Tony Probst's passion for Titanic is unwavering.
Since the mid-1990s, he has collected hundreds of artifacts from the ship's maiden voyage in 1912, including lifeboat plaques, ceramics, sheet music, and a collection of personal documents.
Probst, 64, proudly said this week: “I believe I'm the only person on earth to have all the pieces of paper for one person to board the Titanic.”
His collection is occasionally on display at the audio-visual store he runs with his sons in California's Bay Area, but it has also toured prominent spaces such as the National Geographic Museum in Washington. Ronald Reagan Presidential Library and Museum in Simi Valley, California. Titanic Museums in Branson, Missouri and Pigeon Forge, Tennessee;
Mr. Probst's enthusiasm for the Titanic puts him somewhere between a collector and a historian, and he is part of a small but dedicated community of people who seek out memorabilia from the Titanic, which sank and killed people when it hit an iceberg in the North Atlantic. He is said to be a member of the 1,500 people.
Henry Aldridge & Son, an auction house in southwestern England, hosted an auction of Titanic memorabilia and other shipping items on Saturday. Among the more than 250 items sold was a black-and-white photograph of an iceberg taken by members of a body recovery vessel after the disaster, which sold for 17,500 pounds (about $22,000).
The auction house also sold bandleader Wallace Hartley's violin case. 360,000 pounds, or about $450,000. (The violin famously sold for £1.1 million in 2013, or about $1.7 million at the time.) Another item up for sale was one of the Titanic's richest passengers. It was a gold pocket watch that belonged to John Jacob Astor IV. The watch, which has Astor's initials engraved on the front, sold for 1.175 million pounds (about $1.4 million).
There are many reasons to seek out Titanic items, but for Probst, it's the stories about the victims and survivors that motivate him to continue collecting and keep an eye out for auctions.
“There are some people out there who have very, very deep pockets and, you know, now they've got all the major items,” Probst said. “I don't belong to that category. I'm more interested in preserving stories.”
Mr. Probst said he was recovering from some major purchases and didn't have anything on his wish list at the moment, but he was going to look at auction catalogs anyway.
“I want to go after what I really want,” he said, meaning items that can be leased to museums.
“In a sense, I call it a retirement account because you can receive your principal and it will increase in value,” he added. “But in the meantime, I can lease it and make a little money.”
Henry Aldridge & Son has been holding Titanic-themed sales twice a year since the late 1990s, said Andrew Aldridge, the auction house's managing director. Aldridge said bidders often have their own areas and personal motivations.
“Some people just collect the Titanic memorabilia itself,” he says. “But some people dig a little deeper and get specific. Certain passengers, certain classes. People from certain regions. Some people might just collect things from Scandinavian passengers.”
David Scott-Bedard, chairman of the British Titanic Society, said the Titanic collecting community was quite small, with few people making particularly big-ticket purchases. Competition for best-selling products can sometimes be fierce. “To some extent, it's about how much you want it and how much you're willing to spend on it without your wife finding out,” he says.
Scott Bedard added that he's not too concerned about items disappearing from public view after purchase. He said it's been a huge blessing to the community that the majority of collectors, even those who shop at six- and seven-figure levels, have been so generous in allowing their work to be displayed publicly. He said he was lucky.
“Titanic is probably the most famous ship in history after Noah's Ark,” said Charles Haas, president of Titanic International. Some enthusiasts are driven to search for increasingly rare artifacts taken from ships by passengers, and the psychological connections that collectors sometimes make as they view disasters through the eyes of victims and survivors Some people are driven to.
Haas said he doesn't know if there will ever be a time when demand for Titanic-related items will disappear.
“The Titanic story has already been going on for 112 years,” he said. “There are some people out there who say, “The ship has sunk, get over it,'' but the younger generation is still very fascinated by the ship because there's so much drama built into it.''
Haas hopes they will continue in the current collectors' footsteps, although Aldridge says they are only temporary. Custodian of relics.
“The best way to explain this is, 'You will never own these objects,'” Aldridge said. “Your job is to keep them for as long as they are yours. Keep them safe and pass them on to the next generation, the next individual, the next collector.”