Type Auction

We travelled out to the underwater republic of Mount Stewart on Sunday to attend our first auction of the season. Gerald Giampa and his family were auctioning off what appeared to be pretty well everything they owned.

Gerald is the owner of the Lanston Type Library and you can read his story here. I’m not sure what fate awaits the family (or the type archive), as they were auctioning off the fridge, the stove and the oregano, so it looks they’re moving away, or at the very least rejecting materialism and seasoning.

So there I was, standing in a couple of inches of red mud in the middle of a crowd of some 200 people at the auction, waiting for the fun stuff to come around for bidding, when who should I see across the field but Ernest Hemingway.

Given the literary nature of the auction (half the audience was there for the belt sanders; the other half for the limited edition chap books), Hemingway’s appearance wasn’t unexpected. There is, however, the matter of his death to contend with.

We left shortly thereafter, and returned home, without french fries (to Catherine’s chagrin) and life has been normal since.