Last month, we reported on the auctioning off of personal effects from the late film and television auteur David Lynch. Lynch’s love of coffee is well known, making these items of particular interest, especially amongst coffee people who are also big time Lynch fans, which is a surprisingly large sector of the Venn diagram.
Of the items up for bid, there were a few mugs going for astonishingly high prices as well as a Mr. Coffee maker priced to make you question currency as a theoretical concept. But weirdly, Lynch’s personal La Marzocco GS/3 espresso machine and Mazzer Mini grinder were the most reasonably priced items, at the time of our reporting sitting at $2,750 and $1,000, respectively.
The article about the auction itself was pretty popular and made the rounds around the social medias, so there’s a non-zero possibility that we aided in driving up the price of Lynch’s espresso setup. Which is our way of saying that we’re sorry you didn’t get to buy David Lynch’s espresso machine because it sold for the price of a mid-size luxury vehicle.
Here’s the thing. A GS/3 is kind of a dream machine for the home coffee geek. New they’ll set you back at least eight grand, so the opportunity to get one for a song, granted a very expensive song but a song nonetheless, got everyone all hot and bothered. Add in who its previous owner was and folks were frothing at the mouth. Our article went out May 29th and by the end of the day, the price had jumped nearly tripled.
There wasn’t much action until June 18th, the day of the auction, where the winning bid came in at $35,000. After a 27% buyer’s premium and online service fees, the total price came to $45,500, over five times the cost of a new machine. Meanwhile the Mazzer Mini went for $7,800, or six times the cost of a new one.
These are all admittedly insane markups, until you learn that the Mr. Coffee went for $4,550, which is 151 times the cost of a new Mr. Coffee. Somehow less offensive to me was the Log Lady mug that fetched over $11,000. There’s at least something ephemeral about it. It’s not something you can buy at literally any Walmart.
So again, we do apologize for blowing up your spot and ruining any chances you had of getting David Lynch’s GS/3. But you knew it wasn’t going to happen, right? You had to know you didn’t stand a chance. It was a fun dream while it lasted, dreaming about casually mentioning at dinner parties, “Oh this, yeah it’s previous owner was David Lynch. Can I make you an espresso?” Wouldn’t that have been something?
If I may offer one consolation, though, there is nothing keeping you from buying a shitty old Mr. Coffee from a local thrift store and telling people that it was David Lynch’s. Like, there’s nothing stopping you from lying about it. I won’t tell.
Zac Cadwalader is the managing editor at Sprudge Media Network and a staff writer based in Dallas. Read more Zac Cadwalader on Sprudge.
