The phrase "Rearranging the deckchairs on the Titanic" is often used as an indication of folly. But what do those deckchairs actually look like? Few folks have seen them in person.

On Saturday, however, a wealthy collector managed to get his hands on one. Not a replica, but an actual deckchair that was sitting on the Titanic—specifically, on the first-class promenade—when it sank.

You're probably wondering how it subsequently wound up on an auction block in the UK's Wiltshire some 102 years later. Here's how:

Immediately following the Titanic's sinking, ships local to the crash were commissioned for the grisly business of picking up the bodies. One such ship was the Mackay Bennett, a cable repair ship out of Halifax. And in addition of picking up bodies, the crew also fished wreckage out of the water, and some of that wreckage turned out to be furniture. "The Mackay Bennett's log confirms that the crew not only picked up deck chairs (plural) but that the ships carpenter spent time repairing some of them," writes the Henry Aldridge & Son auction house.

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One of the sailors on board took home the Nantucket chair you see here as a macabre souvenir, and following his death it changed hands several times until arriving at the Aldridge auction house.

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While you'd imagine that everything on the Titanic was custom-built for that ship, the surprising thing is that this piece of furniture is actually second-hand:

Titanic deck chairs were actually a collection of chairs taken from other White Star steamers [and] they bore no characteristic design attributable exclusively to the Titanic. Some bore the distinctive White Star Line Company star carved into their headrests while others did not. Significant variations in the design were evident as well. Nevertheless, known examples of Titanic deck chairs did exhibit certain aesthetic similarities. For instance, all the chairs showed a comparable overall structural style. They all had seats which were caned and seat frames which were interchangeable in the event the seats became damaged.

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Speaking of damaged, this one had been so badly damaged that one of the previous collectors never sat it in, but used it as a display piece in his home. Now that the mahogany chair has been professionally restored, however, it fetched top dollar at this weekend's auction: The Guardian reports it sold for "just over £100,000," which is more than US $150,000. That probably called for a rearranging of finances.