An Ohio man was stunned to learn that a book about his passion project would fetch tens of thousands of dollars at auction during an episode of Antiques Roadshow.
The popular television program has been running since 1997 and follows auction house specialists across the country who offer free appraisals of antiques and collectibles.
During a trip to Ohio, the PBS series met a man who had purchased a worn book from 1792 and was fully aware of its significance.
“I brought a very old book, an essay on clockmaking that I found in an antique shop,” the guest said. He said his “main interest” was collecting watches, especially those related to navigation.
‘I’ve seen this book. What caught my eye was ‘Essai d’Horloge’ on the outside cover, which is French for ‘An essay on watchmaking,'” the man explained, sounding like an expert himself.
The man identified the item as a book written by French clockmaker Ferdinand Berthoud
The guest said he bought the book at an antique mall in Canada and said his “main interest” was collecting watches, especially those related to navigation.
He opened the book and was surprised to discover that it was handwritten by Ferdinand Berthoud, a legendary Parisian clockmaker involved in the creation of the first marine chronometers, specialized devices used to determine longitude at sea.
Devon Eastland, the senior specialist of early printed books at Swann Auction Galleries, agreed that the item was “very important to our whole history of navigation.”
At the time, she explained, “there was no way to determine longitude on a moving ship in the way that we now take for granted knowing that we are going through time zones and so on.”
She turned to the guest and said, “You know more about the subject than I do.”
The man intervened and explained that King George had offered a prize after a shipwreck ‘to see who’ could solve the problem of determining longitude at sea, so that this kind of thing wouldn’t happen.’
Eastland said British watchmaker John Harrison “discovered it” before turning her attention to the centuries-old book.
“There is original material in there, like these drawings,” she said, reiterating that the item was handwritten rather than printed.
“This is a very unusual occurrence because we sometimes find manuscript versions of printed books, but as far as I know I cannot find a printed version of this book.”
An Ohio man was shocked when he learned how much a book about his passion project would fetch at auction during an episode of Antiques Roadshow
Appraiser Devon Eastland agreed that the book was ‘very important to our history of navigation’
She was impressed with the book’s contents and identified “original material” such as hand-drawn illustrations
Eastland estimated that the book would fetch somewhere between $40,000 and $60,000 at auction
The guest seemed visibly stunned. “Wow, I had no idea what it was worth,” he said
She explained that a company in Switzerland called Berthoud still makes watches by hand.
“They have a bibliography and they don’t mention a work by this name anywhere that I can find, which again is very unusual,” she said.
‘I also looked in library catalogues, I can’t find it. For all intents and purposes, it seems to be something he is working on immediately.”
To make the find even more “extraordinary,” Eastland said, there were clear working notes at the end of the book.
The guest said he closed the sale for just $200 Canadian dollars.
“There is a lot of interest in this collecting area,” Eastland said before estimating the auction price at between $40,000 and $60,000.
The guest seemed speechless. “Wow,” he finally blurted. “Wow, I had no idea what it was worth.”
The show is known for capturing guests’ shocked reactions, for better or for worse. One of the most memorable was during a 2012 episode in which a Texas man discovered that a piece of art left behind a door to collect dust was the most expensive painting ever appraised on the show.
After receiving an estimate between $800,000 and $1 million, the man opted to donate the painting to the San Antonio Museum of Art, saying he was “really scared to carry it around.”