Private collectors and museum storage units yielded up several unusual pieces at auctions in 2012 that are now headed for public view. The New York Times highlights these noteworthy sales, and a few are given below:

1. Four 1880s Herter Bros. gilded chairs, made for the Vanderbilts and held for decades in the storage of a Texas museum, sold through Charlton Hall Auction for a total $363,000 to New York dealer Margot Johnson. She will give three to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

2. Important 1930s letters from the Frank family, set to sell through Doyle, were bought before the auction by the Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

3. The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY, has acquired an extremely rare, early blue glass creamer, probably made in Philadelphia, with a coin embedded in it. The date on the coin: 1794. The consignor's family purchased the piece in the 1860s and dealers Gary and Diana Stradling paid $82,600 for it at Northeast Auctions in Manchester, N.H. before flipping it to the Corning Museum.