Titanic Deck Chair Sells for $150,000 at Auction

This story appears in the May 25, 2015 issue of Forbes.

Rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic might be the quintessential exercise in futility, but collecting them isn’t. In April, a wooden Nantucket recliner from the doomed ocean liner was auctioned at Henry Aldridge & Son in England and sold for £100,000 (nearly $150,000). The chair was on the promenade deck when the great ship went down in 1912 and is one of a half-dozen retrieved by the cable repair ship Mackay-Bennett, which was sent to recover bodies.

According to Aldridge’s records, the chair was then given to Mackaycaptain Julien Lemarteleur by one of its crew, and for the past 15 years it has been owned by a Titanic collector in England, who kept it by a large window in his home, overlooking the ocean. The anonymous winning bidder can’t actually sit in the chair; it’s too fragile. Given the furniture’s tragic provenance, though, why even risk it?

Click here for Forbes