The Snob Appeal of Antiques

QUESTION: I’ve been buying most of my antiques at flea markets and in shops. The dealers are usually very nice and helpful. But when I’ve gone to antique shows, especially higher-end ones sponsored by one charity or another, I find the dealers helpful but the showgoers off-putting. Why is that? What makes some of them think that I shouldn’t be there just because of my appearance?

ANSWER: Antiques have a long history of appealing to the wealthier set, especially those high-end antiques produced before 1830—what many call “authentic”antiques. In 1930, the U.S. Congress formulated a law which stipulated that all antiques had to be 100 years old or older. So at the time, 100 years old meant 1830, the date selected because of its relevance to the start of the Industrial Age.

When the law passed, the country was in the midst of the Great Depression, so only the very wealthy could afford antiques. It had been that way for well over a century. But after World War II, prosperity came to more people. By the 1960s, the wealthy were still purchasing and collecting those “authentic” antiques, but another type of antique came on the market—the furniture and accessories belonging to the Victorians. And since these were 100 years old, they certainly were antique according to the law, but antique experts and the wealthy didn’t consider them “real” antiques.

The snobbery towards antiques and antique collecting continued as unknowing novices followed articles in “American Home” magazine and bought not-so-good-looking pieces of Victorian and early 20th century furniture at flea markets and used furniture stores, stripped them down, and painted them with “antiquing” paints. Oh the horrors!

As the decades of the latter half of the 20th century continued, more and more old objects came on the market through yard and garage sales and flea markets. Now everyone with a little extra cash and a little knowledge of antiques and collectibles could get in on the act.

The wealthy who frequented the high-end shows stayed right where they were, but now some of those not-so-wealthy collectors began to go to the them for the hefty price of a ticket. Most didn’t buy anything, but they learned a lot. Unfortunately, the wine-glass toting buying patron of these shows still looked down their noses at the newbees.

There are generally three types of antique shows out there---the friendly firehouse or school show, the more elegant hotel show, and the high-end show.

You’ll find the first of these, the friendly firehouse or school show, held in a local fire company hall or the all-purpose room of an elementary school once or twice a year. Here, you’ll find lots of affordable antiques and collectibles. Prices range from as low as a few dollars up to perhaps three figures. Dealers, mostly from the surrounding region, tend to sell only at shows or out of their homes.

The more elegant hotel show comes around usually once a year and features finer items. Tables often display a myriad of small objects—Japanese Imari porcelains, Wedgewood, fine English majolica, and Staffordshire ware, along with small pieces of furniture, trunks, stained glass lamps, and so on. Dealers tend to come from a wider area, including surrounding states while prices range from two to four digits, with finer items selling for several thousand dollars.

High-end shows are extravagant affairs, both in goods and prices, and feature dealers from all over the country. For some patrons of these shows, nothing says they’ve made it better than bragging about how much they’ve spent on an antique, whether it be a piece of fine 18th-century furniture or a diamond necklace that once belonged to a princess. Patrons at these shows often think nothing of whipping out their checkbooks and writing checks for $30,000 to $40,000 for an Empire sofa or as much as a quarter million for an 18th-century Philadelphia secretary in the Chippendale style.



Many of these shows are vetted, which means the promoters guarantee everything sold there as authentic. Where’s the fun in that? Part of the thrill of the antique hunt is being able to tell for yourself if a piece is real or not by the knowledge you’ve amassed about it beforehand, especially when the dealer doesn’t have a clue. But when someone pays six figures for a piece of furniture, they damn well want to know it’s the real McCoy.

Collecting antiques and collectibles is for everyone—young, old, and in-between. There’s something out there for those in every economy level. Let the snobs look down on you in your jeans and trendy T-shirt. How do they know you didn’t just inherit a cool million from daddy.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about  La Belle Epoque in the 2020 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

So You Want to Sell Antiques

QUESTION: I love antiques and have been collecting them for over 25 years and have so many things that my house is bursting at the seams. I’m ready to retire and have been thinking about opening my own antiques shop. Is this a good idea?

ANSWER: Lots of people dream about going into business for themselves. For some, it seems like a way out of the corporate rat race. For others, something to do in retirement. And while an antique shop may seem like an uncomplicated, quiet business to get into, it’s far from it. Remember, first and foremost, selling antiques is a business—with the emphasis on selling.

Many people think because they’ve been buying up a storm at yard sales and flea markets that they can turn around and sell what they’ve bought. Sure, you can put some items up on eBay to sell, but to be successful at selling on eBay, you first have to know what people are buying. Salesmanship is a skill that needs to be learned. And loving antiques has nothing to do with it. In fact, the worst reason to open an antique shop is that you love antiques and have been collecting them for years.

Most people come to consider opening their own antique shop by chance rather than on purpose. More often than not, their road to becoming their own boss begins at local yard or garage sales where they buy items that they like for their home. Eventually, they find themselves buying similar items and eventually begin a collection. This collection leads to exposure to other items which leads to another collection and, soon, another. By now their house is so full that in order to continue collecting, they must resort to selling some of the pieces that perhaps aren’t as good at their own yard or garage sale.

While yard and garage sales are where many antiques and collectibles enter the market, prices can be limited here because buyers are looking for bargains. So ambitious wannabee dealers seek out flea markets where they cannot only sell their items for higher prices but are also exposed to collectors seeking those items. Thus, begins the route to becoming an antiques dealer.

Unfortunately, that isn’t the best route, and it’s why most new dealers fail in their first year or two. While they may get a better feel for what to buy for their collections, they don’t learn to buy salable items—ones that their customers won’t be able to resist.

Many dealers begin by selling antiques part-time. Some of them use this as a sideline business to supplement their regular job. Others see it as a profitable hobby, a way to have the fun of working with antiques and make a little money on the side. A few dealers started out buying and selling antiques simply because their own collections became too large.

To have a successful antiques business, whether selling in a shop, at shows, flea markets, or online, you need to know what people want to buy and then buy those items. What usually happens is that the items people want to buy aren’t the ones they, as dealers, personally like to buy, so they avoid them. For instance, today, the trend is towards collecting items from the 1930s and 1940s. The wannabee dealer, however, likes Victorian antiques and can’t stand Art Deco.

Remember, selling antiques is a business. That means keeping records, learning how to display things so they sell, and developing a network of sources to buy new inventory. The IRS doesn’t look kindly on people who just play around.

For those who really wants to sell antiques, it’s best to start small. Renting a space at a small flea market is informal enough to provide exposure to customers, yet simple enough that prices remain reasonable. A table and a few boxes of items will go a long way. After selling at several of these small sales, often at church festivals or community days, the novice antiques dealer can move up to larger flea markets. If still successful, then the next step is to perhaps inquire about selling at an antiques coop. Here, a dealer rents a space in an indoor antiques mall and shares the duties of staffing the mall.

What many dealer wannabees don’t understand is that it’s vitally important to rotate their inventory. Antiquers tend to go back to the same flea markets or antique malls over and over. If they see the same items for sale each time they go, they’ll just walk right on by. The trick is to rearrange the items on sale and exchange some for new ones. By rotating items in and out of display, it looks like the dealer has more for sale.

Before attempting to open an antiques shop, a dealer needs to have been in the business for some time. As a shop owner, there are many more responsibilities, as well as higher rent to pay. So it’s imperative that he or she understand the business, have good contacts, and a ready market for their antiques.



The best way to develop an understanding of this business is to talk to dealers. Many will be willing to share their knowledge and expertise of the business.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 18,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about western antiques in the special 2019 Spring Edition, "Down to the Sea in Ships," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.

The Magic of Light

QUESTION: Recently I watched a documentary on PBS called “Saving Brinton,” a part of the America Reframed series. It’s the story of a man in Iowa who ended up with one of the greatest collections of early films and projection entertainment equipment and accessories. It centers around William Franklin Brinton and his wife, Indiana, who traveled around the Midwest giving slide presentations and showing early movies, the earliest of which was from 1908. One of his pieces of equipment was a “magic lantern” projector. I had never heard of anything like it before and found it mesmerizing. What can you tell me about a magic lantern projector? How far back did they exist and who invented it?

ANSWER: Don’t feel bad. Most people probably haven’t heard of a magic lantern projector. It was the forerunner of slide projectors used until around the turn of the 21st century. But its history goes far back to the 17th century.

Historians credit Christiaan Huygens,a Dutch scientist, with the invention of the magic lantern in the 17th century. Candles illuminated this early form of slide projector but as technology evolved, a variety of sources from kerosene lamps to limelight and electricity were used. Magic lanterns work like a camera in reverse—they shine light out through a lens and project it onto a screen, with a static or moving slide or slides inside them, between the light and the lens.

The magic lantern, also known by its Latin name laterna magica, projected images painted, printed, or produced photographically on transparent glass plates. People commonly used these devices for entertainment purposes. By the 19th century, magic lanterns began to be used for educational purposes.

The magic lantern used a concave mirror in back of a light source to direct as much of the light as possible through a small rectangular sheet of glass—a "lantern slide"—on which was the image to be projected, and onward into a lens at the front of the apparatus. The user adjusted the lens to focus the plane of the slide at the distance of the projection screen, which often was simply a white wall, on which it formed an enlarged image of the slide on the screen.

Originally, artists hand painted the images on glass slides. They initially rendered  figures with black paint but soon used transparent colors. Sometimes they first did the painting on oiled paper. Usually they used black paint as a background to block superfluous light, so they could project figures without distracting borders or frames. Artists finished any slides with a layer of transparent lacquer, but later on they used cover glasses to protect the painted layer. Finally, they mounted the slides in wooden frames with a round or square opening for the picture.

After 1820 the manufacturing of hand colored printed slides began, often making use of decal transfers. Makers produced their slides on strips of glass with several pictures on them, then rimmed them with a strip of glued paper.

During the 1790s, Thomas Rasmussen Walgensten, a mathematician from Gotland, who historians believe met Christiaan Huygens and from him learned about the magic lantern. In 1670 Walgensten projected an image of Death at the court of King Frederick III of Denmark. This scared some courtiers, but the king dismissed their cowardice and requested to repeat the figure three times. The king died a few days later. After Walgensten died, his widow sold his lanterns to the Danish Royal collection, but they have not been preserved.[9] Walgensten is credited with coining the term "Laterna Magica", assuming he communicated this name to Claude Dechales who in 1674 published about the machine of the "erudite Dane" that he had seen in 1665 in Lyon.

According to legend, Athanasius Kircher secretly used the lantern at night to project the image of Death on windows of apostates to scare them back into church. He hid his magic lantern in a separate room so his audience would be more astonished by the sudden appearance of images.

The earliest reports and illustrations of lantern projections suggest that they were all intended to scare the audience. Pierre Petit called the apparatus lanterne de peur, or lantern of fear, in his 1664 letter to Huygens. Surviving lantern plates and descriptions from the next decades prove that people used these early projectors not just for horror shows, but for projecting all sorts of subjects.

In 1675 Wilhelm Leibniz saw an important role for the magic lantern in a plan for a kind of world exhibition with projections of attempts at flight, artistic meteors, optical effects, representations of the sky with the star and comets, and a model of the earth, fireworks, water fountains, and ships in rare forms; then rare plants and exotic animals.

By the 1730s the use of magic lanterns started to become more widespread when traveling showmen, conjurers, and storytellers added them to their repertoire. The traveling lanternists, called Savoyards because they supposedly came from the Savoy region in France, became a common sight in many European cities.

Thomas Walgensten was the first person to use the term Laterna Magica. He not only realized the technical and artistic possibilities of the magic lantern, but also its economic potential, traveling round Europe demonstrating and selling them.

In the early years of the 19th Century, showmen with lanterns traveled around the country giving shows wherever they stopped. These were known as 'Galantee' showmen, and they would give shows by projecting on walls or white sheets. The subjects probably related to Biblical, moral and current events, and the showman would create stories for the children watching.




The Galantee showmen gave way to the “Professors,” showmen who had access to more elaborate equipment and wonderful, but expensive, animated slides. The development of oxy-hydrogen limelight and arc light made it possible for these projectionists to create huge images and elaborate effects in front of large audiences. The peak of the magic lantern trade occurred in the 1870s and 1880s.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Article section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the other 18,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about religious antiques in the special 2018 Holiday Edition, "The Art of the Sacred," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques & More Collection on Facebook.

Ladeez and Gentlemen! Welcome to the Greatest Show on Earth

QUESTION: When I was a kid, I loved going to the circus with my parents each Spring. There was something exciting and foreign about it—the unusual animals and the performers who seemed to come from all over the world. A while back, I purchased an old circus poster from the Barnum and Bailey Circus and have it hanging on the wall in my den. But I know nothing about it. A friend told me the U.S. Post Office recently issued a new set of stamps featuring circus posters. My interest has been rekindled all over again. What can you tell me about them?

ANSWER: Circus promoters referred to circus posters as "bills" from the early use of handbills, paper, or later, "lithos", whether printers produced them using lithography or not.

Circus owners recognized the notion that "a picture is worth a thousand words." So they incorporated illustrations, which early on took the form of wood engravings, or in some cases cruder woodcuts. Engravings from mahogany blocks, however, were difficult to make and expensive, so printers used them sparingly and repeatedly. The same images would be used over and over again, often for different shows, thus originating the concept of "stock" posters. Circuses produced early show posters in mass, using a single design, often with only a printed title. Other information, such as dates and locations would be handwritten or stamped with ink by circus advance men.

By the 1860's more circus owners embraced the poster as their main means of promotion. And by 1880, the Golden Age of the circus poster had begun.
   
The actual production of circus posters from idea to finished product was a team effort. Some of the most talented artists of the day designed circus posters, but most didn't sign their work. In fact, most printing companies created circus posters as production art--much like the "original oil paintings" available at Airport Hotel Sales. Any number of artists might work on the overall design of a poster. Often, specific artists specialized in certain subjects. For example, a single artist might specialize in lettering while another specialized in horses, and yet another in performer portraits.

Circus posters can be divided into two categories—stock or specialty. Stock posters, generic designs that could be used by any circus, included images of clowns, wild animals, performers, etc.. Show printers would print large runs of stock designs and store them, making them the most inexpensive. Circus owners could pick these out of catalogs and have their show's  title printed on them. It wasn't uncommon for more than one circus to use the same poster designs in the same season. Printed stock posters might remain in storage for years until a printer sold them to a circus to be used. Often posters used during a specific year had actually been printed decades before.

The dimensions of circus posters are important in dating them. Originally, printers based the sizes of posters on the size of their printing press beds, which varied widely. Eventually, printers standardized a unit of measure called a "sheet"at 28" by 42", basing these dimensions on the dimensions of a lithographic stone a single man could handle or carry.

The most common were "one-sheets," followed by "half-sheets" measuring 28"x  21".  "Flats" had a horizontal format, while "uprights" had a vertical orientation. Printers also produced various multiple sheets, with corresponding multiple dimensions. They produced larger multiples in rare instances, including 100-sheet posters and larger. Printers determined the kind of bill by the combinations of sheets.

Even though printers produced circus posters cheaply by the thousands, they used high quality medium weight woven paper, usually bleached to a bright white color, even though posters were printed in volume and used briefly. Also, printers used oil-based inks for printing circus posters because they were often hung outside.

In the mid-1970's, Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey adopted a policy of using only a single poster design for each edition of their circus, often incorporating a variety of featured acts or attractions in the design. By the late 1970's, few circuses even used posters, and many shows opted to use window cards only, which could be placed indoors or simply be stapled to telephone poles outside.

Probably the greatest image ever produced for a circus poster design was that of a leaping tiger, designed by the noted illustrator Charles Livingston Bull in 1914. This particular image may well be the most recognizable circus image in history, and it’s still in use today, often appearing in set and costume designs in current productions of the Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey Circus. Bull's original poster image, however, doesn’t bear his signature.

Generally speaking, circus posters can sell anywhere from $30 to $375.  With such a broad range, collectors must take the specific circus, date, and condition into consideration. At the low end might be a mint Famous Cole 3 Ring Circus poster with black type on yellow stock for $30. At the high end might be a rare Cole Bros. Circus from the Erie Litho. & Ptg Co., of Erie, Pennsylvania, bearing the title, “Cole Bros. Circus Presents Quarter- Million Pound Act of Performing Elephants–The Most Colossal Train Animals Display Ever Presented” for $375.

Although circuses continue to thrill youngsters, much of the promotion is now done using T.V. and radio ads and discount coupons handed out in supermarkets. The days of posters plastered on the sides of buildings are long gone.