How much would you be willing to shell out for the desk and chair Charles Dickens used to write “Great Expectations?”
Unless you would have been willing to fork over $850,001 then you wouldn’t have gone home with the items.
According to reports, the new owner of the historic mahogany desk and walnut chair paid $850,000 for the right to call it his. (By the way the buyer told auction officials that he made the money to buy the lot from his tarot card psychic readings business. Perhaps, his winning bid was made in the cards.)
Dickens’ desk and chair set was just some of the many items up for bid in a recent auction designed to raise money for the Great Ormond Street children’s hospital in London. Dickens was reportedly a close friend of the hospital’s founder and spoke at its first fundraising dinner in 1858.
According to auction organizers, the furniture was passed down through the Dickens family and was recently donated to Great Ormond Street by Jeanne-Marie Dickens, the widow of Dickens’ great-great grandson Christopher.
In other good news, country music star George Jones is counting down the days until he is reunited with a guitar that was stolen from him nearly 50 years ago in Texas.
Interestingly, the man who had the famous stolen guitar says he spent years trying to give it back to Jones.
Texas resident Larry Berry says he paid $10 for the acoustic Martin-000 from two boys who lived in the same Fort Worth apartment complex in 1962. Once he discovered that the guitar actually belonged to Jones, Berry says he tried to return it. In fact, the Texas man says he has been trying to reach Jones since the 1960s, and finally got through this year.
The guitar was reportedly stolen from a Fort Worth nightclub where Jones was performing in 1962. Berry told news reporters that the two boys originally asked $25 for it, but he offered $10 and they accepted because, as the youths would tell him later, the instrument was stolen.
Berry said he deduced the guitar belonged to the famous country singer because the strap had Jones’ name on it with streaks of “White Lightning,” one of his hit songs.
Berry said he would present Jones with his long lost instrument on June 14 when the singer is set to perform in Louisiana.
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