The difference takes four seconds at a window, and almost nobody knows it. Seven volumes that teach you to tell the ordinary piece from the exception — in your grandmother's cabinet, and on a table at a flea market on Saturday morning.
Seven volumes · four printable tools
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Twenty-six years finding people's families in written records. I started at nineteen, pushing a trolley of deed volumes across a record room floor in Port of Spain, and I spent four years carrying books to other people's tables without being allowed to answer a single question.
The family calls me because the papers have to be found before they lose the deed, or the plot, or the policy. That is what I am paid for. But you cannot spend twenty-six years standing in other people's front rooms on the last weekend of a house and not notice what is going into the bags.
I am not from here. I grew up in Port of Spain. The first time I watched a grandson put a hand-cut crystal decanter into a box marked donate, I understood something about this country I had not understood before. Nobody had ever told him. That is the whole problem, and it is the whole reason for this.
Not because they are careless. Because the house has a deadline and nobody in the family was ever told what any of it is.
The gold-rimmed china everybody is arguing over. The framed print. The set that looks valuable. Most of it sells for less than the cost of shipping it.
The orange bowl on the bottom shelf. The tin pushed behind the larger pieces. The Bible with the names written in the middle. The photograph with nothing on the back — yet.
Outside Macon, Georgia, last spring. Six of those pieces were carnival glass, and one of them — a marigold bowl with a grape pattern pressed into the underside — sells today between four hundred and nine hundred dollars, depending only on what colour the glass goes when you hold it up to a window.
That woman was not foolish. She was exhausted, the house had to be empty by Sunday, and not one person in that family had ever been told what was behind that glass.
Every figure in these seven volumes is a sold price. Not an asking price. And when a thing is worth nothing, the volume says so — even when it is the thing the family is fighting over.
The order is not tidiness. The order is what stops you losing something with no replacement while you are busy pricing something that has one.
Before anything moves. Paper is the only thing in that house with no resale floor and no second copy. You photograph. You do not sort.
The physical tests, one per material. You are not valuing yet. You are separating look again from let it go.
Now the sold prices, family by family. The ordinary version, the exception, and what it actually brought.
What you cannot decide alone. Who to send it to, and the exact words to write so that you get an answer.
Ten seconds, at any window in the house. It sorts most of a china cabinet before you touch a phone.
A wave and a scar means a person made it. Dead clear and perfectly even usually means a machine did, after about 1960.
Orange or amber through the base is marigold — twenty-five to seventy-five dollars, and that is fine. Red, or a milky blue-green with a creamy white edge, is a different world entirely.
Every test in the set is drawn out like this, on a card sized for a phone, because you will be doing it standing up in somebody's front room and not sitting at a desk.
Organised by material, not by room — because that is how the tests work and how the price behaves.
92 entries · 157 pages
Depression, carnival, milk glass and hobnail, cut crystal. The window test, the ring, the fingernail on the cut. Pattern by pattern: what the common one looks like, what the exception looks like, and what each actually brought.
78 entries · 138 pages
The good service, the backstamps and the date marks, and the three families of commemorative plate. Including the honest chapter on why the gold rim is worth far less than the family believes, and the three exceptions that change it.
62 entries · 107 pages
Sterling against plate, the hallmarks, weight value against pattern value, the serving pieces, brass, copper and cast iron. One word on the back of one handle is the difference between a hundred dollars and four thousand.
72 entries · 123 pages
Quilts, and why the pretty one is not the one that is worth money. Linens, church robes, lodge sashes and regalia, uniforms. What condition means in cloth, and the four kinds of damage that do not lower the number at all.
88 entries · 155 pages
The volume with no replacement and no resale floor. Family Bible records, funeral programmes, policies, deeds, ledgers, letters. What counts as a document, what is only ephemera, and which institutions actively buy which.
58 entries · 106 pages
Cabinet cards, tintypes and cartes de visite, and how to date each by the studio mark. Why the word carrying the money is identified, and how to caption a photograph before the last person who knows the face is gone.
82 entries · 149 pages
The shelf no appraisal book covers. Walker, Poro and Apex tins. Black insurance and bank ephemera, HBCU material, church and lodge issue. And the line this work holds about the caricature market, and what holding it costs.
The volumes are for the evening before. These are for the Saturday itself.
field tool · 6 pages
The walkthrough itself. The room order, and how a Sunday deadline changes it.
26 cards · 4 pages
One card per material, drawn out and sized for a phone screen.
field tool · 12 pages
Both numbers on every line, and the venue math at the end.
field tool · 2 pages
KEEP, SELL, ASK, PHOTOGRAPH — plus how to photograph a Bible page.
The whole cabinet goes for twenty dollars because it was Sunday. The Bible goes into a box nobody opens again. The photographs lose their names along with the last person who knew them. Somebody keeps the china and gives away the silver.
A written inventory: what stays, what sells, what it is worth. Every page of family record photographed before anything moved. Names in pencil on the back of the photographs, and who said so. The four things you could not decide, sent to the person who can.
Knowing marigold from aqua opalescent does not care whose shelf the bowl is on. It works in your grandmother’s cabinet, and it works on a trestle table at a church sale where the bowl is marked three dollars because nobody there knows either.
Church and school sales. Thrift shops. Flea markets and swap meets. Small country auctions. The junk shop on the edge of town that has not repriced anything since 2009. Volume by volume, the set says which of the five each category turns up in.
Every price line in the set now carries both: what the piece brings, and the most you should ever pay for it. The gap between those two numbers is the entire job, and it is printed for you.
The same piece is four different prices depending on where it goes: to a dealer that afternoon, into a country auction, onto a table at the flea, or listed online with a photograph. Tool Three ends with that table.
I am not going to promise you a treasure. Most Saturdays you walk out with nothing and that is normal. But a marigold bowl at three dollars that turns out to be aqua opalescent is not a story I made up for a sales page — it is the difference between two pieces that sit on the same shelf looking identical, and the whole set exists to teach you to see it in four seconds.
And the piece you already own gets valued by the same page. Nothing here asks you to buy anything to use it.
You are buying Volume One and Volume Five. The other five volumes, the four field tools and every future edition come free with them.
92 entries, 157 pages.
78 entries, 138 pages.
62 entries, 107 pages.
72 entries, 123 pages.
88 entries, 155 pages.
58 entries, 106 pages.
82 entries, 149 pages.
The method, room by room.
26 cards for your pocket.
Both numbers, plus the venue math.
Four printable tags and the paper protocol.
Straight to the same inbox, at no charge, forever.
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Neither is in the set, because neither is about pricing an object. They are offered as a tick box on the payment page at $9.90 each, and the set is complete without them.
The compressed clear-out, for when the van comes Sunday and the house is not yours to keep waiting. What order to work in when you have two days, what to skip on purpose, and the four things you never skip no matter how late it is.
The version you do while she is still here to tell you. Which room to start in, the questions in the order that actually gets answers, how to record it without making it feel like an inventory, and what to write on the back of a photograph the same afternoon.
You do not have to decide now. Both appear as a single tick box after you pay for the set, and the same seven day refund covers them.
Through the same checkout the big stores use. I never see your card number.
On the very next screen. Phone, tablet or computer, whichever is in your hand.
The same link lands in your inbox, so you can pull it up standing in the front room.
Partly. Volumes one to seven carry the sold prices by family of object, and Tool Three pulls every table into one file. But it is not a search box. It teaches you to tell the common version from the exception, because that is where the whole difference in money sits.
Every figure is a sold price — what somebody actually paid — not an asking price. Where a thing is worth very little I say so plainly, including the pieces most families are certain are the treasure.
Then start with Volume One and the add-on called The Walk With Her. Most of the people who write to me are not clearing anything. They are trying to find out what is in a room they grew up being told not to touch.
Yes, and it is built for both. Every price line carries two numbers — what the piece brings and the most you should ever pay — and Tool Three ends with the venue math: the same piece to a dealer, at a country auction, on a flea table, or listed online. Where a category turns up in the wild, the volume says which kind of sale to look in.
Only where furniture is a container — the cabinet, the canteen box, the chest. The seven volumes are about what is inside those things. If you want furniture appraisal this is the wrong set and I would rather say so now.
No, and you do not need one to use the other. That set is about finding your family in written registers. This one is about the house those families left behind. Volume Five is where the two touch.
Seven days, one email, money back, and you keep the files. I would rather refund you than have you feel sold to.
A china cabinet is a glass box, at the front of the house, where a family puts things that are theirs. Not rented. Not borrowed. Not on somebody's account. Theirs, lit up behind glass where every single person who walks through that door can see them.
I read paper for a living, and most of the paper I read about Black families in this country is a record of things being taken. Land taken. Wages taken. Names taken and written down wrong on purpose. A locked cabinet full of things nobody could come and repossess was a statement, and every person who walked into that house understood it without a word being said.
So when the family clears the house and that cabinet goes for twenty dollars, what is lost is not only the four-hundred-dollar bowl. It is the one thing in that whole house she ever got to point at and call hers.
She locked it for a reason. Open it and look at every single piece before somebody else decides what it is worth.
— Errol