I just got back from a weekend of fun in sunny Santa Cruz, CA. Swam in the ocean, saw a blue whale skeleton and live dolphins, watched my daughter ride the kiddie rides on the boardwalk, and had probably the best Chirashi sushi I’ve ever had. But enough about me. There are Dansk auctions to talk about!
There are 3 eBay auctions right now with multiple mills. Ending soonest is one with 11 mills, then one with 15, and a final one listed tonight with 5 mills. The big lots each have two non-Dansk mills and one quite rare and valuable specimen. The small lot does not have any super rare mills, but would be a great way to start a collection. None have ultra rare mills. And yes – I’m not bidding on them or I wouldn’t be publicizing them 😉 I’ll put the final prices in the comments.
It will be interesting to see how these do. Sometimes selling as a collection can yield great results, sometimes it seems as if one could do better one at a time.
Which mill are you considering to be “one quite rare and valuable specimen…”?
I was thinking on the one on p 22 in my book in the first one, and the fluted bullet (p 52) in the second one. They aren’t super rare, but I think they are rare, and amy mill that sells for almost $300 (as a bullet recently did) is valuable in my book. Maybe we need more words for rare, like Eskimos have words for snow, so that we can properly classify them;)
I think we do need more words, Mark. People ask me whether mills are “rare” quite a bit, but I don’t know how to answer them. Some of the ones that are selling on eBay for high prices are surely “rare” in that there aren’t many of them, but are much newer than some mill that sell for less. For me, age/vintage is a very important dimension for any given peppermill. That holds especially true since most production changes affected the sculptural shape of the mills.
So, the first ended for $620. The winner got a pretty good deal. That’s about $56 a mill, and two of them regularly go for well over $200.
Now we’re talking. The second went for $1225. That’s about $80 per mill. Even though this collection includes two non-Dansk mills, they are great examples. The collection has 4 more mills overall, and although only one of them are in the realm of $300, the collection as a whole is very nice. Still not the $4,000 prices we were seeing from some of the auction houses.
He made a nice profit on those mills, but think the prices would have been better had they been split up. I haven’t seen the buyer around before, perhaps he’s starting his own collection.
And the third auction went for $635. That’s above even current market value for all five mills, especially considering that only two of them have the good quality Peugeot mechanism. The others were either of later make or were produced after the Peugeot mechanism was phased out.