$$$ in the Attic

When my 93-year-old mother-in-law died several months ago, my husband and I did three things with her personal property. First, we took what we wanted and then hired an estate liquidator for the rest. Finally, we bought a paper shredder for the boxes of stuff that took up most of her basement--old handwritten receipts, meticulous business ledgers, military correspondence, personal (but not too personal) letters and even my mother-in-law's report cards from Brown University (then Pembroke, class of '33).

The estate liquidator quickly rendered the paper shredder almost unnecessary. "There's a strong market for ephemera," she told us. "I can sell whatever you don't want to keep." We went through the boxes carefully, taking out what was personal or meaningful. The material we otherwise would have tossed has since brought in more than $500 and is still selling. Not a record-breaking amount, to be sure, but enough to make a point: as we baby boomers tackle our parents' personal effects, including the paper trails of a generation taught to save everything, we could be throwing away cash--and history.

According to Sylvia Link, a Denver-based estate liquidator with 30 years' experience, the average estate has marketable paper items worth at least $500. (Estate liquidators typically charge 25% to 30% of the sale.) Consider the items that sisters Donna DeRosato, 52, and Carol Pogue, 54, found in their mother's attic in Plymouth Meeting, Pa.: the stubs of two sets of Beatles concert tickets (1965 and 1966), a concert handbill (Rolling Stones, 1968) and some Beatles fan books and figurines. The sisters gave them all to a local eBay consignment shop, and when the online auction was over, they pocketed more than $5,000.

Not every attic contains old Beatles tickets, of course. But people will also buy more mundane relics such as autograph books, railroad timetables or sets of love letters. Why? They do so for many reasons, say experts, not the least of which is living history. "People are intrigued by the past," says Jaben Broach, owner of CollecTons, an eBay drop-off shop in Boulder, Colo. "And often letters, diaries or ledgers reveal a time and place much better than any history book." Professional auctioneer G.G. (Gwen Glass) Carbone, author of How to Make a Fortune with Other People's Junk, sold four Civil War diaries--not written by anyone famous--for $3,500. "The family that owned the diaries had no idea they were so valuable," she says.

The calligraphy or quality of the paper on which something was written can also confer extra value. "As we head toward a paperless society that communicates in an abbreviated, computer-generated style," says Debbie Gordon, founder of Snappy Auctions in Nashville, Tenn., "many people are drawn to the attention to detail in penmanship, expression and beauty of paper that reveals a slower way of life." And eBay, along with eBay drop-off centers for those who don't want to run an auction themselves, has made selling ephemera easier than ever.