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I Am Steamed

Saturday, January 1, 2011

Steampunked that is.  After two years selling articulated workshop lamps and multi-socket clusters, flat white shades and caged trouble lights to the New York industrial crowd I went over to the dark side.  May of last year I had an opportunity to buy a group of industrial sewing machine lamps perfect for the fabrication of customized industrial style table and floor lamps.  After picking up some cast iron gears, belt wheels, and spigot handles at my local flea, I attached them to the sewing lights in the manner of many dealers servicing the new passion for industrial style.  Even though these sorts of creations have been de rigueur in New York and San Francisco for several years, no one was making them in Boston so I figured I would give it a try.

 

I like to make things.  One of the reasons I restore and sell antique lighting is because working with tools and metal I find more interesting than sitting in a library doing research as some in the antiques business must.  After thirty-five years, I have built up a decent repertoire of skills.  With industrial lighting, I had to develop a new set of skills.  I was now working with steel and cast iron, which require sand blasting, wire wheeling, and welding.  I had to find welders and machine shops to do those things, which were beyond my abilities.

Within four months, I had built twenty-five lamps enough to do a show and see how the public would respond.  Not very well, I discovered after doing two shows in downtown Boston.  The lights have a great wow factor, people liked them, they just didn’t buy them.  I, however, was hooked and encouraged by the few I sold out of my shop.  Publicity was what I needed.  I pitched the style sections of my local newspapers in hopes of getting someone to write an article about this new thing I was doing.  Soon enough the Boston Globe wrote a wonderful full-page article, which brought in many new customers.  This is when it got weird.

a-steam-2A man named Bruce Rosenberg contacted me and asked if I would be interested in coming to the opening of a Steampunk exhibit, he and a group of artists were putting on at the Waltham Industrial Museum.  The term Steampunk was new to me.  Someone had referred to my lights as Steampunk and I had done a bit of research.  Steampunk appeared to be mainly a young adult fashion statement.  Bowler hats and goggles with drop down lenses, Victorian puffy dresses, and jewelry made of watch parts.  I was not sure what it had to do with my lights until I went to the show.  

A hundred and fifty people, most over the age of thirty, gathered in the old Waltham Watch factory, which several years ago had been turned in to a museum of early industry.  Closed for renovations after a flood—the museum sits right next to the Charles River—this exhibit heralded its reopening.  A motorcycle all stacks of tubes, curving wires, and what looked like a kitchen mixing bowl, puffed steam and dripped water in the front entry of the exhibit.  Its maker in leather pants, buckled leather vest, and multi-studded ears explained that the motorcycle was part steam and part electric power.  Nearby I heard the a-steam-3sounds of a blues guitar riff, which emanated from an electric guitar tricked out in Victorian carved furniture appliqués, steam gauges, and the, I now recognized as ubiquitous, clock parts.  Steampunkers often reference the H. G. Wells book The Time Machine and, like the movie cliché of backwards running clocks, in the Steampunk clockwork motifs stand as a metaphor for looking back in time.  In the exhibit is—the exhibit will be up until March of 2011—a vintage cast iron stove meticulously resorted by David Ericson with a functioning hot box where you can build a fire but, if time is limited, there is a seamlessly install Mele electric stove top.  The most ingenious—if I can say this of a group of all fantastically ingenious objects—is a pinball machine. It wheezes and dings like an old trolley when the ball strikes the bumpers but holds an important message.  The point of the machine is to recreate the original experiment, which searched for the precise amino acid combination that created life on earth.  That hitting the proper combination is, as explained by the inventor, a one in a ten million chance demonstrates the remarkable improbability of our existence. 

 

a-steam-4After seeing his exhibit, I felt inspired and, returning to my lights, began to produce some with superfluous additions of gauges and tubes, augers and clock faces.  I still make many simpler form following function lights but I cannot resist the lure of invoking the aesthetic of a time when, unlike today’s digital gadgets with all their functions hidden inside microscopic silicone brains, machines looked like machines.  A time when you could see how a machine functioned just by watching it.  Imagine the action of a piston turning a gear, which in turn moves a rocker, which throws a shuttle back and forth in frenzied motion this accompanied by the hissing voice and curling cloud of heated water expanding into steam. 

 

 

 

 

 

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Consumed or Consuming

Saturday, September 4, 2010

curio-shop

Consumed or Consuming

By

Christopher Osborne

 

I shop for a living.  I am an antique dealer.  I also sell but it is the searching, digging, discovering, and acquiring that draws me to my profession.  Stepping into a disused nineteenth century barn, descending into the basement of a neglected old house, prying open the cobweb-sealed lid of a steamer trunk shoved in the eaves of an attic, these are my frontiers, my urban archeology.  I spend hours on the road going from antique shop to antique shop, flea market to flea market.  I even keep an eye on the trash stacked by the curb.  You would be amazed at what I have pulled from the trash.  On the road, I buy antiques, oddities, and collectables, filling my van, store, garage, and home with things to sell and things to keep.

 

My study is a Dickensian curio shop containing close to three hundred personal objects, perhaps more, and over four hundred books.  There are thirty-eight Art Nouveau figural lady lamps, twelve modernist lamps, and thirty-five art nouveau desk trays.  In addition to these, I accumulated several small collections of fifties craft artists when the mid-century trend took hold in the early nineties.  I can drop their first names Doris (Hall), Maurice (Heaton), Fredrick (Weinberg), and Guido (Gamboni), into conversations with collectors as if these long dead artists had just munched toast tips with brie on my patio.  The objects in my study, occupying the floor, shelves, windowsills, and tabletops, range from the beautiful: an exquisite art nouveau vase depicting a nude woman emerging from a field of daises.  To the surprising: an intricately carved seashell lamp with Chinese dragons grasping a ball.  And the weird: a quack medical device, a cloth helmet sprouting antennae and electrodes.

 

I love showing off my collections and enjoy the awed and admiring comments they inspire.  Recently, however, I received a not very welcome comment from a friend I had not seen in years.  Scrutinizing my study with the look of a biologist come upon an unfamiliar species, she said, “You’re certainly the sort of consumer who keeps our economy afloat.”

 

shrek-dollConsumer?  I have never considered myself a consumer.  Consumers buy plastic lawn chairs at Wal-Mart, slicer-dicers off television, and Shrek dolls on the first day of release.  They buy liquid silver and cubit zirconium and adhere to trends and fads.  I occasionally sell to consumers.  When Martha Stewart takes some weather beaten old thing, paints it white, and sticks it on the cover of her magazine a shockwave resonates through the antiques business as we all scramble to find more of whatever it is.  I sell these consumer antiques to Martha’s flock.  To equate my collections with consuming with all its glutinous undertones I found demeaning.  If she had called me a recycler, I could have lived with that.

 

My friend is an estate planner, a financial knit-picker.  She makes her client’s money perform tricks commanding it to rollover and retrieve profits, like a well-trained schnauzer.  She speaks elliptically of basis points and cost basis, and calls my jar of pennies a nonworking asset.  I was remembering why I hadn’t seen her in years.  I explained to her the difference between my gallery of rare and rarefied objects and my neighbor’s accumulation of techno toys.  I pointed out the distinction between preserving the past by amassing artifacts and amassing shoes to preserve the status quo.

 

“Consumers buy compulsively,” I said, “they buy because they are bored and it gives them a thrill.”

 

“You never get excited when you buy?” she asked.

 

I must admit that I do experience a rush whenever I discover something exceptional.  When, with the flourish of a magician, a seller pulls away the packing quilt in the back of his van, sparklers ignite my brain.  If for example, the object beneath happens to be a massive Victorian filigreed eight-arm combination gas and electric chandelier with two-toned original patina, my brain explodes.  It is in these moments when involuntary impulses agitate my fingers as I reach for my wallet even before knowing the price.  I will break into a sprint when a sighting is yards away, slapping my hand on the object as I skitter up to it, like a base runner grasping for home plate.  These are not, however, the compulsive actions of a consumer.  No, not at all.  They are the survival tactics of a highly competitive business.  I resist the notion that my collections are the product of a desire to shop.  I am a connoisseur, an aficionado, a lover of beauty.  That this love has no bounds is because the beauty of the past abounds.  This is my conviction and I’m sticking to it.   

 

 

 

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Of Shops and Dogs

Saturday, September 4, 2010

peace-love

Of Shops and Dogs

By

Christopher Osborne

 

At the time, 1970 I was twenty-one, when the owner of an antique shop threw my stepfather and me out of his store, I did not know that I would eventually become an antique dealer.   

It seems I’d always liked old stuff, I’d even sold a few things scavenged from my job at Morgan Memorials, but I really didn’t consider antiques a viable occupation for me.  Workin’ on my cool, not workin’ for the man, was where I was at.  

My mother and stepfather, Ernie, lived in New York and I visited them often just for the opportunity to hang around one mythic location from a song lyric, “standing on the corner of Bleeker and MacDougal wondering which way to go.”  This one line seemed to encompass all of my generation, which in so many ways stood indecisively at a crossroad.  I assure you, my attraction to the village had nothing what so ever to do with the hoards of long hair hippy chicks wearing peasant blouses and glassy eyed stares, working in the head shops there, and wondering around Bleeker and MacDougal as if it was Mecca in Manhattan. 

One evening when visiting my parents, Ernie and I, wondered into a tiny antique shop in Greenwich Village.  Whatever our destination, I most likely suggested a route that took us directly through that hippy haven.  The shop occupied what had been the front room of a turn of the century townhouse, the room now crammed with several upright showcases and these crammed with knick-knacks.  The cases contained things popular with a new generation of collectors accumulating throwaway objects from the recent past.  Vintage Coney Island prizes, early bus tokens, key tags, and tin wind-up toys, all neatly displayed under glass.  Like so many shops in the village, the place also offered head gear mixing pipes, rolling papers, and peace signs in with the antiques.  

Ernie was not averse to poking through antique shops he collected stamps.  He spent hours poring over stamps encased in velum envelopes in the dingy cubbyholes clustered in Manhattan’s numismatic district.  Ernie thought the only things worth collecting had to have intrinsic value.  He used to tell me that if you collect coins and they lose their collectable value, you could still spend them.  If your collection of stamps didn’t go up in value, you could use them to send a letter.  Sterling silver and gold will always retain their scrap value he constantly reminded me.  You might say his collecting had a certain hedge fund quality to it.  True to Ernie’s standards, after he died and we liquidated his better stamps, my mother still had several boxes filled with sheets and pads of first day covers of no special worth.  For years afterward, I received letters from her so plastered with two and three-cent stamps they nearly obscured the address.  The stacks of worn silver dollars we found among his possessions had no more value than scrap, but at five dollars each.  Ernie would have been quietly thrilled that his old stretched-out gold watchband came to a startling $500 dollars in scrap.  

The objects in the shop that night were not what Ernie considered worth buying and like so many New Yorkers who seem to feel that the power of speech automatically endows them with not only a right, but an obligation to express their opinion, he told the owner.  When the bearded bushy haired man offered assistance Ernie said to him, “I am just amazed at what you are asking for all this junk we used to throw out.”  I was familiar with his tone.  Ernie could be one sarcastic SOB.  I could also tell he felt disappointed that he hadn’t saved this stuff so he could sell it to all these numbskull collectors.  The shop owner did not take Ernie’s comment well.  Raising his voice, he said he worked hard at what he did and he did not need someone coming into his shop criticizing him.  He demanded that Ernie leave shoving him towards the door.  Outside, Ernie got off an indignant drop dead at the guy as if this would salvage his dignity.  Straightening his coat Ernie shrugged his shoulders in a, some people just won’t listen to reason, sort of way.

I stood on the sidewalk embarrassed and stunned.  The shop owner’s reaction did not seem to reflect much peace or love.  I’d witnessed Ernie’s rough treatment of waiters and shop owners before, but as far as I knew, getting himself tossed out was a first.  Ernie could be demanding and narrow and opinionated.  He did not tolerate what he considered fools or foolishness.  It wouldn’t be until many years later when my antique shop started to show some success that I would feel as though I had finally earned his respect.  And, when I angrily threw someone out of my shop, I remembered that previous event.  It felt ironic to me to be on the other side of the equation and overreact in a similar way. 

Throwing someone out of your store is never a good idea and, if necessary, one should handle it with dignity.  However, “I am sorry sir but you have deeply offended me, would you please leave my establishment,” are words said only in English movies.  As shop owners, we are on poochesdisplay and it is hard not to take criticism of our shops personally.  What we choose to sell, where we choose to sell it, and how we choose to display it, generates from who we are.  As they say about people and their dogs, the owner often resembles his or her shop.  If an attractive young woman emerged from the back room of a shop selling early medical devices you would most likely assume she must be the daughter of the owner.  The burly old man surround by old lace, dust ruffles, and crochet curtains would be watching the shop for his wife.  The shop with pinking shear price tags attached with red yarn, the shop collaged in rusting farm tools nailed to barn board, the formal shop, the jumble, the shop with narrow aisles and withering multitudes of objects, the art gallery style shop with three objects to a room, the monochromatic accumulations, the blizzards of color, the manly shop with pipes, padlocks, and model airplanes and its opposite with pillows, comforters, and brocade these shops are all expressions of the fussy, rustic, traditional, disorganized, acquisitive, artistic, restrained, expansive, and gender loving aspects of its owner. 

With all this personal expression going on it is only human nature that we would be as protective of our shops as we would be of our children.  After I tossed that man out of my store for rudely criticizing the restoration of my antique lighting (my specialty for the last thirty-five years) I wished I had shown more restraint.  But I must admit I probably enjoyed it more than I should have.  There is satisfaction in feeling completely justified in your actions and besides if I don’t defend my shop, who will?    

 

 

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When Thirty-Five is Not Thirty-five

Saturday, September 4, 2010

munakata

When Thirty-five is not Thirty-five

By

Christopher Osborne

 

This is the story of my mother’s greatest success in the antiques business.

When my mother and stepfather moved from New York to New Hampshire in 1978, they both started dabbling in antiques.  Like many retirees, the antiques business became an excuse to fill the house with stuff, as they bought and kept ten items for every one they sold.  For my stepfather, who started acquiring sterling, it was an “investment.”  For my mother, who haunted auctions until the bitter end buying box-lots of kitchen utensils, knick-knacks, costume jewelry, and photos, it was borderline compulsive.  An artist herself, my mother acquired art, particularly Oriental art, eventually learning a fair amount about the specialty and eventually covering every inch of their new walls. 

One evening at auction, she bought a late printed Audubon book for fifty dollars.  “It should have sold for ten,” she grumbled to me on the phone,   “I knew the under bidder, he had no idea what was inside,” which my mother did know.  Tucked in the pages, she’d noticed a block print by the Japanese artist Hiroshige and a drawing in the style of the Japanese artist Munakata.  I pointed out that she got a good buy anyway but she continued to be rankled by people who “have money to burn.”  My grandfather, a Congregationalist minister, raised my mother to respect the godliness of thrift.

At the time, Mom typically made one trip a year to New York and to the oriental department of Christie’s auction house bringing them her previous year’s accumulation of purchases.  When setting up the appointment, she told the curator about the drawing she suspected was by Munakata but that it did not have his usual signature.  Being a contemporary artist, Munakata typically signed in English longhand where the drawing only had Japanese calligraphy down the side, none of which showed up in her books as his signature.  “Then it is probably not by him,” the curator said putting her off the idea of bringing it.

She did well with her consignments that year getting fifteen hundred at auction for the Hiroshige print and good profits, although not nearly as spectacular, for the other items they took.

A year passes and she plans another trip with another group of items this time including the drawing, as she wanted to see what Christies thought of it.

The curator’s eyes grew large when he came on the drawing unceremoniously tucked in with the other items.  “Do you know who this is by?” he asked.

“I thought it might be Munakata,” she answered, “but it doesn’t have his signature.”

“There it is,” he exclaimed pointing to the calligraphy, “in Japanese.  Where did you get it?” he asked and she told him.  The curator agreed to place the drawing in an upcoming auction along with several other lots by Munakata, indicating that interest in the artist was heating up and suggesting a thirty-five hundred dollar reserve, “Would that be acceptable?” he asked.

Mom could not resist telling him, “I paid fifty dollars for it.”  To which, according to my mother, the curator sighed and grinned.

By the day of the auction, Mom had mentally spent all the money and more, working herself up to anticipation of the drawing doing even better than expected, “His pieces have gone as high as ten thousand,” she told me on the phone.  I encouraged her not to spend it all until she had the money in hand.

The day after the auction, she called Christies and asked for the results.  They told her the lot brought thirty-five and as I feared, she was disappointed.  “Mom you made five thousand dollars total on a thirty-five dollar investment,” I pointed out, “not to mention the fifty dollars you got for the book.”  I am not sure it helped.

A few weeks later, I got a call from her.

“Can you believe it, I thought Christies had made a mistake they sent me a check for thirty thousand dollars minus the commission,” she said.

Suspecting that my mother, who has never handled large sums of money, may have heard it wrong the first time I asked, “When you called did they say thirty-five hundred or just thirty-five?”  I asked.

“She said thirty-five.  She was very abrupt.”  Mom probably launched into the story of how she bought the drawing and the woman at Christies had better things to do.

“That’s rich-people speak for thirty-five thousand.”  I told her still only half believing it myself.  “Call and confirm.”

“I have and they did,” she said to my surprise.  I ignored the fact that she didn’t lead with this detail assuming she held it back in order to recreate for me her entire incredulous experience.

“That’s great!”  I said.  “What are you going to do with the money?”

At which point my mother, who has always had the knack of seeing the cloud lurking around every silver lining, a tendency she calls her dry wit, then sighed deeply and said, “I suppose I’ll have to pay taxes on this now.”

 

 

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Sundays at the Norton flea Market (Part one)

Monday, June 15, 2009

flea

By Chris Osborne/Citylights

 

It is the first Sunday of April, opening day.  I must get to the flea market before dawn.  If my car is not the first one in the parking lot, I feel I have already missed the best stuff.  I tell myself this is a ridiculous feeling.  It doesn’t help. 

In the dim light, I can just make out what looks like bears looting a campsite fumbling with furniture, and pawing through boxes. 

I park the car and pull from the backseat my broken-in black leather coat bought at Goodwill and the brief case with a sign “Maxfield Parrish Wanted” taped to the side.  Shrugging into the coat, I reach to flip my ponytail out from the collar forgetting I had cut my hair the week before, it still covers my ears but no longer falls to half way down my back.  I have been shedding the tribal regalia of the hippy life-style for a while now.  The coat, however, with its double breasting and epaulets, the military style ironically adopted by my antiwar generation, will be last to go.  I flop an Irish tweed cap on my head in an attempt to look countrified, although in the U.S. these caps are an affect of the Vespa crowd, and besides Norton is hardly the country.  Fifteen minutes from Taunton, Norton is a suburb, but I am a city boy and any more than ten trees looks like a forest to me.       

fleamarket-drive-iinJittery from several coffees poured thermos to mug, mug balanced on dashboard as I sped down route ninety-five, I grab my flashlight, and head to the last of the thirty or so rows where dealers who don’t have a permanent booth set up, providing the greatest opportunity for inexperienced new comers selling something for much below what it is worth.  I start with a quick run through to see who is back, who is new, and who got a good house call, all the while racing through lists of styles, categories, notables, and constituent parts, as though cramming for a final, starting with my specialty: illustrators.

Children’s book illustrators:

Pyle-Crane-Greenaway-Denslow-Parrish-Rackham-Nielson-Wyeth-Kent-Dulac

Magazine illustrators:

Phillips-Rockwell-Lyndecker-Anderson-Erte-Petty-Vargas

Poster illustrators:

Mucha-Livemont-Holvein-Bradley-Reed-Cassandra,

Furniture styles chronological:

Jacobean-William and Marry-Federal-Adams-Sheridan-Duncan Fief-Chippendale-Queen Ann-Gothic-Rococo-Renaissance-Aesthetic-Art Nouveau-Arts and Crafts-Bauhaus-Art Deco-Depression-Art Modern-Streamline-Pop

Types of Desks:

Tambour- kneehole-cylinder-roll top-“S” and “C”-Larkin-Eastlake

waldo-flea-marketNorton is a true flea market meaning that it is a mix of pro and semi-pro dealers, yard sales, retirees, hobbyists, part-timers, and cleanouts.  The last being someone with a truck who, for a fee, will cleanout an attic or basement, and stops at the flea market to sell some of it, before taking the remainder to the dump.  What they all sell, what they spread out on the tables, on the ground, on the car hood, or hang from the car mirror falls into generic categories and it all looks the same no matter where you are in the country.  The miscellaneous furniture: chairs, couches, desks, and tables; the mismatched kitchenware: dishes, glasses, pots, and flatware; the herds of miniature: cats, dogs, frogs, and penguins; the worn out libraries: books, magazines, records and tapes; the baby residuals: clothes, bassinettes, cribs and toys; the souvenirs of vacations, schools, holidays, and jobs; the crafts projects: paintings, pot holders, pasta wreaths, and popsicle stick lamps; the halfhearted New Year resolutions: exercise bikes, diet books, golf clubs and ashtrays; all evidence of a fervent Yankee-like frugality devotedly following that eleventh commandment “Thou shalt not discard anything useable.”     

impeach-bushThe difference between buying at an antique show and a flea market is that buying at antique shows is like shooting animals in a pen.  In the spring, however, fresh “merch” emerging from hibernation in attics and basements sniffs the outside air for the first time at flea markets.  Tracking down that which others don’t see, don’t know, or don’t recognize, competing with dealers over who totes the bigger gun of expertise and experience, this is hunting, this is rewarding. 

 I am looking for stock to sell at antique shows: Art Deco, the hip new collectable; illustrated children’s books, an expertise I picked up collecting Parrish; and of course, I hope add to my Maxfield Parrish collection. 

falling-fenceHow do I explain to people who don’t collect what it feels like to be a collector?  We collectors care for our collections and our collections take care of us, providing purpose and meaning.  Until they have experienced it themselves, non-collectors cannot imagine the gripping, tingling, drug-like rush of discovery, a spreading warmth comparable to returning home, encountering a lost love, or winning a fortune.  These comparisons may sound overblown, trite, and emotionally shallow in connection to a collectable, which is why they are so brief.  Once it is on the wall, resting on a shelf, or snug in a showcase, the tingling wears off, and we begin again to stalk the next trilling moment of discovery.  In the antique business we say, “Collecting is all about the next object.”

std-2I often think about how people accumulate, acquire, consume, collect, and just plain hoard.  I have rummaged in houses with narrow paths through mountains of stuff, stuff mortared with newspapers and buttressed with stacks of magazines, houses looking like the den of some burrowing animal or nest of some great scavenging bird.  I have been in shops that were little more than catch basins for the flotsam of some up steam torrent of household cast offs and the flea market provides an outlet for a bit of dross skimmed from the top.

Why do we want so much stuff?  Are we are responding to a misfiring synapse, filling voids in our personality, following a genetically imprinted primordial survival instinct, or over-compensating for a childhood of poverty?  I don’t know.  The nature of my own acquisitive virus is as yet undiagnosed.  But we fill the house, then fill the garage, then rent a storage locker and fill it, then forget to pay the rent on the locker, have a yard sale, or drop dead and it all goes cheap to someone who takes it to the flea market and sells it to people filling houses, garages, and storage lockers. 

I am twenty-five and I don’t know it yet, but today I will engage in one testy confrontation, experience one huge disappointment, and find one fabulous thing.  It will be a good day.

 

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The Strange Nature of Lightning

Thursday, May 28, 2009

 

th_treeName: Paul Horan

Years in business: 18

Name of business: J. Edmund August Antiques

Email address: teekphoto50@yahoo.com

Specialty: Antique photography, frames, Arts and Crafts furnishings, Art

 

“Own nothing that you do not believe to be either useful or beautiful” William Morris

 

The Strange Nature of Lightning

By Paul Horan as told to Chris Osborne

 It is a fact that in the antiques business, lightning sometimes strikes in the form of a fantastic good buy, and it is also a fact that we will test that law against lightning striking the same place twice and return to the spot hoping to be electrified by good fortune again. It was for this reason that my first stop, five AM, opening day I walked into a booth at Brimfield, a booth I had reentered numerous times since fortune struck there. At this point, I knew the proprietor’s name, John (not his real name);  he referred to me as “Rocking Chair” in honor of my purchase of a Stickley rocker from him, as though I needed to be reminded of that object sold to me at one tenth of value.

Scanning the booth for the umpteenth time, beginning to feel that a second strike was never to occur in this particular fishing hole, my eyes fell on a framed Curtis photo, “The Vanishing Race”, easily worth thirty five hundred dollars and an object well outside the jewelry and sterling John usually sold. Certain that I was about to land the score of the century, I attempted to get John’s attention precisely when, as though anticipating my request, he pulled the piece off the wall and to my surprise handed it to another dealer, saying in his thick Brooklyn brogue, “A nice picha of Indians,” as though offering him lemonade

The dealer said, “It’s a photo,” a little sleepy, a lot smug.

“That so?” said John

Canyon de Chelly by Edward S Curtis

Canyon de Chelly by Edward S Curtis

As the man inspected it, I tried not to press against his back peering over his shoulder at what was supposed to be my prize. Why did he deserve this luck, had he religiously returned to this site time and time again as I had?

I signaled John that I would like to see it next.

“Rockin’ chair, how ya’ doin’?” John greeted me smiling.

“How much?” The dealer asked, and I was afraid that all my return trips were about to be made pointless.

“Tree hundr’d ‘n fity,” answered John, again with uncanny accuracy hitting precisely one tenth of value. I clung to the remote hope that even though the person holding it was capable of distinguishing a photo from a print he might not notice the photographer’s signature beaming from the corner like a neon sign.

“Too much,” he said and my chest swelled, the fortune mine, and dutifully, pointedly, John pulled the photo from him handing it towards me, the dollar signs cascading before my eyes as I groped for it.

“The most I can give you is two thousand,” the dealer quickly added, the object pulled from my grasp, a gasp bursting from my throat.

John stepped back, blinked, shuddered, his expression nonplussed-plus. The dealer reiterated, “Two thousand is the most I can pay.”  More than I could pay, his offer brushed me off like a bug.

John replied slowly, precisely, as though speaking to someone who did not understand English.

“You_will_give_me_two_thousand_dollars_for_this?”

The man looked annoyed, even though his offer was low in comparison to the thirty-five hundred he thought he had been quoted; it was nevertheless in keeping with offers typically made at Brimfield and he appeared to feel his did not deserve to be laughed at. Testily he mimicked John.

“Yes_I_will_give_you_two_thousand_dollars_for_it_cash.”

John shot me a hard look that seemed to threaten the next ten generations of my family with watery graves if I said a word, then returning to his benefactor, John jolted as though touched by live wires, “Give me the money!” he shouted practically throwing the photo at him.

I watched the hundreds counted into John’s hand.

Later when I tried to overcome my disappointment at missing this sleeper, I soothed my feelings by ruefully dwelling on how the dealer screwed himself for not being awake enough, not having had enough coffee that morning, not paying enough attention to know when lightning was striking him. I also felt good for John; whenever someone makes a huge mistake, such as when John sold me that rocker, I think you have to be pretty mean not to feel just a bit guilty and seeing John come out ahead was as though he and I got squared. That it was at someone else’s expense was like, well, being hit by lightning.

 

 

 

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Objects I Enjoy

Thursday, May 14, 2009

171 By Chris Osborne/City Lights

My rule is this: three or more of something is a collection which means that I collect many things even though most of these collections started unintentionally. I bought a vintage plastic water pitcher at a flea market, round and deep red, and stuck it on a shelf in my kitchen. I later found a matching one in blue then one in green, yellow, light green, black, light blue, and purple. They line up on the shelf like a gaggle of chicks.

My tastes run to cheap because I don’t want to collect something that is a stretch to buy, I may feel compelled to sell when I need money, and because it is surprising when cheap objects have good design, as though the drudge at the factory whose job it was to crank out utilitarian designs suddenly had a flash of genius or a good day.

170 Above my collection of plastic pitchers, I have a collection of Czechoslovakian animal pitchers. I like looking at these although it has been ten years since I have found one I do not have, making them disappointing to collect.

Collections need to consist of things you can find; things so rare that years pass between discoveries will not satisfy most people’s impulse to collect.

As you might expect, as an antique lighting dealer, I collect lamps. I have a small group of modern-style lamps, a few stained glass lamps, and several “chunk jewel” leaded lamps I prefer to conventional stained glass because they are weird and macabre and resemble glowing coals.

174I collect Art Nouveau lady lamps, mostly American made. Unlike the realistic European lady lamps, which start out as sculptures by fine artists, American lady lamps are less artistic and, as it is with real women, a lack of sophistication is often appealing.

I also collect desk trays depicting women gracefully flowing with sensuous Art Nouveau curves.  These go well with the lady lamps, and I have always felt that there can never be too many beautiful women around.

Most people collect things at the beach: beach stones, beach glass, seashells, bits of coral, suntans, sunburns, and half-read novels. I narrowed my search to stones with a single contrasting stripe always looking for that one perfect stone with one perfect narrow line, I have one that approaches my ideal, it sits on my night table and gives me pleasure every time I look at it.

189Then there is my collection of Longwy porcelain, started as replacement parts for the porcelain components on 1880′s Aesthetic style gaslights, and now grown to more pieces than I will ever need. I have a group of glass by Maurice Heaton and brass statues by Frederic Weinberg, both picked up over the years with the intention of resale, and currently parked on shelves in my study.

I, like most antique dealers, sell things that appeal to me. What I buy, what attracts my eye, what holds my interest long enough to learn about it and all other objects like it, will have something in it I respond to; and if occasionally objects linger in my home for a while or longer, it is only understandable and unavoidable.

191There are objects in my home that have been with me for years, they may fade into the background, I may even forget I have them, thereby allowing me the delight of discovery all over again: a three-dimensional wood Dubonnet ad, a Frank Art striding figure ashtray, a poster by Livemont, an Egyptian motif domed glass desk thermometer, a lithographed cigarette tin, an oriental carved seashell lamp, a pair of Art Nouveau vases with women at a waterfall, all of which for me the pleasure of viewing never diminishes.

If I had to pick one object that surprisingly still continues to give me pleasure after all the years I have owned it, if you asked me to choose, and I made the choice without feeling guilty for making a poor choice, or fear of appearing naive, lowbrow, or unsophisticated, if I was not trying to impress you with my selection and only tried for a sincere response, I would have to say it is my glass boat lamp.

198It is a cheap dime store novelty, a single casting of glass representing waves and the hull of a boat, a slight remnant of red paint on the bow, a single chrome mast screwed to the top carries two cut out sheet metal chrome sails. The frosted glass has the texture of a Jujy Fruit, the color is a delicate pale blue, the cake frosting waves resemble a charging ram and dramatically carry the boat up and forward. When I look at this, I think about the person who designed it with, I assume, the intention of making several hundred if not thousands, although I have only ever encountered one other. I wonder, was its graceful design the product of the designer’s innate artistry such as those skillfully hand carved farm implements that hang on the walls of primitives shops or was there some feeling on the part of the designer that surfaced that day, resulting in his or her one inspired design of the thousands of uninspired designs he or she would execute in a lifetime, that moment of inspiration diluted by mass production, until time’s careless destruction left only one to be contemplated and appreciated and possibly understood.

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It’s Not Just the Cats

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

img_6204Name: Jerry Gordon

Years in the business: 25

Shop name: Fun Antiques

Shop address: 2230 Mass. Ave. Cambridge, MA 02140

Specialty: Midcentury furniture

Focus: vintage watches, jewelry, musical instruments

Email: mnkbiz@yahoo.com

Web site: Not yet

 

“It’s Not Just the Cats”

By Jerry Gordon as told to Chris Osborne

 

House calls always bring the unexpected and this one confirmed my suspicions about what really goes on in the suburbs.

It was a Friday at Sadie and Company Antiques where Michael and I sublet space from the owner Elaine. We were working about as hard as two guys can sitting on a couch in the middle of the shop, chopsticks in hand, facing a coffee table covered in Chinese take out containers, when Elaine walked into the shop scowling at the realization that the first sight to greet any customer who happened through the door of her shop at that moment would have been the two of us kicked back on the couch blissed out on Kung Pow, a condition she had been exposed to numerous times over the last fifteen years but which she never seemed to become reconciled to.

“Jerry, come on, I got a house call and need a hand,” she said.

Over the phone, Elaine had negotiated a deal with Brad Hummer (not his real name) in Easton (moving to Vegas) for a bunch of Heywood Wakefield furniture. The only thing that would nix the deal would be if the pieces were not in good condition.

We arrived at a circa 1950’s ranch, two floors with a car port, and rang the bell. When the door opened the smell of cat pee, which must have been percolating inside for hours building pressure, rushed out at us, a smell so strong it made my eyes water. I had been in plenty of houses with over powering animal smells but this was the worst; it was making me light headed.

Brad waved his cigarette in the direction of the woman beside him, introducing her as his wife Sheri;  she waved her cigarette at us. Brad was short, skinny, mid-thirties, and probably always had thin hair and probably always made up for this by letting it grow long. He had one of those loose beards that just look dirty and strands of greasy hair ran half way down the back of his white tee shirt. Sheri had a good three inches and thirty pounds on Brad,  half the extra weight residing in two large breasts that were playing tug of war with the neck of her tee shirt: the shirt was losing. A herd of cats milled around their feet.

They invited us in and we all crowded onto the landing of the split level, stairs up-stairs down, waiting to be instructed where to go. The decision was made to start at the bottom and work our way up.  We marched down the stairs. 

Brad told us an uncle left him the house, contents, and a dozen cats, which got along just fine with the eight cats they already had. Brad informed us that the uncle had been a wrought iron welder and all the iron work in the house was created by him. A piece of the former owner’s handy work resided in the dining room surrounding the table and chairs with an ornate cage people like to refer to as a “Grotto.”

Stepping into the dining room my foot kicked something, sending the cats bounding after it, slapping and playing with what looked like a piece of hot dog but I soon realized was a dried up bit of cat turd.  The entire floor was covered with turds, and Sheri was clearing a path for us with her foot.

When I saw all the cats I anticipated that this was going to be a waste of time as houses filled with cats always have furniture either clawed to death or soaked in piss. The HW dining room set, however, was in good condition leading me to assume that all the cats had been inhumanely declawed. My true sympathies lying with the HW,  I breathed a sigh of relief in its direction.

On a house call, the people generally fall into two categories: those who are not ready to let go of their stuff and those who are. The Hummers fell into the second:  they couldn’t get rid of it fast enough. They offered to sell us every object in the house: the grotto, the lawn furniture, the dinette set, and the dozen overflowing ashtrays.  Sheri offered one up to me as though it was dish of mixed nuts.

Satisfied with the dining room set we headed back up the open wrought iron stairs, also made by the former owner who had either died before its completion, or omitted installing a hand rail for aesthetic considerations. I hugged the wall, my vertigo increasing as the stairs curved up to the second floor.

The front room was enormous,  the full width of the house. At one end was an old Bell and Howell 16mm film projector and a screen. I like this early equipment and figured the old gent must have used it to bore guests with home movies, a stack of which still sat on the shelf underneath the projector.

“How long ago did you get this place?” I asked assuming it was recently and nothing had been changed

“We’ve lived here for about three or four years now,” Brad answered, causing me to wonder if the old guy would have been shocked at the way Brad and Sheri had turned his place into a dump.

At the other end of the room was a giant rear projection TV, a VCR on the shelf below, and a scattering of VHS tapes on the floor. In between these two generations of home entertainment was a field of mattresses.  Couches lined the walls facing the mattresses and prominently in the middle of the room was a tall undulating chaise lounge covered in orange velveteen. A ray of recognition slowly broke through the haze of cat stench clouding my brain and I looked again at the VHS tapes now recognizing their lurid flesh toned covers and, spinning around to the projector, I recalled the first 16mm films I owned. I stopped myself from blurting out “Orgy room!” Immediately images of Bert and Sheri entered my mind that I couldn’t get rid of fast enough. Suddenly I realized that Elaine had disappeared into the bedroom with Brad, her parting words being instructions to make sure the cats hadn’t “done” anything on the chaise, my concerns suddenly being what Brad and Sheri had done on it.

Sheri took me around the room, trying to sell me whatever I was willing to take,  flicking ash at the movie projector, the couches, the TV, the VHS films.  “You into those?” she asked. Her cleavage was winning the battle with her tee shirt, a little brown crescent signaling that a breakout might be imminent; I worried about where these offers were leading. I knew that Elaine wanted me to make sure that the cats hadn’t pissed on the chaise but there was no way I was going to turn my back on this woman or stick my nose into anything.

“How’s the chaise?” Elaine asked, finally emerging from the bedroom counting out the cash Brad had insisted we bring.

“Oh it’s fine yup, just fine,” I said. I’d caught a quick sniff when Sheri’s back was turned. I shifted my eyes side to side hoping to signal Elaine, who up to this point was completely oblivious to the room’s function.

“What?” she said screwing up her face, “its okay isn’t it?”

“Yes the chaise is fine,” I answered.

Elaine handed Brad the cash and she and I went back into the bedroom to get the set.

“It’s an orgy room,” I whispered as we picked up the bureau.

“Jesus, Jerry, is that all you think about,” she said.

“Check it out,” I insisted as we stepped back into the room. Passing through it Elaine got a good look around her eyes slowly getting larger, her lips curling in disgust.

Eager to get into breathable air and normalcy, we couldn’t get out of there fast enough, which even though the stairs had no railing and were more that a bit hazardous, we managed without killing ourselves.

Once everything was loaded, we said goodbye to the Hummers.

“Enjoy Vegas,” Elaine said.

“Oh I’m sure we will,” said Bert, “the swinging scene there is much better than it is here.”

Elaine hesitated, lost for words, I was once again chasing unwanted images from my head. “How nice for you,” she said with a warm smile, then getting into the van, “How nice for Vegas.”

 

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He Who Laughs Best, Laughs Last

Monday, April 20, 2009

basket-of-lastsName: Robert Werner

Years in business: 18

Former president Antiques on Cambridge Street

Currently selling at: Bob Withington & Co York Me. and Acushnet River Antiques, New Bedford Ma.

 

He Who Laughs Best, Laughs Last

By Robert Werner

 

A few years ago my friend Rex E. Pough (also an antiques dealer) and I were driving from my shop to his workshop to pick up a particular type of socket wrench necessary to repair a cast iron table that needed adjusting.  On the way, we passed a lumber yard which was going out of business and sported a sign advertising a huge sale. There was hardly any lumber left in the building but in a corner were piles of wooden shoe lasts.  I inquired about the price and was told we could purchase the entire lot for $25 which we did.

Upon returning to my shop, we divided the lot.  On the following morning, I drove to southern Maine where I also sold my stuff in a small group shop.  I brought 10 of the lasts to that shop and the shop’s owner bought them from me for $5.  He said he would buy all I had for 50 cents apiece. On the next day, I mentioned this to one of my partners in our Cambridge shop and he also wanted the entire lot.  I sold him one bag of them containing about 50 lasts for $25.

wall-of-lastsA few days later, I set up at Brimfield where I thought I might be able to get $3 a pair however, I was only able to sell 22 of them for $1 apiece.  My Cambridge partner set up in a different Brimfield field the next day and didn’t sell a single last.  I called the Maine shop owner and told him I could probably sell him whatever Rex E. Pough, my Cambridge partner and I had leftover but now the price was $1 apiece.  He agreed so I bought my partner’s and Rex’s lots for 50 cents apiece, brought the entire lot, now containing 178 lasts up to Maine and the shop owner purchased them from me.

The following week, the Maine shop owner informed me that they were going to sell the entire lot to a dealer whom they called “the fat man” for $4 apiece.  A week later, they told me that “the fat man” would only pay $3 apiece for the lasts. Some time later, I was told that “the fat man” backed out of the deal completely so my Maine friend and his partner still owned them.  End of story!

 

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How To Become an Antique Dealer: Collect Something

Monday, April 20, 2009

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By Chris Osborne/City Lights

I guess it was because we already felt different that caused the specific group of us to congregate on the Boston Common in the early seventies, most of us from working class families, and blue-collar neighborhoods outside of Boston. Some of us, as was my case, grew up on welfare. Whatever our origin, we came to the wide asphalt path that ran along Beacon Street to skate board, although not one among us would have been mistaken for an athlete. Mostly, we hung out.

It was here I met my first wife Deborah Johns. Deb came from the rough Italian blue-collar neighborhood of East Boston, wore only black, and made up her eyes Twiggy-like with dark shadows and drawn in lashes she called her “sticks.” In her high school yearbook picture, Deb’s long dark hair falls around her face, and she holds her mouth cocked in the skeptical smirk that I would come to recognize as her near permanent expression. That smirk and her constant use of the phrase, “Yeh, right,” were how Deb let you know that she never accepted anything on faith. Soon we were living together, and now domestically situated I needed to find a steady job, once again, turning to my old friend Chaunce.

At the time, Chaunce was working in a used furniture store in Brookline and, as we already had the experience of moving antiques together, I went to work with him.

The store overflowed with couches, chairs, dining room sets, and sideboards. Pictures of cow littered fields and thatch roof cottages crowded the walls, but among them was one that attracted my attention for its depiction of a paradise without manure and the possibility of farm work. In it, two large columns framed a view of a lake, rocky cliffs beyond. An attractive young woman lays stretched out on a patio in the foreground, a nude sexually ambivalent figure bending over her. This person might have been waking her up but the picture gave no impression that they really had anything important to do. Finding myself drawn to the picture I wondered why: there was a great deal of small detail which I liked, and deep rich color something I also liked, or maybe I had just been looking for something to become passionate about and found it in Maxfield Parrish. I bought the picture for three dollars.

It is a romantic notion that most people like to think of their lives as pivoting on a single chance event. The reality is that most of the people I know prefer to think of their lives as carefully planned. My life, however, has always felt like the result of the sorts of events that lead to the “what-ifs.” What if I didn’t take that job with Chaunce and never saw a Maxfield Parrish?

Chaunce pointed out an article in the paper about the guy who painted my picture, it said he recently died and the Vose gallery in Boston was selling the family estate.

I went to the Vose gallery. Seeing the oil paintings in the rarefied setting of a Newbury Street art gallery was somewhat intimidating although they were very nice to me and showed me their entire collection of about twenty-five Parrish oil paintings as though they thought I might actually be able to afford one. I should mention that the paintings, which sell for tens of thousands today, were as low as five hundred dollars, but then, gas was thirty-five cents, a Mustang convertible twelve hundred, and I typically lived on less than fifty dollars a week.

The gallery had a list of collectors of Parrish illustrations and among them was Horace Tailor in Brookline. I called and, like all collectors, he was eager to show me his collection.

Over the phone, Mister Taylor proudly told me he was eighty-two and when I arrived at the rambling Victorian house, a slight, energetic elderly man wearing a brown suit and bow tie answered the door. Fortunately he didn’t seen at all put off by my ponytail, long side burns, and informal jeans.

Inside, the house had the thick soupy smell of over-cooked cabbage, and from the hall, I looked into the living room, which was dark and brimming with heavy furniture, tall Chinese vases, and curio cabinets.

“That’s my sister’s room,” Horace said, then added as though it was all I needed to know, “She’s ninety.” I would never meet her, but at times, thought I detected her presence in the house.

Horace steered me around towards the dining room and into an entirely different environment, this one crowded with hundreds of stuffed birds. Like the final scene of Hitchcock’s movie when the birds stop attacking as mysteriously as they began, these birds sat silent and watching as I entered the room. In dense congregations, small brown birds watched from glass cabinets, large speckled ones spread wings on top of the cabinets, and other birds huddled together beneath the cabinets, tables, and chairs. I gawked like a tourist in Times Square. Horace explained that he was an ornithologist and during the Depression when he gave talks, rather than money he accepted birds as payment.

I was considering saying something clever like, “Too bad, you couldn’t eat them,” as I reached out to touch one.

“Don’t touch them,” Horace gently warned with a wink. “Some of the older ones are filled with arsenic powder and we don’t want to stir that up now do we?”

Dust covered everything in the room. I tried not to inhale.

Occupying the rooms along with the birds, there were old toy trucks, stuffed animals on wheels, and on the dining room table sat a huge model of a manor house constructed of hundreds of individual clay bricks, lintels, and arches. I wondered if I was observing a second childhood although once I knew Horace better it felt as though he had never quite advanced beyond his first.

Horace showed me around the house where evidently the family never threw anything out. Tufted, tasseled, crenulated, and laced, the sumptuous detailing of the Victorians was evident on every surface. Curtains thick as blankets hung from fat wood rings around speared end rods and on the walls, the faded cabbage roses were so plump they seemed to bulge. This décor, so reminiscent of ancient grandmothers, may have been where I detected the presence of Horace’s sister, in the chairs with rounded backs, their fringe brushing the floor, and in the threadbare upholstery, which, like psoriatic elbows, exposed a matrix of tiny veins.

In what I assumed was simply more pride of personal history Horace showed me the nursery where, “I and all my brothers and sisters were born,” but I think he wanted me to have my first glimpse of Parrish since, around the top of the wall of the nursery, in what was one of the weirdest product placements I have ever seen, was a Maxfield Parrish Fisk Tire advertising border, depicting a witch-like Mother Goose in a black cone hat, astride a goose flying through a tire. This design repeated about fifty times around the room. I was eager to see the collection.

Horace’s collection was in a small adjacent bedroom. Haphazardly piled on the floor, on the bed or leaning against the wall, the collection was neither displayed nor protected. Only a couple of framed prints actually hung on the wall.

Parrish painted in minute detail and used dramatic effects of color and light. He painted with so much deep rich blue that in the twenties people called saturated blues, “Maxfield Parrish Blue.” In the movie Top Hat, Fred Astaire says of someone’s black eye, “It looks like Sunrise by Maxfield Parrish.”

Parrish did one particularly blue picture called “Stars,” a copy of which hung on the wall of the bedroom, and was the first thing I saw when entering. At over two feet tall, it was one of the largest of the framed prints, and the overall impression is of only one color, deep blue. In the center, a nude woman sits on a rock, the rock jutting out like a hand gently holding her aloft. She holds her knees up to her chest. A still ocean is in the background and a pale horizon almost cuts the picture in half. It is the moment when the sun passes below the horizon and as they say, “the stars come out.” At the top of the picture are tiny brilliant white stars against the darkest blue sky and the young woman looks dreamily up at them. I found it romantic and sensual. I wondered what the men and women of the prudish twenties thought of it. I supposed, to the intellectual crowd of the time who would have been declaring allegiance to Picasso and Braque, this was just commercial piffle. I knew this would be the judgment of my artier friends, such as Chaunce. I guess I was more easily impressed, and because of the simplicity of the emotional message and composition, I became absorbed in the picture in a way no work of art had ever affected me.

Horace perched on a chair while I went through everything. He did not seem to care what I picked up. While I foraged, he kept up a breezy monologue of what things were, how he obtained them, and what he knew about Parrish and the gossip about his relationship with his model.

In that room were all of Parrish’s characters, the knaves and jesters, portly jovial kings and fawning attendants, beautiful women in flowing gowns and young men in jaunty feathered caps along with Parrish’s signature nude and semi-nude women beside streams, below foliage and under starry skies. As though attending a language immersion class in a foreign country, it was both thrilling and intimidating to me.

Maxfield Parrish illustrated twelve books, over two hundred magazine covers, and did ads for Der-Kiss perfume, Swifts Ham, Fisk Tire, Hires Root Beer, and Mazda Light bulbs as well as others. He did oil paintings, such as “Stars,” for publishing houses that reproduced the paintings and sold them as “Art Prints.” Parrish was paid commissions from the sales of these prints and “Daybreak,” that first one I purchased, was the most popular, it alone ultimately making Parrish over a million dollars in commissions. Horace had almost everything, some things in multiples.

The most extensively illustrated book by Parrish is a children’s play called “The Knave of Hearts.” Horace had enough copies to launch a production.

One advertising commission Parrish undertook was a series of fourteen calendars for Edison Mazda light bulbs. The calendars had the store’s name printed on them and came in two sizes, a very large one to hang in the store, and small ones to be given away free. Horace started collecting Parrish in nineteen-fifteen when he could order the large calendars through the mail and pick up the small ones at stores for free. He had two complete sets of the large still in their mailing tubes and fist-full’s of the smaller.

His collection included an unused Hires Root Beer billboard five feet high and eight feet long. This was folded in a mailing envelope and he had two of them. I think it is very likely he had the only two of these in existence.

The hard part for me was that everything in the room was for sale and I didn’t have very much money.

Over the next two years I made three trips to Horace’s collection and purchased some very rare things such as a Hires Root Beer window card since I had no place to display the billboard nor the three hundred dollars to buy it.

Part of the point of collecting, however, is to find things on your own, not to mention cheaper, and the competitive spirit that drives all collectors took hold of me. I hit the bricks or in this case, the muddy fields of the Norton flea market.

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