WHAT'S IN YOUR BAG?
By HILARY POTKEWITZ
Seth Kaller usually travels with an original copy of the Declaration of Independence in his briefcase. The current version is a July 1776 broadside of the declaration from New Hampshire that could have been posted in a town square for public viewing. He carries an original copy of the Bill of Rights too. “Those are the gateway drugs” that often spark interest in collecting, he says. “People see that you can hold something in your hand that literally changed the world, and they’re attracted to that.”
Mr. Kaller deals in mainly American historic documents, acquiring, selling and appraising them on behalf of private collectors and institutions. He helped the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History at the New York Historical Society build its 60,000-document collection, for example. He regularly works with the National Constitution Center and the Smithsonian Institution.
His office is in White Plains, N.Y., but he is usually on the road at least once a month for client visits, antique auctions or research trips, often carrying valuable documents worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
He uses a simple nylon/poly briefcase by Wenger. “Being low-key is important,” he says. Historical papers live in clear mylar folders tucked into Prestige-brand portfolio cases.
Part of the job is authenticating documents. He sees forgeries on a weekly basis.
At 49 years old, Mr. Kaller has been doing this long enough that he can tell at first glance whether a Thomas Jefferson or an Abraham Lincoln letter is real. He has the men’s signatures memorized. Other items take closer examination.
He uses a hand-held microscope by RF Inter-Science Co. with a 36x magnification and a bendable bug-shape LED light by Nite Ize that he liberated from his 10-year-old son’s camp kit. He also carries an ultraviolet light, which can reveal where a document has been altered. For photos, he uses the camera on his iPhone 5s.
Mr. Kaller grew up in the collectibles business. His father was a rare-stamps dealer and his mother dealt in rare coins. By age 11, he was mounting stamps for his dad, and started dealing stamps himself in high school. When he was 23, he persuaded the family to sell some rare coins and he made their first document purchase: John Hancock’s signed protest letter against taxation without representation.
He did his first million-dollar deal when he was 27, serving as agent on the purchase of a copy of Abraham Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech for $1.5 million.
Occasionally, carrying around pieces of history can get nerve-racking. He was recently selected for a random TSA screening while carrying a rare newspaper printing of the Bill of Rights and several letters from Abraham Lincoln and George Washington—in all, worth about $1 million. As the agents started rifling through his briefcase, “They kept holding things up saying, ‘What is this?’ and I kept saying, ‘Please be gentle,’ ” he recalls. “I didn’t want to say, ‘Hey, that’s a $200,000 document!’ But they quickly got it.”
