It never hurts to ask - charity auction

Cutting and pasting to forward to myself. No guarantees, but there's no harm in passing the request around a bit (i'll remove your contact info, so it doesn't just wander off into the world)

I will check with my Aunt in Dallas tomorrow for you. She has a ton of Texas stuff going back over 100 years. Maybe she would be willing to part with something.

Bermbits -- If you have enough lead time... a group in our area wrote friendly notes to several well-known authors, asking if they'd donate a book, signed of course. They received several. Apparently many authors, even famous ones, love this kind of approach. It seems like the group had a good PR line, going for books within a specific interest area, I'm sure that helped.

Good luck.

Thanks for the replies. Maybe it's just me, but I DON'T want someone to part with something of theirs (as in JD's aunt's collection). What I envision is as suggested by Piffka, which I will certainly try.

It really depends on how much money you want... and if you were an active fund-raising organization and had auctions every year.

If you can get to the right person, another thing is to ask an artist to consider donating a piece of art... permanently or for a specificed length of time (say ten years). Then you auction off, to great fanfare, the "use" of the piece. If it is a good one, each year it will improve in value both as a piece and as an auction item. So it does an artist a favor too. Many regret selling their early pieces. And who wouldn't want, say a Dale Chihuly in their living room? Especially one which was in the say club president's home the year before... A certain amount of competitiveness is expected. (Insurance, obviously must be obtained.)