'One of Rarest Types of Titanic Collectible' Is Sold

After the Titanic hit an iceberg on April 14, 1912, the Mackay-Bennett was dispatched from Halifax to the scene to recover bodies; it pulled 306 corpses from the water, and ended up carrying 190 of them back to Canada. But according the the ship's logs, it also brought something else home: six or seven deckchairs it found in the Atlantic. One of those chairs, described by auctioneer Andrew Aldridge as "one of the rarest types of Titanic collectible," has just sold to an unnamed UK collector for roughly $150,000.

The Press Association traces the chair from the first-class promenade deck to Captain Julien Lemarteleur to a Titanic collector who owned it for the past 15 years; he says he never sat on it. Auction house Henry Aldridge and Son did better than expected: The chair was estimated to sell for no more than $120,000. In a pre-sale press release, the auction house noted that the chair is "one of only a handful of fully provenanced and documented examples in existence." (More auction stories.)