It’s a collection of bric-a-brac and treasures ranging from 18th-century newspapers, a complete hotel switchboard, a stainless steel soda fountain and pinball machines, to World’s Fair collectibles, Tacoma High School literary journals and the autographs of celebrities long forgotten.

Over the next two Mondays, Tacoma antique dealer and auctioneer Alan Gorsuch will drop the gavel on Craig’s personal collection.

An executive at Tacoma Power, a part-time antique dealer and a supporter of the arts, Craig died Feb. 19 at age 59. He lived on Opera Alley in downtown Tacoma, in a former car dealership turned split-level loft-warehouse-home fit for a man whose eccentricities were as broad as his personality.

“He was a customer of mine 20 years ago,” said Gorsuch, who spent Tuesday – as he has spent 12-hour days during the past two weeks – organizing the collection for sale.

That collection comprises at least 20,000 items spread over two rooms, each the size of a restaurant. The contents of Craig’s downstairs, downtown gallery, Rampart, have already been sold.

Three days would not have been sufficient to compile a list of everything people will find at the auction – scheduled to begin Monday morning.

Here’s a brief list – like the collection itself, in no particular order.

 • Photographs of the Tacoma Hotel after it burned and a photograph of the Tacoma Magicians’ Banquet, April 11, 1936.

 • Tickets to the Lincoln-Stadium football game on Sept. 27, 1946.

 • Forty-five rpm records featuring the Monkees, Duke Ellington, and Paul Revere and the Raiders.

 • The cash ledger from the Tacoma Commercial Club, a Victrola, a “Manual of Police Jiu-Jitsu.”

 • Medical textbooks featuring diseases and surgical techniques; a letter about gold written in California in 1866; U.S. Geological Survey maps of Idaho and Oregon.

 • A hall tree, a Bell System phone booth with beveled glass, a stained glass sign from Hackett Drug Co., an 11th Edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

 • A copy of The London Chronicle from 1757, The New York Times of Oct. 29, 1859, the Boston Gazette of July 25, 1808.

 • An embalming table; a nearly complete dentist’s station featuring chair with spit bowl, drill and tools; a hand-hammered copper Arts and Crafts light fixture; a “cold-painted” bronze harlequin on a marble base.

 • An arm and a leg (from a human skeleton), a life-size “birthing doll” used by medical students, a large photograph of teepees by Asahel Curtis, a program from Sarah Bernhardt’s performance in New York in December 1910.

 • Badges, plates, tickets, photo books and various ephemera from the 1909 Alaska-Yukon-Pacific Exposition in Seattle.

 • Scrapbooks; family albums (known in the antique trade as “instant relatives”) featuring various Tacoma families, including one from the Weyerhaeusers; a show-business album with signed photographs of various starlets, comedy teams and Sally Rand, with fans; a panoramic photo of the 1927 Fisher Co. picnic.

 • Pinball machines, a shuffleboard game, juke boxes, a complete soda fountain, tiki bar, pornography of a sort not spoken of in family newspapers, a hand-written Tacoma Public Utilities ledger from the 1920s, political convention delegate badges.

And lots more.

Craig, to his colleagues at Tacoma Power, was “an incredible guy. He was one of those guys who would come down and talk to you. He was really personable,” said spokeswoman Chris Gleason. “He was so good at his job because of how good he was at building relationships. He just cared about people so much. His customers thought he was a great guy.”

To members of Tacoma’s arts community, Craig was “the sort of man who would encourage collaboration with young artists and collectives of various kinds. He made his space available as a cooperative gallery,” said Benjii Bittle, deputy executive director of the Broadway Center for the Performing Arts.

“He was definitely not highbrow, he was the farthest thing from that,” Bittle said. “He had a very blue-collar sensibility about art.

“He created opportunities – cheap, cheerful and hip – it was a niche that was needed.”

“It’s a logistical nightmare,” Gorsuch said Tuesday as he made ready for the auction.

“I need a vacation after this.”

C.R. Roberts: 253-597-8535

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