But I also learned a lesson: a lesson which sifted down to me only by degrees but which was in fact the truest thing at the heart of the business. It was the secret no one told you, the thing you had to learn for yourself: viz. that in the antiques trade there was really no such thing as a “correct” price. Objective value—list value—was meaningless. If a customer came in clueless with money in hand (as most of them did) it didn’t matter what the books said, what the experts said, what similar items at Christie’s had recently gone for. An object—any object—was worth whatever you could get
...more
arfuably true for unique real property as well
