Can a Backstory Add Value?

Experiment turns unwanted tat into eBay treasure

Bruce Sterling's civil war tale helped a $3 boot sell for $76.

Significant Objects is a web project that aims to discover whether investing an object with fictional significance can raise its value on web auction site eBay.

The idea is simple: objects bought for “no more than a few dollars” from thrift stores are paired with participating writers. The author then composes a fictional story about the object, theoretically investing it with “significance”.

The hypothesis behind the idea is that the object should acquire not merely subjective but objective value. In other words, its cash value should increase when resold on the Significant Objects eBay shop.

To avoid accusations of hoax selling, when products are put up for sale their stories are accompanied by a byline for the writer, along with a brief description of the project and a link to the site.

If Colson Whitehead is to be believed, this mallet allows the wielder to step through a temporal rift.

Winning bidders receive the object along with a print of the fictional story. The writer, meanwhile, gets any net proceeds from the sale, and the Significant Objects website keeps a record of all sales. So far, the aggregate cost of buying the objects sold has been $79.82, while their sales have raised $1781.70, which seems to back the SO hypothesis.

The project is the brainchild of Rob Walker and Joshua Glenn, both of whom have written books about the ways in which people invest inanimate objects with significance. Contributing authors so far include the mighty Bruce Sterling and former Marvel writer and editor Annie Nocenti.

The Significant Objects site is a great way to waste some time; few of the backstories will take you any longer than a couple of minutes to read, and it’s fascinating to see how writers can find inspiration in the kind of kitsch that many of us wouldn’t give a second glimpse to if we saw it at a car boot sale.