Back in the day they were used by print shops to shoot offset plates. The paste-up would be placed under glass in the platform on the bottom and the plate to be exposed would be placed under the lid on top. The two hand cranks were waist high and would raise or lower the paste-up platform and the lens (at the bottom of the bellows in the middle) so you could get the enlargement or reduction ratio where you wanted it, 4:1 to 1:4 IIRC. The two wings on either side were the lights for the paste-up.
It was part of a failed business scheme and in those pre-desktop publishing days, worth about a thousand dollars.
I had an epic brain glitch when I was 27 and left behind a $2000 Tri-Star vacuum cleaner with an ex-boyfriend when I moved out. To this very day I miss that vacuum.
When I was 12 I moved out of my dad’s apartment and into my mom’s, taking pretty much just what I could carry. At the old apartment there was an attic that had my entire childhood in it - these were the days before thrift stores, Kijijji etc. and you just stored away things you didn’t use anymore. Well my dad moved out and left all my stuff behind. I’m talking Fisher Price toys, Red Rose tea figurines, hockey cards (so many cards - hockey, baseball, movies, etc.) - I had 3 Wayne Gretzky rookie cards. Everything left behind. I just hope that whoever bought that house and renovated it found my treasure and made good money.
I left my violin in the attic. It was from when I was in elementary/jr-high school. I hadn’t used it in decades. The finish was drying and the cat hair bow was unraveling. I had restored it a bit a decade earlier, but hadn’t kept up with it. More sentimental value than anything.
We bought a second-hand couch for the upstairs game room. It took us at least an hour to negotiate the stairs. I thought it was going to turn into a Dirk Gently Holistic Sofa event, but we finally got it up, with only a few gouges in the plaster. It is GOING to be left behind.
We left thousands of dollars worth of curtains behind, on purpose, when we left a rental home in Jakarta a few years ago. I wanted to break the ridiculous cycle that has developed in the expat rental market there: houses are often rented without curtains, so you have to have them custom-made, which is incredibly expensive and a total pain in the ass (especially for newcomers who don’t speak Indonesian and who are unfamiliar with where to buy things in the city). So when people leave their house, they think, “hell, I paid thousands of dollars for those curtains and it was a huge headache to acquire them, I’ll be damned if I’m going to leave them behind” - even though the chances of the curtains being the right number/size/shape/color for a new house are fairly slim.
I said, “screw that, let’s be nice to our landlord, who was nice to us, and make the empty house more inviting for future rentals by leaving the curtains.” So we did.
A few weeks later we went back to the house to meet the landlord and finish up some last minute administrative matters, and THE CURTAINS WERE GONE. The guard (who came with the house and had been employed by the landlord for many years) had evidently decided that if we didn’t want them, he would take them. We told the landlord that we were really disappointed to see the curtains had disappeared.
The good news is that the curtains came back! I take it the landlord discussed the matter with the guard, who had fortunately not cut up or resold the curtains yet, and told the guard to put them back in the house.
The house has since been rented. I hope the new tenants like the curtains, not to mention the convenience and savings of not having to buy any.
(Karma note: we’ve since moved into a house that also has pre-existing curtains - quite nice ones, actually.)
I had a collection of Wacky Packages, probably worth a couple of hundred dollars that I put in storage when I moved. They vanished when I had all my stuff that was in storage mailed to me. Why I didn’t take them with me I’ll never know. The whole collection fit in a shoebox.
When we moved cross-country, a number of my husband’s computers disappeared. He used them for research projects. We arrived in our new home, and the computers didn’t. No idea what happened (but I speculate that the movers were involved).
Shit, complete Yankee teams from 1952 to 1964, damn, damn damn.
Parents first TV (and neighborhood for that matter). Sylvania with a 8/10’ diagonal blue screen sometime in the early 50s. We’d have 12-15 neighbors come over for certain shows. Big cabinet boxes to either side with the myriad tubes. Good times with my father dragging tubes to the drug store that had a tester. Still worked in the 90s. Brother-in-law and sister sold the house as a lot to an auction house for a single price when my mother passed while I was overseas.
Valuable? I guess I’m in the wrong thread, but when I was 3, I left my toy boat under the claw-foot bathtub in the house in Minneapolis. It had a rubber-band stretched across the back, through which was threaded a paddle wheel, so you could wind it up and let it go.
At three, I didn’t fully understand the concept of “Leaving, and never coming back”.
When we sold our co-op in Chicago we sold it with the washer & dryer. At the closing the new buyers then said they didn’t want them. But we weren’t even in town any more (long story). Fortunately our lawyer said, he could use them so rather than us hiring someone to take them out, he did.
Two weeks ago, I moved (permanently) eleven time zones away. Everything was left behind except my carry-on bag. I arranged for a friend to dispose of everything, and handed over my security deposit to her. So the answer is “nearly everything”. However, my $99 TV from WalMart probably tops the value list.
Not me, but my tenants. Just this weekend I was cleaning my condo between renters, and found a necklace in the closet. I sent a picture to the previous tenants and said I could send it to them. The wife texted back, “I don’t recognize that necklace…”
The tenants prior to that moved out of state and left a few towels in the washing machine, a nice cookie sheet, cooling rack, and some other random kitchen stuff. None of it was worth shipping, but much of it I still use.
I bought a condo with a washer/dryer nook on the second floor, empty. Getting the dryer upstairs was a piece of cake, but the washer…
Two of us below with our backs to it, two more above pulling on a strap wrapped around it. One step at a time with a few breaths in between. When we had it settled in place I declared, “When we leave, the washer stays!” to which DesertWife heartily concurred.
One house I lived in with three other guys during college, I left behind a bike and a telescope when I moved out rather abruptly. We had a dirt bag landlord who refused to do anything about our water pipes that kept freezing up in the winter. So one by one we all just moved out. When I found out the last one of us had moved out, I went back to the house to see if my stuff was there but it was gone. I don’t think it was any of my housemates, it was likely either the landlord or someone in the crew he had doing repair work after he left.
During my multi-staged move to Maryland I seem to have lost my old handheld GPS which I really liked, since it had a bunch of waypoints that were not backed up. That’s because it was a basic model that had no USB hookup.