Why Doesn't This Ever Happen to Me?
The marble looked old and chipped, but there was something about the bust in the Texas Goodwill that struck Laura Young as remarkable.
So Young, an Austin antiques dealer, acted on her hunch in 2018. She had an employee remove the 52-pound piece from the floor of the northwest Austin thrift store, purchased it for $34.99 and took it home.
“He looked Roman. He looked old,” said Young, a Texas native. “In the sunlight, it looked like something that could be very, very special."
After some scrutiny, Sotheby’s consultant Jörg Deterling made up his mind: The piece was a marble Julio-Claudian-era Roman bust.
This was reported in The Houston Chronicle on April 4. The article is titled “A Texas woman made an unusual find at Goodwill. It turned out to be a Julio-Claudian-era Roman bust.” and was written by Timothy Fanning.
Once in the 90's, when I worked at Half Price Books, I found a sketch by Dali on a 21 Club menu, lining the bottom of a box of books. We had it authenticated and it was sold to a dealer.