A Lladro Cinderella figurine proves to be a valuable find for more than just its monetary value. (Ann Tatko-Peterson)
The light blue dress of the figurine caught my eye.
Sandwiched between a red miniature vase and a brightly painted pair of salt-and-pepper shakers, the 11½ inch porcelain figurine of Cinderella looked pale and easily overlooked in the glass display case of a Sutter Creek thrift shop.
I did a double take.
It looked like a Lladro, the famous porcelain collectibles made in Spain. The price sticker on the bottom of the figurine said $20 -- on sale for $10 on this 50-percent-off-everything Saturday.
No way, I told myself, even as I nudged the sticker up with my fingernail to reveal a sliver of the unmistakable Lladro logo.
I sweated through the next five minutes as the kind, elderly
A Lladro Cinderella figurine proves to be a valuable find for more than just its monetary value. (Ann Tatko-Peterson)
thrift shop employee struggled with shaking hands to wrap my new purchase in paper.
For 20 some years, I had trolled flea markets, thrift shops, swap meets and estate sales looking for that one great find -- the bargain of all bargains -- and finally, I knew the rush of uncovering a true treasure that would make even my mother proud.
Maybe treasure is exaggerating reality just a bit. My Cinderella figurine won't pay off the house, or put the kids through college, or even pay this month's bills. On the secondary market, it's worth about $200. But I landed it for 1/20th of that price -- in a day and age of Google searches, where even a small, strip-mall thrift shop in the California foothills should have known that a Lladro didn't
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belong among its other display-case collectibles.
The real value is that I found it at all. It's a badge-of-honor sort of thing that comes from decades of watching my mother rack up great finds like a museum curator.
She bought a Thomas Kinkade painting mere months after the painter opened his first gallery, well before he earned the moniker Painter of Light. While living in Europe, she purchased Wedgwood plates, Lladro figurines and David Winter cottages directly from the factories that made them. Somehow, in 1990, she even managed to buy a special edition "Crossroads" Hummel, commemorating the fall of the Berlin Wall, when it was first issued and we were living in Germany.
My mother had a gift for recognizing what would appreciate in value.
I, on the other hand, merely dabbled in that art.
Over the years, I've had a few marginally impressive finds. In the basement of a dusty Las Vegas bookstore, I uncovered a signed Stephen King book with a letter of authenticity tucked inside. In a small New Mexico antique shop, a $2 ring turned out to have a real pearl set in it. And in a Napa thrift shop, I spent $5 on a cute, portable baby's bed to display my stuffed animals, only to discover two years later it was an antique; a dealer paid me $80 for it.
Of course, none of those comes close to the incredible stories of unsuspected treasures. Among the most famous is of a man who bought a weathered copy of the Declaration of Independence at a garage sale, only to donate it to a thrift shop years later. He realized too late that he had given away one of 200 copies of the famous document commissioned by John Quincy Adams; it sold for $477,000 in 2007.
Even in this grand age of the Internet, impossible finds still happen each year.
In 2012, a North Carolina woman bought a $9.99 painting from a Goodwill store so she could repurpose the canvas for her own artwork. Fortunately, she searched Google first and learned she had an Ilya Bolotowsky painting; the abstract sold for $27,000 at auction.
Stories like those are what feed the hopes of anyone who has ever bargain hunted. It's not just about hoping to one day pad the retirement nest egg with a great find. It's really about the rush that comes with the discovery.
And that's why the Lladro Cinderella figurine now sits on my bedroom shelf instead of residing on eBay.
By Ann Tatko-Peterson
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