Going Once, Going Twice, Going Right in the Closet
At Weschler's Auctions, a Hoard Mentality
Monday, July 31, 2006; Page A01
The stuff is often funky, but David Monosson can't get enough. Old albums. Old cameras. Old anything: He's gonna crave it, bid on it, get it. He's gonna stuff it in the rented storage space where he stuffs all his other stuff. The hundreds of books. The 25 stereo amps and receivers. The thousands of record albums, like the latest bundle of vinyl he's just procured with a winning $20 bid at Weschler's Auctioneers and Appraisers on E Street NW.
He's a thin man, in shorts, T-shirt and large red-rimmed eyeglasses, and he's excited as he flips through his new haul, showing off the old Mose Allison album. He's trying to justify himself, to explain there was a treasure (Allison, the singer) amid the trash.
  Auctioneer Michael Weschler calls out the lots at the auction house in Penn Quarter as Vera Loewy, Wendy Abbruzzetti and Fred Hays appraise the offerings. (By Nikki Kahn -- The Washington Post) |
"It's acknowledged that that is his greatest album ."
But he already had the album. That's the rub. He didn't even need a Mose Allison. He just wanted a second one. And it's headed for storage, like all the rest. He's just gonna have it, hold on to it, hoard it. The conquest, after all, is his thing.
Monosson, 62, a retired photographer, remembers the first time he went to Weschler's with a friend eight years ago. That's when it all began.
"I went crazy. I said, 'Oh, my God, there's something I always wanted.' " Monosson doesn't even remember what it was. But he had to have it.
"It's a treasure hunt," he says of his Tuesdays at Weschler's, where one man's flotsam is another man's jetsam amid the detritus tossed into the seas of auction house uncertainty.
To spend a day at Weschler's is to stumble upon a subculture of secrets and mysteries, of empty lives (and homes) filled, where characters rendered incomplete by the rush of modern life might, just might, find that special thing to make them feel good and whole, even secure. More stuff. The place even smells like stuff -- that familiar stuffy smell of your grandma's old stuff. The folks at Weschler's are all over it, searching for their treasures, among them some serious art collectors, including a few members of Congress.
Plenty of collectibles dealers also bid here to stock their shops, satisfy their clients. They're reluctant to talk about their business at Weschler's because they don't want their customers to know that the item bought with a $50 bid at Weschler's may be the same item on sale in someone's shop for, say, $200.
And then there are the compulsive bidders and obsessive collectors, like Monosson, who come each Monday to preview the goods and plan their bids for Tuesday -- and who have done this for weeks, months, years, decades.
Some are embarrassed to talk about it. Some are playing hooky from work and don't want to get fired. This part of their lives, their obsession, is hidden away.
Some are mysterious characters, like the toothless man with the duffel bags who says cheerfully that he's been coming to Weschler's for 54 years. He once worked for the State Department. Doing what?
