He looked at the empty glass vial on his workbench. Then he looked at the thousands of sealed ones still resting in their dark mahogany beds.
He wasn't looking at a museum collection. He was looking at a catalog of moments. Someone had spent a lifetime trying to preserve the unpreservable, boxing up the air and the light and the sounds of people who were now nothing but dust in churchyards. buy wholesale antiques
He was a man of bulk lots and freight crates. While other dealers hunted for the single, perfect Roman coin or the signed Chippendale chair, Arthur bought in volume. He bought the contents of dead clockmakers' workshops, the forgotten attics of bankrupt seaside hotels, and the entire inventories of competitors who had finally succumbed to age or exhaustion. He bought wholesale. He looked at the empty glass vial on his workbench
By midnight, the first four pallets were processed. His back ached, and his fingertips were raw from cardboard burns. He looked at the black pallet standing in the corner like a monolith. He was looking at a catalog of moments
Arthur walked among the stacked wooden pallets. They were shrink-wrapped in thick, yellowing plastic, looking like giant, rectangular cocoons. Through the hazy film, he could see the dark spines of leather books, the curved brass necks of Victorian microscopes, and the cold, unblinking eyes of taxidermied birds.