Wisteria Tiffany Lamp from Eddie Rickenbackers

I apparently missed a pretty good story from earlier this year, when some of the furnishings from one of my favorite San Francisco wateringholes, Eddie Rickenbackers, were auctioned off following the death of the owner. And we’re not talking about just any old bar furnishings, but six, original Tiffany lamps with an estimated value of nearly $2,000,000!

Norman Jay Hobday, the bar’s colorful and dedicated proprietor, died in February 2011 at age 77. He’d spent much of the last 20 years of his life carefully collecting the lamps, which were manufactured around 1910.

The largest and most prized lamp in the group – “Wisteria” – stands more than 2 feet tall and has been given a presale value of $500,000 to $700,000.

Hobday, who adopted the name Henry Africa after he opened a bar in San Francisco by that name, had a good eye for the lamps and culled a valued collection over the years that appeals to dedicated Tiffany collectors, said Sarah Shepard, an account manager with Christie’s auction house in San Francisco.

“The Tiffany lamps are coming with all this history of being behind the bar,” Shepard said. “It’s a really special story. You don’t often go inside a bar and restaurant and get to look at lamps like this.”

I’ll say!

When you went in Eddie Rickenbacker’s what you noticed weren’t the million dollar lamps sitting behind the bar, but the vintage motorcycles which hung from the ceiling in the dining room. That collection of mobile art is expected to fetch more than a million dollars at a separate auction later in the year.

I used to be a huge candle fan, meaning I was one of the people who actually burn the candles instead of just letting them get all dusty, until the day I found out that cheap candles from the Chinese dollar store in nowheresville Brooklyn frequently have lead in the wicks. That gave me pause, but didn’t prompt me to toss out my tea lights.(Although I did find that I like personalized candles from Best Kept Secrets.) No, the last straw was a candle that threw off so much soot as it burned that it somehow stained a bunch of nearly invisible leftover grout that wasn’t cleaned properly off my bathroom tiles. You couldn’t actually see it until the soot started flying… when I tried to clean up, it stained the grout, which is why I have these odd stains on my bathroom tiles. Stupid candle!

Nowadays I don’t burn quite so many candles, what with the baby and the cats and the extreme dislike of soot, but I do keep some around, just in case. The ones I do keep around are pure beeswax with organic cotton wicks, with no scents or fillers. I’m partial to the Timberline brand, but there are plenty of great candlemakers out there working with pure beeswax instead of petroleum-based products. If I had the time, I might even try rolling my own with a kit or maybe reading up on the topic (which is a lot less appealing than just jumping in with the kit, really).