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460
328
33 Ferry Avenue, East,
Detroit, Michigan,
March 3rd, 1909.

My dear Doctor Allen:-

I have your kind letter of March 1st, enclosing the one from M. dePlancy to you, and in accordance with your wishes, I return the same herein. I am much interested in what M. dePlancy states in his letter, and shall be pleased to receive the list he is now preparing of the articles in his collection.

I note with interest also, his reference to the sale of Korean pottery formerly belonging to Mr. Bing. Mr. Bing and I were intimate friends for many years prior to his death, and in fact, I was with him at his hospital only a few days prior to his death. The Korean objects in his collection which were sold at auction, were, as M. dePlancy said, of differing quality - a few pieces were exceptionally fine, and some of these I bid upon myself at his auction; others were not of the first quality, but the extraordinary thing is, that the latter really brought higher prices at the sale - the result, of course, of lack of intelligence upon the part of the buyers. Then, too, one should remember that the public sales made by the Parisian dealers are always mystifying to outsiders, for certain reasons. In nearly all important sales, prices are run up beyond all reason for the sake of increasing the selling value of similar articles owned by other dealers, and frequently (as in the Bing case) articles are bought in by the owners at extravagant prices, secreted for a year or two and then exhibited for-sale in the very same shops in which they were originally shown. To a certain extent, these same conditions exist also

Transcription Notes:
unsure of word in the first paragraph Update 3/30: the word is "he" ---------- Reopened for Editing 2023-03-30 10:19:46 updated 466 to 460 to match that of the letter changed that to fact, to reflect what is in the letter added , after the word outsiders to reflect that of letter changed sale to sake to reflect letter added sentence that was skipped before the sentence year or two.