Double Your Money in Antiques by Grotz George

Author:Grotz, George [Grotz, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Publisher: Random House, Inc.
Published: 2010-04-06T21:00:00+00:00

Regional Sellers

And the trucks are out there rolling

every day of the week

There are many people—usually families—that make a living in the antiques business by simply moving antiques from one part of the country to another. With the big boys even moving them from one continent to another.

This is made possible by the fact that we are a regional country, with each region having a different cultural history.

One of the most obvious examples of this regionalism is that an old ox-yoke that sells for $25 in Nova Scotia because it’s a pretty common object will be bought in Texas for $250 to $350 because, as I pointed out earlier, Texans like to hang one over their mantelpiece and claim that it is the very same ox-yoke that their great granddaddy used when he came to settle the state. The same thing goes for old wooden farm-wagon wheels from anywhere in the back country of the Eastern states. Buggy seats are another hot item in Texas, as is anything made out of oak, which Texans consider to be Early American. And because of this, the trucks are rolling back and forth from Providence, Rhode Island, and Wheeling, West Virginia, out to Texas every day, Saturdays and Sundays included.

Another fundamental regional preference is that of American Empire furniture of the Victorian Era, which is much in demand in Georgia. This is the bulky pine-covered furniture with good figured mahogany veneer and simple round curves, which is just old furniture everywhere except in Georgia, where it is the style the South refurnished its houses with after General Sherman burned all the stuff they had before that. So the trucks roll back and forth from New England to Atlanta with that.

Victorian oak furniture also sells for three times as much in the Midwest as it does in the states along the Eastern coast. For the obvious reason that the Midwest was settled after the Eastern states so that oak is what Great Granddaddy had when he started his tool factory or hog-butchering plant.

Primitive furniture sells best in Virginia and the Northeastern states.

And what do you think goes at a premium in southern California? Strangely enough it is ornate, rococo French chests, bureaus, clocks, chandeliers—the stuff you see in movies about decadence in the French court of Louis XVI with Marie Antoinette telling the peasants to eat cake (hardtack) and all that.

Oak furniture, I should also note, sells very high in Manhattan. Just in the center of New York City, not even in the suburbs of the city, and certainly nowhere else in the East.

Also, folk art sells three times higher in New York City than anywhere else. Three times is the average markup on it between the antique flea market at Brimfield, Massachusetts, and The Fall Antiques Show on Pier 90 in New York City every October. (See the section on folk art in Part II.)

All the unwanted clocks, boxes and bric-a-brac that have come to this country from central Europe and Germany end up in a group of dingy starvation shops in Delray Beach, Florida.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.