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Comment by bloat | Hacker News Reader

You must have pretty specialised knowledge to look at that photo in the junk shop and say to yourself, "You know, that might be Billy the Kid. I should get this appraised."

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Allot of people hunt for "treasures" in thrift shops, yard sales, and even auctions and then get them evaluated by more knowledgeable experts.

When you buy enough "junk" that just looks old and or unique you'll eventually hit jackpot, I'm really not sure that the guy who bought the picture knew exactly it's value or it's historical significance, he just might had enough experience to estimate that it's more likely than not worth more than 2$ and got really really lucky.

An original old-western picture could probably get more than 2$ on Ebay and the likes as just decorative art so even without it's historical significance it could've been purchased as an "investment".

My wife is a thrift store / garage sale junkie and it always goes one of two ways.

1) We end up with a junk piece of furniture that sits in our garage for months while she tries to either sell it for a few bucks or makes a run back to the thrift store to drop it off (majority of the time)

2) She ends up finding a piece worth hundreds (sometimes thousands) that make it all worth it. She recently found a Paul McCobb table she restored and sold for 700 dollars that she bought for $15 (small % of the time but worth it)

Kinda sounds a bit like venture capital...

> Kinda sounds a bit like venture capital...

"But does it scale?" :-)

If you want growth, you need to focus on buying perishable food items instead of furniture.

There is a ripe market for perishable food items with somewhat recognizable blemishes resembling religious figures.

Now imagine, sometime, somewhere, someone got a written manuscript from Plato, or the Buddha, or another figure and just used it to make fire.

That might be unfortunate, but we've set fire to priceless manuscripts intentionally far more often. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Destruction_of_the_Library_of_...

More recently, Napoleon's Egyptian Scientific Institute in Cairo: https://www.rt.com/art-and-culture/egypt-library-fire-herita...

Also, sacking of Taxila/takshashIla [1] and Nalanda [2] in Indian subcontinent by Huns and Islamic marauders.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taxila [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nalanda#Decline_and_end

The other, brighter side of this coin is the many remarkable rediscovery stories, like that of the Archimedes palimpsest [3] in the 1990s and Indian statesman Chanakya's 3rd century BCE manuscript 'Arthashastra' [4] in the 1900s.

[3] http://www.archimedespalimpsest.org/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthashastra

There's no need to imagine. When Henry VIII ordered the supression of the monasteries, manuscripts from monastic libraries were sold as toilet paper and shining rags. Though this has less to do with unnapraised items being lost due to clulessness than with a monarch being a dick.

That general idea is similar to one of the themes running through Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose.

I'm sure it's happened. If you can't read, old documents just look like perfect tinder.

Many of the documents found at Nag Hammadi were burned before anyone read them. Among the unburned was a copy of Plato's Republic (not an original, but still).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nag_Hammadi_library

Reading these makes me wonder what other interesting written interpretations of various religious figures were burned out of existence.

Actually some goat-skin books were recycled for new books. Existing parchment with uninteresting texts was cheaper than acquiring new parchment. Sometimes the scraped old text is faintly or can be seen with hyperspectral imaging. There was some famous Greek author whose work is only know this way. Lots of books are referenced in other books, so ther eis some idea of what is missing.

Depends. You'd have to look closely at the photo to see him, but the stance and appearance are very close to the other, well-known photograph:

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/c/c2/Billy_th...

I'm not anything like an expert, but looking at the enlarged portion, he was the one who came to mind.

I thought the same thing I mean... IS that really him? It looks - pardon the phrase - photoshopped. Like someone pasted a smudged face on to another body. The figure on the right is so clear, and yet the one on the left looks like a deformity. I would love to read more about the analysis done to verify this.

Yeah that's the one thing I was hoping the article would explain.

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