Collecting "Antiques" is indeed a broad term. It can cover anything from lamps and music boxes to rocking chairs and old cars. Your choice will be determined by your interest and by the space you have available for your treasures. At the start, at least, you would be wise to confine yourself to one category, say clocks, or lamps, or copper kettles. You may even restrict it further by concentrating on antiques from some definite period of history, or from a limited geographical area, or a combination of both. You might, for instance, collect kitchen furniture of the early American West, or Colonial New England pine furniture, or Nineteenth-century pottery from the Far East.

Unlike collecting items like matchbooks, collecting antiques requires specific and quite considerable knowledge—a good reason to limit your interest when you first start to collect. Unless you really know and can recognize what you are looking for, you run the risk of being "sold a pup." Don't ever go beyond your budget, unless you know as an absolute fact that you are getting a genuine bargain.

There are three good sources of information on antiques: museums, the public libraries, and periodicals. The public library should be your starting point, for what you read will tell you what to look for in the specimens you will later see at the museums, and perhaps at that delightful little country store during a shopping trip. A friendly fellow collector or an interested librarian should be able to suggest some good books as an introduction. The bibliography in the back of this book will provide a few initial suggestions. Raymond Yate's The Antique Collector's Manual, published by Ruddell in 1962, is a worthwhile "Price Guide and Data Book" which offers guidelines in recognizing period pieces and giving comparative prices for various antiques. If you want to keep up-to-date in the field, by all means subscribe to the monthly periodical Antiques, which is published in Westfield, New York, by the Guide Publications Company. If you specialize in collecting pictorial and factual data on old cars, you will be interested in the Antique Automobile Club of America, Inc., at Hershey, Pennsylvania, and its magazine, Antique Automobile.




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March 11, 2010