GUEST: When my mother bought our house, which she's lived in for about 30 years, there was a trunk in the barn behind the house, and these inserts were folded up inside the trunk and had probably been out there for, you know, over 50 years. She gave these to me, since I had expressed such an interest in Mardi Gras, after many, many pilgrimages in college. And I really enjoyed them because they're so colorful and...
APPRAISER: Well, these are just wonderful historical prints. I mean, they're like posters, but also it's a wonderful historical record on a chromolithograph, showing each float in the parade. shows a particular day in Mardi Gras. For instance, this is February 19, 1917. A lot of these floats were put in warehouses at the end of Mardi Gras, they were reused in subsequent years. It would be wonderful to know if some of these are still used today. You've got this beautiful kind of a title cartouche, but also again, each of the particular works. Now, it was a newspaper pop-out--
GUEST: Right.
APPRAISER: --and these were parts of a newspaper. So what you have is on the back of each of these, you have a whole bit of text, you have wonderful advertisements for the time and place. And while the chief value is in the color work on these, also the, you know, just the documentation here. And you were wondering about conservation of these.
GUEST: How do you protect them?
APPRAISER: Right. And they do need conservation. Look at the way there's little holes, there's tears. Well, this can be backed with a transparent Japanese tissue that will allow you to read through it. It'll be a little bit covered up and a little murky, but they'll be much better. They'll be preserved very nicely. I did consult with some of my colleagues on the prints and photographs table. One of these has come up for auction about 15 years ago in New York. It was in worse condition than here, and it sold for about $400.
GUEST: Really?
APPRAISER: These are in better condition. I would suspect that if these were restored, I'd put $900 each on them. So if you've got four of them, you're talking about $3,600.
GUEST: Oh, for all of them.
APPRAISER: Yeah, right.
GUEST: I thought the $900 was for the set.
APPRAISER: Oh, no, no, each, each. I mean, each stands alone.
GUEST: And how much does it cost to restore each one?
APPRAISER: It would probably be about $300 each.
GUEST: Okay. Well, great, thanks so much.
