vanderbilt?s town house on Fifth Avenue.

The museum sold the four for a total of about $363,000 through Charlton Hall Auctioneers in South Carolina. Margot Johnson, a Manhattan dealer specializing in Herter material, acquired them for the Metropolitan Museum of Art. (She kept one armchair for her inventory.) The Met is planning conservation work on the gilding and fringed velvety red upholstery and an exhibition about Herter achievements under Vanderbilt patronage.

? In the 1950s the Austrian-born actor Joseph Schildkraut played Anne Frank?s father, Otto, on screen, and he amassed research files of Frank family letters dating to the 1930s. ?His widow consigned the material to a Doyle New York auction, slated for November, with an estimate of $20,000 to $30,000.

The Anne Frank House in Amsterdam persuaded the family to cancel the auction, and it raised an undisclosed sum in the estimate range to acquire the lot, which also includes movie memorabilia. The paperwork documents that Otto Frank desperately feared Nazism before the war and tried to emigrate through contacts in Britain and the United States.

?It?s an important part of the history of the Frank family,? Teresien da Silva, the head of collections at the Anne Frank House, said in a phone interview. The museum is sorting the archive for Web site postings and exhibitions about the family?s prewar life and movie versions of their story.

? Bradford Edwards, an artist and art collector long based in Vietnam, focused on 1960s Zippo cigarette lighters that belonged to American soldiers. The metal sheaths are engraved with longings for sex, marijuana, enemies? violent deaths, peace and home. Mr. Edwards consigned 282 of them to a June sale at Cowan?s Auctions in Cincinnati (estimated at $30,000 to $50,000 for the group).

When they did not sell, the auction house owner, Wes Cowan, persuaded the Manhattan collector John R. Monsky to spend $35,250 for the lot, so that it would not be broken up. Mr. Cowan said, in effect, ?This is your patriotic duty,? Mr. Monsky said during a recent tour of the collection, which was laid out in neat rows on his dining table, like a military cemetery. ?Each one of them is like a little emotion,? he said, while hunting for a favorite, marked with a peace sign and ?WHY ME.?

He plans to have them mounted for traveling exhibitions, with searchable databases of engravings and owners? biographies.

? Rumors among ?Star Trek? fans had persisted for decades that a huge 1960s prop from the television series had survived. The model for the show?s Galileo shuttlecraft, about 24 feet long, was used for scenes of crews and visitors in transit; assorted villains destroyed it in episode after episode.

The actual wood and metal box ended up left outdoors in Ohio and was badly eroded when it came up for sale in June at Kiki Auctions in Canton, Ohio. Adam Schneider, a management consultant in New York, paid about $70,000 for it, and Master Shipwrights in Atlantic Highlands, N.J., is now restoring it. (Mr. Schneider collects spaceship models from ?Star Trek? sets and displays them at home, complete with reactivated lights glowing in the windows.)

Galileo?s metal frame and landing gear are salvageable, but the shell and trapezoidal sliding doors will have to be largely replaced. Mr. Schneider is researching every detail, down to the paint used on the original exterior lettering, he said during a recent tour of the shipwrights? workshop. He plans to donate the vehicle to a museum. ?It?s a fabulous children?s exhibit, in the right hands,? he said.

? No one is sure who made a little blue glass creamer now on view at the Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, N.Y. But it was probably produced in Philadelphia and definitely after 1794, the date on an American penny rattling around in the creamer?s hollow base. In August it sold for $82,600 at Northeast Auctions in Manchester, N.H. The consignor?s family had acquired it in the 1860s, and the penny?s date may have commemorated an original owner?s birthday or anniversary.

Corning owns other glass vessels with coins sealed inside, but American pieces are extraordinarily rare. The museum also invested in another major blue glass object this year: a profile of Akhenaten molded around 1340 B.C. (it cost about $332,000 at Christie?s in London in April), now on view with a glass head, most likely of his forebear Amenhotep II.

Source: http://ballsam.com/?p=938

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