Potential buyers examine the goods during yesterday’s two-hour morning preview of the unclaimed property auction.

The Providence Journal / Kathy Borchers

PROVIDENCE — The crying of Lot 5 began with an opening bid of $100. When it ended a few moments later, Jack Nalbandian of Warwick had prevailed and was the owner of some 1,000 American stamps, many almost a century old, that had spent years in the dark quiet of a safe deposit box.

Nalbandian, a stamp dealer for six decades, won with his bid of $1,350.

“I think I was pretty much to my limit,” he said as he waited to pay, Visa card in hand. Friday night, as he reviewed the inventory of unclaimed property that the state treasurer’s office auctioned yesterday, he had penciled in $1,500 as the highest he was willing to go. Yesterday morning, he dropped his limit to $1,400.

But that could have changed if the bidding had continued to escalate.

“Sometimes,” he said, “you get carried way.”

Several hundred people — collectors, dealers and just plain folk — attended the daylong auction, held at the state Department of Administration Building, across from the State House. When the bidding for the final items — Lot 568, “ass’t items containing everything imaginable” — had ended, General Treasurer Frank T. Caprio and his staff collected about $374,872.

Jewelry, watches, coins and stamps comprised most of the goods that auctioneer Bob Resnick, of Max Pollack & Co. Auctioneers, offered to the crowds. Gold and silver goods proved popular, especially with dealers who will in turn sell them to smelters and refiners who are capitalizing on a robust precious metals market.

But there were some unusual items, including Lot 300, a custom-designed Tiffany & Company silver trophy cup that was presented in 1898 to a Massachusetts industrialist on the occasion of his retirement. The cup sold for $50,000. There was Lot 163, “fake U.S. bills,” which seemed evidence of some long-ago crime. There were sports cards and a baseball signed by Walter Johnson. There was Lot 323, “Gorham Sterling Fish Slicer.”

According to Mike Solomon, Caprio’s executive director of operations, the property came into state hands from bank safe deposit boxes whose owners or heirs have failed to pay the rental fees. The boxes were drilled and the contents moved to a vault controlled by the treasurer’s office. Those items that are not claimed after advertising and other publicity are made available for auction.

“Typically we wait until we have enough goods to have a pretty good presentation and have a nice auction like we have now,” Solomon said. The last one, he said, was about a decade ago.

About three-fourths of the proceeds will go into the state’s general treasury, Solomon said. The remainder will be reserved in the event that previous owners or relatives finally surface, in which case they will be entitled to receive the amount that was netted at auction –– after past-due and drilling fees have been paid to the banks.

In a quirk that reclusive novelist Thomas Pynchon (author of The Crying of Lot 49) would appreciate, some bidders yesterday declined to give their names when approached for an interview. But some had good stories, including the retired school teacher who successfully bid $550 for Lot 6, several hundred old American stamps.

“My limit was really $300 but I would have gone $400,” she said. But auctions get the adrenalin going, and she “went a little higher.”

The woman said she became a collector growing up in New York City, where her father was a lawyer and accountant. Dad got the collecting bug, she said, during the Great Depression, when a client, unable to come up with cash, paid him in stamps.

“This was the only thing he spent money on,” she said.

She plans to give her extensive collection to her grandchildren some day — although, with a souring economy, she could always sell some of her stamps to get by.

“It’s a serious collection,” she said. “If all else fails, maybe I would have to look at my stamps.”

gwmiller@projo.com