By this stage in your life, you’ve surely made your share of questionable online purchases. But should you still be in the market for some bizarre gimcrackery that will start conversations and alienate friends, boy is there an opportunity for you.
The Guinness World Records Museum in Niagara Falls, Canada—one of many quirky franchisees of the Guinness World Records Book—is auctioning off its wares after closing for good last September.
The online sale, hosted by Indianapolis’s Ripley Auctions, is live now through mid-February. Lots are, on average, estimated to be worth a couple of hundred dollars to a couple of thousand. And bids are already starting to pile up.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.
On sale is a bevy of offbeat sports paraphernalia, tourist town kitsch, and dioramas celebrating the kind of idiosyncratic feats made famous by the best-selling copyrighted book of all time.
You can bid, for instance, on the world’s biggest pinball machine or its smallest bicycle; on a fun house mirror or a machine that measures your weight on Mars. You can take home life-sized models of the “oldest man” or the “hungriest sword swallower.” You can even snag that seven-foot-tall chair you’ve always dreamed of.
Much of what’s for sale feels a little off in a “this hasn’t aged well” kind of way. Some of it is downright unsettling.
There’s a football kicking game that is alarmingly sexual, for one; bidding is currently $800. And don’t forget about the life-sized electric chair display that, for just a pair of tokens, actually shocks a model of a death row inmate. It’s currently priced at a reasonable $1,900.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.
The museum opened in 1978 with a ceremony that featured Sandy Allen, the world’s tallest woman, and was in its subsequent decades the site of many attempts by aspiring record holders to land a Guinness World Records certificate.
A livestreamed event will close Ripley’s auction on February 12.
See more offerings from the sale below.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.
Courtesy of Ripley Auctions and the Niagara Clifton Group.