Featured Pricing items to sell

Also include the size of the item

 

If the items were bought cheaply they were possibly the type of silver items that still sell cheaply. By cheaply I mean at a small or non existant premium over silver scrap value.
Things like part tea sets, compacts and cigarette cases, trays, odd pieces or part sets of flatware usually sell at auction for around metal value and are hard to shift at much more than a small premium.

My triage method with such a hoard would be first to sort into a pile of clearly marked sterling, a pile of other stuff and a pile of weighted stuff.

Starting with the first pile, sort it into boring and interesting stuff. This is harder, but let your own judgement guide you. If you would buy it and display or use it around the house, others probably would, so the premium is likely to be higher and it will be easier to sell. Here you are looking for design and quality, and experience helps to educate the eye. Condition is part of this, most damaged stuff is scrap, given the cost of repairing anything.

All the boring stuff can go to a refinery, with all the damaged stuff. The more you have to sell the better the prices you can get for silver scrap. 5% under spot is an achievabe target at the right place. If you live in Dead Horse, Texas (pop. 23) you will have to ship or take it somewhere. Do not take run of the mill silver to an auction house. Buyers will only pay enough to get routine silver at about spot price (metal value) and the comissions will take away about 30% of this. Pretty well any pro siver buyer will pay 90% for a good weight, if pressed.
Make a note that small items of silver will often make quite large premiums over scrap, there are more collectors for most small items like match safes and model animals.

For your second pile, establish if it is sterling or coin silver or some other grade, you will find various grades in imported stuff and there is no easy way unless you simply heap it all up and take it to a refinery, where it will all be turned into pure silver and weighed to give a value.
The thing is, the coin silver in that pile may be antique enough to have a premium of its own. One odd Federal period spoon with pseudo-marks but attributable to an early maker would fetch many times the price of an early 20th C sterling spoon.
The more time and energy spent on this pile, the greater the return.

For the weighted stuff like candlesticks, cutlery handles, hand mirrors and brushes, etc, consider the hammer and anvil. Smash all the filling out of it and add it to the scrap pile. But if the piece looks attractive to you someonne may well buy it. There are no simple answers.

What it boils down to is you will get out in proportion to the effort you put in. Unless you are really strapped for money, selling it slowly and carefully is the better plan, there is however simply no single answer to what it is worth apart from the scrap metal value.

 

All great advice given above. I might add that you may want to consider holding your scrap for better prices. Silver is half the price it was 5 years ago. This might have been why your grandfather was saying not to worry about the silver just yet. He may have had no intention of selling it any time soon.

 

isn't silver funny, the way it used to follow gold up and down...and then it didn't !

 

af speaks wisdom, as ever. I'd only add that appraisal values != sales values. Typically, a thing sells for a third or a quarter of that.

 

"sort it into boring and interesting stuff."
This becomes a different issue. As I'm not an actual antique dealer, I'm a de facto antique dealer. These items to me are just inventory. I'm not attached to any of them, I've got no personal interest in any of them, other than helping my wife's mom.

To me, it's all just stuff. I've handled some amazing things over the last four years. US coin currency from the 1780's. US Paper currency from 1777. Uniforms from Europe from the 1600's. Certified holy religious relics from the 1200's. A certified piece of the Merrimac. A silhouette cut by Martha Washington's granddaughter. Mourning pins from the mid 1700's with the braid's still in them. A large cloth from Grover Cleveland's 1888 campaign.

The list is almost endless. To me, it's just stuff. A task at hand, until it's sold.

 

well it's stuff or it's amazing.....take your pick...

 

You don't have to be an antique collector to think that a piece of paper in your hands is a paper currency that was printed in 1777. Or a coin minted about the year 86.

To me it's more like going to a museum. I want to respect the collection, and the memory of the man who spent fifty year amassing it, as well as the items themselves. But I'm not personally interested in keeping anything. I'm supposed to sell some of the stuff for my wife's mom, if I can. She decided what gets donated to museums. She donates certain items to families, things with names inscribed.

I respect the items, but it's still just stuff.

 

My father-in-law was an advanced collector, who also sold stuff. He had a well known eye for things. He was once at a flea market and bought a bottle for eight dollars and sold that bottle for four hundred. Another time he bought a set of medals for about the same price and that set had almost one pound of .999 sterling in it between the medals. He didn't buy cheap stuff, he bought stuff cheap. When he went to a coin show, or a political show, or an antique show, he would always have stuff in his pockets to sell. He would buy stuff at that show and sell it to other dealers at that show as well. He was quite the character.

When we do scrap our stuff, we take it to a family friend on W47th Street in Manhattan, NYC.

 

Sounds like you've got your work cut out for you, @gabatgh !!!!

 

While this sounds cliche, you really have no idea. The man's interests seemed to have no limits. Four years later and we're still finding boxes of things that we didn't know were there. Last weekend we found a fairly large box of filled with plastic alligators with pencils in their mouths of little black boys. Dozens of them. Each one has a location on it. There's also some measuring tapes in there too.

 

Well...Sir.....without sounding ......what was I called recently.....ahh yes.. 'pompous'........we really do have an idea.....more than you know !

When I'm on the hunt...I always have stuff to sell, barter or trade with me as well...so your FIL is not an unknown commodity here.
Our FINDS tread is chock full of high quality finds from our members keen eyes, & our Hoarders thread....is ..well.....chock full !!!

So , yes indeed we know exactly where you're coming from & what you're dealing with......& await more photo's of pretty pretty tasty items !!!!

 

These will have value under Black Americana.

 

Exactly.

Didn't read all of the responses.
I haven't dealt with any of these places. But it might be worth looking into them, particularly; as you say your FIL had a good eye and knew what he was buying.

http://www.sothebys.com/en/auctions/2017/iris-schwartz-collection-of-american-silver-n09606.html
http://www.skinnerinc.com/specialty-areas/silver-auction/

I think we have a thread going somewhere about auction houses.

 

You're not kidding. With the cities printed on them, they're about a hundred bucks a pop here for the pencils, while anything else, like the tape measures, are considerably more.

 

Well, even if I thought you were, I'd never call you pompous, at least in public

My FIL was indeed a rare breed. I've met antique dealers, and collectors, but he was in a whole other category.

I've already posted a pair of coin spoons, and I've got some more spoons on my desk that I need to add more photo's of. Then I'll post those in pairs as well.

Thanks for being supportive