DALLAS — Poking through antiques stores while traveling through the Texas Panhandle, Bill Waters stumbled across a tattered old ledger book filled with formulas. He bought it for $200, suspecting he could resell it for five times that.
Turns out, his inkling about the book’s value was more spot-on than he knew. The Tulsa, Okla., man discovered that the book came from the Waco, Texas, drugstore where Dr Pepper was invented and includes a recipe titled “D Peppers Pepsin Bitters.”
“I began feeling like I had a national treasure,” said Waters, 59.
Dr Pepper’s manufacturer says the recipe is not the secret formula for the modern-day soft drink or any other. Spokesman Greg Artkop said it’s likely instead a recipe for a bitter digestive that bears the Dr Pepper name.
But the 8 1/2-by-15 1/2-inch book is expected to fetch $50,000 to $75,000 at auction at Dallas-based Heritage Auction Galleries on May 13.
“It probably has specks of the original concoction on its pages,” Waters said. The Associated Press; AP photo
