Do you keep something that does not quite behave? We are glad to look at it.

There is a particular kind of person who already knows. The object in the house that the animals avoid. The heirloom no one will claim. The thing that came home from an estate sale and changed the temperature of a room. You have lived alongside it long enough to stop pretending it is ordinary, and now you would like to know what it is.

This is the service for that knowing.

You send us five objects. We receive them with care, and we sit with them as we sit with everything that passes through this house. Each one is examined the way we examine our own acquisitions: its age, its making, its provenance where it can be traced, and the nature of whatever it carries. We grade each piece on our own scale, the same one used for every object in the collection, measuring not only what a thing is but what it does.

When the work is finished, each object is returned to you accompanied by its Certificate of Appraisal, set down by hand and sealed. The certificate names the piece, records its grading, and gives the account of what we found. It is the document these things were always meant to travel with, and so rarely do.

What you receive:

• Appraisal of five objects, examined individually

• Full grading on the Rooks and St. Felix scale

• A hand-prepared, sealed Certificate of Appraisal for each piece

• Your objects, returned to you with the care they are owed

A note on intake. Objects must be mailed to us. We will provide instructions for safe packing once your appraisal is reserved. Pieces are handled, documented, and returned. Nothing stays unless you wish it to.

Some who send us five discover they were keeping something remarkable all along. Others learn the truth is gentler than they feared. Either way, you will no longer be guessing.

$500 · Intake of five objects

Some objects answer a single question. Others ask to be sat with.

This is the appraisal for the piece that has earned more than a glance. The heirloom with a history you half-know and wish to know fully. The object whose behavior has changed, grown louder, grown stranger, since it came into your keeping. The thing you suspect is not one presence but two. When five pieces deserve not only an appraisal but an investigation, this is the service that gives them their due.

You send us five objects. We receive them as we receive everything that passes through this house, with care and without hurry. Each is examined as before, its age, its making, its provenance traced as far as the record allows, and the nature of what it carries graded on our own scale. But here the work goes further. Where a piece warrants it, we sit with it across more than one session. We note what shifts. We follow what the object is willing to tell us, and we set down not only what it is but what we came to understand of its story, its temperament, and what it seems to want.

When the work is finished, each object returns to you with its Certificate of Appraisal, prepared by hand and sealed, and with a written account of the deeper reading, our fuller notes on the piece, the history we recovered, and the nature of its presence as we came to know it.

What you receive:

• Deep appraisal of five objects, examined individually and at length

• Full grading on the Rooks and St. Felix scale

• A hand-prepared, sealed Certificate of Appraisal for each piece

• A written reading for each object, our extended account of its history, temperament, and presence

• Your objects, returned to you with the care they are owed

A note on intake. Objects must be mailed to us. We will provide instructions for safe packing once your appraisal is reserved. Pieces are handled, documented, studied, and returned. Nothing stays unless you wish it to.

There are objects that have waited a long time to be understood. If five of them are in your keeping, this is how they are finally heard.

$800 · Intake of five, with deep reading

There is a point past investigation. It is the point at which an object is not merely examined but truly known, taken in, lived alongside, attended to until it has given up the whole of its account. This is the service for the five objects that deserve nothing less.

You send us five pieces. They enter the house as honored guests. Each is examined as in our other appraisals, its age, its making, its provenance traced as far as any record will allow, and its presence graded on our own scale. But here the work is given all the time it asks for. Each object is sat with at length, across many sittings, in the quiet hours when these things are most willing to speak. We document what stirs. We trace the history as far as it can be carried. Where a piece holds more than one presence, we work to know each of them. We treat your objects exactly as we treat the finest pieces in our own collection, because for a time they are kept among them.

When the work is complete, each object returns to you with the full record of its keeping. Its hand-sealed Certificate of Appraisal. Its written reading, the full account of its history, temperament, and presence. And a portfolio of documentation prepared as we prepare the entries in our own catalog, the kind of dossier that turns an object you own into an object with a name, a story, and a place in the record.

What you receive:

• The fullest appraisal we offer, five objects examined at length and without limit of time

• Full grading on the Rooks and St. Felix scale

• A hand-prepared, sealed Certificate of Appraisal for each piece

• A written reading for each object, the complete account of its history, temperament, and presence

• A catalog-grade documentation portfolio for each piece, prepared to the standard of our own collection

• Your objects, returned to you with the care and ceremony they are owed

A note on intake. Objects must be mailed to us. We will provide instructions for safe packing once your commission is reserved. Pieces are received, kept, studied, documented, and returned. Nothing stays unless you wish it to.

Most objects pass through the world unrecorded, their stories lost with the people who knew them. This is how five of them are saved. When they return to you, they will no longer be things you simply own. They will be things that have been understood, and set down, and made to last.

$1,000 · The Keeper's Commission