Antique stores: "ZOMG, look at all the wonderful treasures of yesteryear!" or "ZOMG, look at all the old crap!"?
Extra credit: For those in either camp, what's the best thing you've ever acquired at an antique store? Regular readers will know that I'm in Camp One, but I know a lot of folks who are in Camp Two.
The personal blog of author Kelly Sedinger, chronicling the adventures of one overalls-clad wanderer.
6 comments:
I tend to see antiques stores as if they were museums. Lovely to look through, but I can't take anything home. I think I worry too much that anything I brought home would be ruined by me somehow.
Camp two. I find going through garage sale items the equivalent to picking up cooties.
That said, I have found some old 45s in years past.
Antiques: "ZOMG, look at all the wonderful treasures of yesteryear!"
Most antique stores: "ZOMG, look at all the old crap!"
I'm definitely in Camp One. I really get off on wondering who sat in this chair? Who ate off this plate? Who treasured this book... The personal history of everyday things fascinates me.
The best thing I've ever acquired from an antiques store was not the most expensive thing (that would be a walnut partners desk from the 1860s, which I no longer have due to a relationship breakup). It is a bound copy of an Eybler choral score from St. Stephen's in Vienna. Eybler was a student of Mozart and took his post as kapellmeister when Mozart died (Mozart never lived to fulfill the post).
The score was typesetted by hand and has several ink blobs and scratched out mistakes in it. I found it in a box of old books in a tiny shop in Santa Paula, California, a most unlikely place, and paid a whopping $7.00 for it.
Wonderful, but I've never bought anything from an antique store and rarely go in them. Strange. People claim that the Nearby Small Town has "over 200 antique stores" but I would guess it's closer to 50. So it's not like I don't have all the opportunity in the world. I guess I don't go because I don't have anyone who wants to go with me. Shopping alone isn't as much fun.
Definitely Camp One.
Though there are some times when I go into an antique store and go, "wait, they want $25 for the Happy Meal toy that I had when I was 10 and threw away because I got bored with it?" Not that I'm sad I threw it away so much as I don't really think it's worth that.
Plus a little bit of feeling old because something I owned has shown up in an antique store.
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