Actually such a "closet find" was the reason I registered here in the first place. I just copy/ paste parts of the post:
Hi everybody!
As the title says, I´m searching for some infos on a pool cue I got my hands on. But since I´m a snooker player, I`m not that familiar with pool cues, brands etc., so I hope someone here can help me.
But at least I can tell you the backstory on how I found this piece:
My name is Chris, and I`m from Austria, Klagenfurt (hometown of Albin and Jasmin Ouschan) and I`m working in a hotel in a near town.
Although this hotel is quite new, there is still an old building next to it, which was the original hotel and dates back before 1860. Well, they want to tear off the old and not used hotel and since there was till some stuff in there, we decided to look through the rooms to see if there is something in there which still can be useful.
And there I found said cue. Obviously it is nothing fancy, has a bit of a curve in it and I guess it is some kind of house cue, but I still think it is a bit uncommon. I don`t really know how old it is, but since the building wasn`t used for at least 40 years and we found much older stuff in there...well, I guess it is quite old.
Back then, nobody could really tell me what I had found. Meanwhile I did some research and wrote a mail to a guy who owns a billiard museum in Vienna.
He told me that my find was a 100-120 year old "Kaffeehaus Queue", translates to something like "Coffehouse cue", you know the old Viennese coffee houses of the pre WW 1 era. But since the cue had some nice inlay , he estimated it to be a special cutom made piece for a wealthy person, maybe a KuK official or someone in the austro-hungarian army.
I didn't ask for the price and I don't really want to know it. Maybe its valuable, maybe not...but I consider it my treasure