GUEST: I found it in a box of paper. I was at an antiques sale, and I love paper, I love graphic art, so something in this box caught my eye, and so I wanted to buy the whole box. So I bought the whole box, and then when I got home, I was astonished to find this poster among all the paper that was in there.
APPRAISER: What other kind of things were in the box?
GUEST: Little cards, notecards-- that's what I first saw, that's what caught my eye. It was this exact picture on a little card. So I don't know if they were advertising, but they all had to do with Spanish-- I think the bullfights, I'm assuming. And just other travel paraphernalia.
APPRAISER: I'm very partial to anybody who is interested enough to buy boxes of paper.
GUEST: (laughing) I love paper!
APPRAISER: What you have here is a poster for a festival in Pamplona, Spain. And it's funny you should mention bullfighting, because people who have walked by and seen it up have said, "I love that bullfighting poster." But it's not a bullfighting poster.
GUEST: Oh, really?
APPRAISER: It's actually better, in a way, than a bullfighting poster. It's a poster for the festival that has the Running of the Bulls.
GUEST: Oh.
APPRAISER: The Running of the Bulls, a festival that takes place in San Fermin every July. And it's an image that, until you opened it from your box of paper, I had never seen before.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: The artist's name is Martin Balda, B-A-L-D-A. The golden age of vintage posters is 1920s, 1930s. Especially for such a sort of, an Art Deco design, this is well outside of the Art Deco era. And I'm thinking, a poster from 1960, that's not really so good. Like, I'd love to see a great Running of the Bulls poster from the 1920s, 1930s. But I also thought, "It's a really nice image." And I did some research, and it's never come up for sale before. There has been a poster from the mid-1950s, of the Running of the Bulls in Pamplona, that came up for auction in 2007. So that's ten years ago.
GUEST: Mm-hmm.
APPRAISER: A similar thematic poster-- it looked very different, it was actually an image from behind, it was from, like, the bull's butt point of view, and it was running down the street chasing the man. Very different, but similar era, same event. And by looking at the price of what that piece sold for, at auction, I think it would sell for between $2,000 and $3,000.
GUEST: Wow. That's amazing. Especially since I paid $20 for the whole box. That's amazing.
