Glass eyes, death masks, and human skulls: browse a weird auction's results
Glass eyes, death masks, and human skulls: browse a weird auction's results Mark Frauenfelder 11:10 am Fri Oct 2, 2026 Image: Potter & Potter Auctions Potter & Potter Auctions just closed its "Weird Tales! UFOs, Curiosities and Tattoos" auction, and it is fun to browse through the catalog and see what was offered and how much money people paid. Items included books on pseudoscience, human skulls, wooden boxes full of glass eyes, quack medical devices, apothecary jars, pickled medical specimens, death masks, exotic weapons, the Lord's Prayer on a grain of wheat, binders of mugshot photos, and more.
- ▪Glass eyes, death masks, and human skulls: browse a weird auction's results Mark Frauenfelder 11:10 am Fri Oct 2, 2026 Image: Potter & Potter Auctions Potter & Potter Auctions just closed its "Weird Tales!
- ▪UFOs, Curiosities and Tattoos" auction, and it is fun to browse through the catalog and see what was offered and how much money people paid.
- ▪Items included books on pseudoscience, human skulls, wooden boxes full of glass eyes, quack medical devices, apothecary jars, pickled medical specimens, death masks, exotic weapons, the Lord's Prayer on a grain of wheat, binders of mugshot
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Story provenance
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Boing Boing |
| Canonical URL | https://boingboing.net/2026/10/02/fountain-pen-potter-weird-tales-auction.html |
| Publication time | Fri, 02 Oct 2026 18:10:19 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-10-02T18:51:15.777Z |
| Last seen | 2026-10-02T18:51:15.777Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | V8ZugV_odI8U · 1 stories |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
Glass eyes, death masks, and human skulls: browse a weird auction's results Mark Frauenfelder 11:10 am Fri Oct 2, 2026 Image: Potter & Potter Auctions Potter & Potter Auctions just closed its "Weird Tales! UFOs, Curiosities and Tattoos" auction, and it is fun to browse through the catalog and see what was offered and how much money people paid. Items included books on pseudoscience, human skulls, wooden boxes full of glass eyes, quack medical devices, apothecary jars, pickled medical specimens, death masks, exotic weapons, the Lord's Prayer on a grain of wheat, binders of mugshot photos, and more. Previously: Boing Boing has browsed antique photos of ventriloquists and their dummies, a chance to own a piece of Houdini, and the early-1900s Thermocap hair loss device. How I use AI.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Boing Boing.
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