Out of all of Chesapeake Collectibles appraiser Allan Stypeck’s memorable adventures, only one earned a once-in-a-career headline from him: The Great Pigeon Poop Purchase.
And the experience WAS great, in both pigeon output and collectible input.
The story goes back to the 1970s and would rank high on any all-time list of discoveries that “mixed“ luck with yuck. Such is life sometimes for the most intrepid treasure hunters. Stypeck, president of Second Story Books, has more than one tale about salvaging iconic material from the pits of ick, but the pigeon escapade takes the cake.
In fact, that’s how he remembers the scene when he and a colleague opened up a Washington, D.C., carriage house that had been stuffed from the floor to the rafters with stack after stack of old magazines. At the top, he recalls, it was “like a cake icing of pigeon guano.” And when disturbed, it of course wafted ickily downward.
“But we couldn’t just abandon what we found,” explains Stypeck, who is part of the Chesapeake Collectibles expert cast. There was a preservable paper bounty: Large runs of highly sought pulp magazines that originated in the 1920s and ‘30s, including Weird Tales, True Detective, and Astounding Stories. So he and his partner donned surgical masks and, yes, plunged in, doing as much as possible to gently scrape and sanitize the best material without damaging it.
The end result? “The amount of money we made in the seventies on those magazines was extraordinary,” says Stypeck. “About a hundred thousand dollars that would be worth a million today.”
The full version of Stypeck’s feat, which entailed transporting and further protecting the prized pulps, is worthy of at least two chapters in a memoir. But Stypeck says he’s too busy with further exploration. None of it involving pigeons in any way.
As Chesapeake Collectibles fans continue to enjoy the show’s current season each Monday evening, they also can revisit the revelations of past years by streaming episodes from the series’ website at mpt.org/programs/chesapeakecollectibles/chesapeakecollectibles-past-seasons/.
