Boosting Prices With Tall Tales

Strolling through garage sales and flea markets, surfing table upon table of bric-a-brac, it's easy to forget that all of those little curios likely once held special meaning and significance to someone, sometime, somewhere. And when the owner of these objects dies, grows up or moves away, then what?

Getting at the answers to questions like these is what the Significant Objects writing project is all about. Created by Taking Things Seriously author Joshua Glenn and Buying In author Rob Walker, according to the Significant Objects website, their books “examined — using very different approaches — the manifold ways in which all of us, whether we realize it or not, invest inanimate objects with significance.”

Their combo project goes like this: A bunch of items costing a couple dollars each is purchased at thrift stores and yard sales. Those items are then matched up with participating writers, who pen fictional accounts surrounding their assigned objects. The objects are then listed on eBay, and the winning bidder will receive the object, as well as a printed copy of the accompanying story. Author Luc Sante's Candyland board game, for example, held a bid of $8.50. New York writer and filmmaker Annie Nocenti's fiction about a fist-sized bust of JFK finds an 80-year-old retired housewife pondering her age-old “pre-assassination JFK Salt Lick head” and its history through the years.

Matthew Battles, a Christian Science Monitor Chapter & Verse blogger and participant in the project, writes: “While Significant Objects may seem like a curious way to promote writing, it's really a cunning experiment in the nature of value and consumer society. Invested with new significance by its attendant fiction, an object may increase its market value.”

And, let's not forget, the pieces might once again find a new home.