Bargain hunter scores 700-year-old medieval times document...

[DGUtley]

Bargain hunter scores 700-year-old medieval times document...

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A bargain hunter who went to an estate sale in Maine to find a KitchenAid mixer, a bookshelf or vintage clothing walked away with a 700-year-old treasure.

Instead of a kitchen appliance, Will Sideri stumbled upon a framed document hanging on a wall. It had elaborate script in Latin, along with musical notes and gold flourishes. A sticker said 1285 AD. Based on what he’d seen in a manuscripts class at Colby College, the document looked downright medieval. And it was a bargain at $75.

Academics confirmed the parchment was from The Beauvais Missal, used in the Beauvais Cathedral in France, and dated to the late 13th century. It was used about 700 years ago in Roman Catholic worship, they said. An expert on manuscripts said the document, first reported by the Maine Monitor, could be worth as much as $10,000.


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[MisterVeritis]

I once found a very old German Bible at a garage sale. I got too excited so the owner kept it.

[Standing Wolf]

A rarer-than-rare copy of Poe's first published work, 'Tamerlane and Other Poems' was found at a sale in a New Hampshire barn some years ago, in a box of old equipment manuals, and purchased for $15. It sold at auction in 1988 for $198,000. Ever since first reading about this, I have never hesitated to spend the time necessary to sort through boxes of what might appear to be worthless trash at such sales. You just never know.

While not even remotely comparable in terms of monetary value, last year when I was cleaning out my late sister's house I saw eight or ten boxes sitting up on a shelf in the detached garage. At first I wasn't even curious, figuring there likely wasn't anything important in any of them. Sure enough, I later opened three or four and found them packed with worthless old VHS tapes. Still later, just a day or two before I was to drive away, I decided to open the others. The contents were mostly junk - old catalogs, unimportant legal papers and other trash - but I also found a box of my grandmother's jewelry, a lovely hand-made coronet that my sister used to wear to RenFaire, and the typescript of a novel that she wrote and apparently never submitted to her publisher. (She had two books published in the '80s.) A few days before, I'd found yet another novel in typescript, this one with a rejection letter, in a storage box under a bed. I'm in the process of transcribing both books now and will have them printed for family and friends. No monetary value on that find, but I think it highlights the importance of going the extra mile when searching for "hidden treasure". (Being just a little bit OCD doesn't hurt.)

[Peter1469]

My house in Louisiana likely has money in the attics. I know their are books in there worth thousands. The why- ​I don't know.