Full article in Bloomberg news
http://www.bloomberg.com...27-000-antique-toys.htmlNYT
https://www.nytimes.com/...tiques.html?pagewanted=1TRUCKLOADS OF TRAINS
Jerry Greene, a vintage-recordings dealer in suburban Philadelphia, has spent 45 years filling his basement with 27,000 toy trains, railroad stations, post offices, carousels, Ferris wheels and bridges. This winter he has crammed 3,500 representative pieces into a fourth-floor gallery at Sotheby’s in New York.
Two trucks, each 24 feet long, brought the little-known Jerni Collection (Mr. Greene named it after himself and his wife, Nina) to Sotheby’s. Display cases and pedestals are piled with simulated rock tunnels, spindly pedestrian walkways, glass train sheds and vintage billboards for Vitalis, Sunkist oranges and deodorant soap. Freight cars carry labels for German seafood, Jamaican bananas and French furniture. Trackside signs read “Halt!” and “All tickets to be shown.”
Mr. Greene, during a recent tour of the gallery, rattled off the names of the objects’ mainly European manufacturers and listed how many examples of the rarer models exist elsewhere and what they cost. He paid a few hundred dollars each for most of the toys at antiques fairs, stores and auctions, but occasionally spent five-figure amounts for something that “completed the collection,” he said. He is selling now because there is little left to pursue, he said, adding, “Once it goes on a shelf, it’s just history to me.”
Although toy-train enthusiasts are a tight-knit clan, Mr. Greene rarely socialized with them. He did not identify himself on buying sprees and let only a few visitors into his basement. “I would be considered a closet collector, because nobody knew,” he said.
His daughter, Melissa Greene-Anderson, who helped set up the Sotheby’s show, said, “He was called ‘the man in black who never smiles.’ ” As a child, she did not play with the trains, she said, but her father did ask her and her two siblings to wiggle into basement crevices and retrieve and arrange the toys. “I would wear a conductor’s cap” while clambering through cobwebs, Ms. Greene-Anderson said.
The collection, on view through February, is for sale as one lot for an undisclosed eight-figure price. “I can’t break it up,” Mr. Greene said. “I worked so hard.”
Collectors have kept asking if individual pieces were for sale. When the requests were rebuffed, Ms. Greene-Anderson said, “people could be volatile.”
