Where Does Anybody Learn This Stuff Anymore?

The first auction I sat through, I kept my hands in my lap. Robert was calling it.

He had told me, half joking, that scratching my nose could cost me a sign, and I believed him enough to sit on my hands for four hours. We barely knew each other. I was there for work, and I understood almost nothing about what I was looking at.

So I watched the room instead.

There was a man three rows up in a folding chair that Robert had wrapped in a fresh strip of duct tape, which everyone had noticed, and which two of them had a running bet about - whether or not it'd survive the next four hours.

And there was a gentleman in the middle aisle, halfway down. I didn't know who he was, but I could tell the room did. He sat like the seat was his, and when the bidding came around to him, people looked, and Robert took his number off a nod without ever having to ask for it.

A Union Oil sign came up.

He nodded early without looking up. Someone came back at him. He nodded again, easy. It came back again, and then again, and somewhere in there Robert's voice changed, and the man in the middle aisle stopped being casual about it. He sat forward. Robert stood up, and the shoddy microphone quit holding his words, and the room started turning its heads, back and forth, like a tennis match, waiting to see which one of them would fold.

Then the gentleman in the middle aisle swung around to look behind him. He had read it off the auctioneer's eyes, which is a thing you learn to do, partly to know who you're fighting and partly to be sure a man isn't just running your bids up against nobody. Everyone else in that room had already found the bidder. The man, however, could only see a wall of faces.

He turned back around and bid again anyway. His wife put an elbow in his side.

He shook Robert off. He said something about how it wasn't worth that, he knew where there was a cleaner one just down the road. He was right about the sign. He sat back, discouraged, still proud, and looked around the room one more time for whoever had done this to him.

Against the back wall - pressed plywood, thousands of nail holes - a young guy in a ball cap said "It's yours," into a flip phone and slapped it shut. He nudged his cap down slightly and smiled politely at Robert.

The man in the middle aisle was still looking.

The bidder he lost to was in California.

He had not been outbid by a stranger on the back wall. He had been outbid by a market he could not see from his seat.

Every skill that man had was a skill of the room. He could tell you who was serious and who was running up a friend. He could hear a bid start to strain. He could look at a face and know how much was left in it. Thirty years of that, and none of it was written down anywhere, because it had never needed to be.

Phone bidding was not new that day, but it had always run through the house, a staff member up front, in plain view. Now, a man had his own guy on the back wall, and he was not on the house's books at all. Nobody could run him up, because nobody could see him.

There was no way to read the young man in the ball cap. There was nothing to read. He was simply the messenger who kept the California collector private. 

The man in the middle aisle was experienced. A Union sign in a South Carolina auction was worth what he had said it was worth. He was right. So was the man in California, bidding on his own regional brand in a market that had never once been in that room.

The young man stayed to the end that day, after the good stuff had run and most of the room had cleared, and bought for himself. Mostly that meant anything with New Jersey or Maine on it, and the small stuff nobody local wanted. He paid too much for a thirty-dollar Pex Chicken sign, close to two hundred with the buyer's premium, and three men watched him do it and said nothing, because a man overpaying for a chicken is not your business.

He listed that chicken sign on Monday and shipped it Tuesday. Watching the next week's eBay listing was part of my job. It brought around four hundred dollars, completing a set for someone who was never going to drive to South Carolina.

Those northern signs picked up in a southern auction were signs you had to sit on. You bought it cheap, you put it in the barn, and you waited for a northern show, which meant waiting for the calendar to come back around. Sometimes a year. You’d bring it for that one man who collected one brand and one brand only and would tell you about it whether you had asked or not. Nobody ever called geography a skill, but thirty years of judgment sat on top of it, and knowing what was worth eleven months of shed space was most of what it meant to know the market. Then what the waiting had bought you stopped being worth anything, and the whole of it went in about eighteen months.

The room he knew how to read was no longer the whole room.

---

It took me years to understand what I was learning, and nobody could have told me.

There is a whole category of knowledge that only moves in person, at close range, over time. A philosopher named Michael Polanyi named it in 1966 and put it in one sentence: we can know more than we can tell. He meant the doctor reading an X-ray, the man who cannot explain how he rides a bicycle.

He was describing why apprenticeship exists at all, why some things have to be learned beside a person doing them and cannot be learned any other way.

Everything in that room was that kind of knowing. How a bid strains. Shelving, the way the enamel stacks up at the edge of a color, thick enough on a 1920s Coke sign that it is nearly embossed under your thumb, and so fine on a later screen print that you have to run your fingers over it slowly to find it at all. Which grommet holes meant a sign hung outside for forty years and which meant it was made in 1998.

None of it was secret. All of it was unwritable.

You stood next to someone who had it, and you asked, and he told you, and mostly he was glad to. His presence mattered because he had the answer for the very question in your hands. It was the economy working exactly as designed. You’d see it in the two men doing a negotiation they had done a hundred times, both of them knowing the number before either of them said it, taking the long way around to it anyway, because the long way around was the fun part.

A generation is learning this the way you learn anything now, by photograph and forum and a thousand details all out of order. They are learning a great deal, and none of it is in their hands.

---

Within a few years, almost everything about an auction result was preserved. The price, public, permanent, searchable, more accurate than any memory in that building.

The numbers survived. The stories, however, did not.

A bid was a story. Everyone in the room was in it. It got talked about in the truck on the way home, and at breakfast the next morning, and at the next show, and the show after that.

Somebody would point out the man in the middle aisle to a new guy and say, you should have seen the day he got ran on a Union sign by a kid on a flip phone. And the new guy would learn six things at once. Who that man was. Why he mattered. Where the rooms were. That the same sign can be worth two different numbers and both of them can be right. What changed. And roughly when.

None of that is in the sold listing. The sold listing has the numbers.

The online auction ends and the number posts and that is the end of it. There is no truck ride. There is no next morning. There is nobody sitting next to anybody with six hours to fill and a story that explains why the price was the price and what it meant for the business. There are no bets on how many more auctions Robert's duct-taped chair has left in it.

That is where the knowledge lived. Not in the transaction itself. In the experience of it and the retelling of it, over years, to people who weren't there.

We kept every record and lost the telling.

And you cannot apprentice to a record.