The Lot I Almost Passed Over

Part of the job is walking into a house you’ve never seen before and making fast calls about what’s worth your time, because you genuinely cannot open every box in every basement of every house you work. You develop a triage instinct, whether you want to or not. Water stains on cardboard, mildew smell, obviously cheap paperback spines poking out the top, that’s a box I’d normally flag for the dumpster pile without a second look and move on to the next room.

I almost did exactly that with this one. It was down in a corner of a basement that had clearly flooded at some point years back, everything near it warped or ruined, and this particular box looked like it had taken the same damage as everything around it. I had my hand on it to move it to the discard pile when something made me actually open the flaps first, I honestly couldn’t tell you what, maybe just habit from enough times being wrong about a box like this before.

Underneath a top layer of genuinely ruined paperbacks, there were many antiques, or at least old things, that hadn’t taken water the way the rest had, cobwebs across the top like the box hadn’t been opened in years, and it was as though someone had packed it up once and just never come back for it. A first edition, not in great shape, foxing on the pages and a chip out of the spine, but real, and underneath that a run of old board games from the sixties and seventies still mostly complete, boxes soft but the components inside dry.

I don’t always tell this story when people ask why I check every box even when it looks like a lost cause, because it sounds like I’m bragging about a lucky find, and mostly it was luck, the top layer really had taken damage and the bottom really hadn’t for reasons that probably come down to nothing more than how the water pooled. But it’s the reason I still do open every box now, even the ones that look exactly like this one did at first. My father used to say the ugliest box in the pile is the one you regret not opening, not the one you regret opening for nothing, and I didn’t fully believe him on that until this one proved it.

I ended up keeping the game run for myself rather than selling it, which I don’t usually do, box lots are inventory, not collection, that’s the whole discipline of this job. But something about pulling a run of intact old games out of what should’ve been a total loss made we want to keep at least one piece of it on my own shelf rather than pricing it out the following weekend. Still haven’t decided what the first edition’s actually worth. Some things I’d rather sit with a while before I put a number on them.