Wednesday, December 03, 2008

Caveat Emptor in 'Wowing her'

I return from my early winter break in the beautiful west-coast of Scotland's Port Appin to find this from Forbes awaiting me on-line:

Jenna Goudreau writes in Forbes.com on style (HERE):

Twelve Gifts To Wow Her”

“This year, a few carefully selected items that will hold or appreciate in value set the right tone.

“A massage at the Peninsula might ease her mind, but a rare, $3,500 first edition of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations will stretch it for years. And while a bottle of bubbly is always a chic choice, a more lasting option includes a set of elegant stemware from Baccarat ($195 each).”


Comment
Hardly ‘wow’ her! At $3,500 for a ‘first edition of Wealth Of Nations’, she would soon discover you are a having a cheap laugh at her expense, or you are so gullible that you believe whatever a salesperson tells you and you are dangerous to be close to because, as they say, ‘a fool and his money are soon parted’. Moreover, the goods are probably stolen and sold on by another fool, or were stolen from the thief.

Sotheby’s advertised a week ago that they had sold a first edition of Wealth Of Nations for £60,000 (I read of a copy being sold for £72,000 last year).

So what gives? A distress sale from a ‘maxed-out’ hedge fund manager? A fake mass-market ‘first edition’ from China?

Or the author of the article, Jenna Goudreau, was just guessing in the best traditions of an overworked, writing in haste, beat-the-deadlines journalist?

True, if she holds onto her fake ‘first edition’ for another couple of hundred years it might double in value maybe, perhaps, and hopefully. I suspect she would have gotten rid of her benefactor long before then …

So, instead buy her the "set of elegant stemware from Baccarat ($195 each)", but, er, not from the same source as the 'first edition'.

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