RALEIGH - One after another, potential sellers walked into a small meeting room at the Crabtree Marriott on Friday where a conference table served as a sort of altar to the past. On it, they placed their offerings: a vintage guitar, an autographed baseball, an early 1940s arcade game.

Across the table sat Nick Gervasi and Rick Kohl, cold-eyed, cash-only judges of historical miscellany, to whom there is no such thing as sentimental value, only market value.

"How much were you hoping to get for this?" Kohl asked Henry Poole, who was considering selling the 1946 Martin 0-18 guitar his father played at dances around Cleveland County with Flatt and Scruggs before they were Flatt & Scruggs. Poole had taken the instrument from its case and it lay, scarred from years of play, silently on the table.

Seems like it ought to be worth $5,000 to $6,000, Poole finally said. Kohl was prepared to give him $500.

In a recession, even memories aren't worth as much.

Gervasi and Kohl, buyers for The Great Treasure Hunt, a collectibles dealer in Winston-Salem, spend two to three weeks a month on the road like this. They set a travel itinerary and run ads in local papers asking, "Do you have cash in your attic?" Much of their trade is in sports memorabilia, but they also want to see your vintage toys, old movie posters, mechanical banks and pretty much anything you have that bears an important autograph.

Sometimes, 30 people are waiting in line to see what these two men think their prizes are worth. Items the men have purchased line the walls, lunch sits on the table in room-service trays, and the place has the feel of a pawn shop, minus the old stereos.

Sometimes, Gervasi and Kohl say they don't see 30 people all day.

Gervasi, who has worked at the company for 18 years, says that when the economy turns down so does the market for collectibles. He is already seeing some of that, he says, and when he can't resell items for top dollar, he has to pay less for them.

When times get tough, he said, "The first thing that people stop buying is the Mickey Mantle baseball card, because they don't have to have it."

The Internet also can depress prices, Gervasi says. Before, for instance, sports trading cards were sold mostly at card shows around the country, and at each show there might be only one of a certain player from a certain year, so it would sell at a premium. Now, everybody who has one can advertise it on the Web.

"Turns out there's a whole bunch of them," Gervasi said. "Something that was really rare turns out not to be rare at all."

In sports, scandal can also cause values to tank. Before Mark McGwire was tainted by allegations of steroid use, he was a big-ticket collectible whose 1985 Topps rookie card was worth $3,000 in 1998. It's now available for less than $10.

Even so, Matt Congleton was insulted by Kohl's $300 offer for a baseball signed by the 1938 Philadelphia A's, including Jimmie Foxx and Connie Mack.

"I just had it on eBay and got an offer for $2,500," said Congleton, of Raleigh, who said he was holding out for more.

Cecil Ashmead thought the circa-1943 shooting game he rescued from a decrepit former arcade near Roanoke Rapids would be worth $300 to $500. Called the Challenger, it was basically a 2-foot-long wooden box with a toy gun at one end that fired round bullets at target holes at the other. Ten shots for a penny: toink, toink.

Kohl punched a few key words into his laptop and found two like it on an Internet auction site that had sold for $110 and $150. He could offer Ashmead $75 for his, at most. Ashmead turned it down.

Kohl said he sees a lot of items like this, "Really cool, just not worth very much."

Too bad. Ashmead has 10 more of them in his attic.

Poole, who brought in the Martin guitar that belonged to his daddy, took his treasure back home, too. He couldn't let it go for a song.