For those whose passion is searching high and low for
prize antiques, the coming weeks in Lincoln City will be a little bit like Mardi Gras.

An entire week devoted to the timeworn items of the
coastal city west of Salem will take place Feb. 8-18. The week also will see special events such as glass floats hidden on the beach, a scavenger hunt and a
theme focusing on the town’s namesake, Abraham Lincoln.

“It’s a unique time for people to come out during a
time when all the dealers are featuring their best antiques,” said Scott Humpert, public relations coordinator with the Visitor and Convention Bureau of
Lincoln City. “One of the things about antique dealers is they sometimes have odd hours or are open on odd days.

“But this is a time when everyone is open, everyone
is promoting and there’s really that feeling of the thrill of the hunt, of  finding a different deal. It’s nice to have an entire week rather than just one day.”

 While Lincoln City’s 80 antique dealers will be the
stars of the show, the town also is highlighting three major events.

One of the recurring events is the hiding of 100 pieces of contemporary glass art and 300 antique Japanese glass floats on the town’s beaches for people to find and keep.

There’s also a weeklong scavenger hunt that will take
participants on a search into nine different businesses.

And, last but not least, there will be a number of
Abraham Lincoln-themed events.

The North Lincoln County Historical Museum will be
showing an exhibit highlighting the 16th president’s connection to Oregon (despite the fact he never visited it to Oregon) from noon to 5 p.m. Feb. 13-17.

There also will be screenings of the movie “Abraham
Lincoln in Illinois” at the Historic Bijou Theatre and a performance of the play “A. Lincoln” at the Lincoln City Cultural Center.

All of the events, of course,  are intended to
highlight the antiques.

“It’s really not one single event but an entire week
of different promotions,” Humpert said. “The focus, though, are the antiques. Lincoln City has been called one of the best secret antiquing spots in the country, and during the week, we really live up to that.”

Zach Urness has been an outdoors writer in Oregon for
five ears and blogs at statesmanjournal.com/section/outdoors. He can be reached at zurness@StatesmanJournal.com or (503) 399-6801. For more news, adventures and trips see Our Oregon Outdoors on Facebook or ZachsORoutdoors on Twitter.

Source: www.Statesmanjournal.com

I found a great article about Woonsocket, RI on the Boston Globe's website. I encourage everyone to read it!

http://bostonglobe.com/lifestyle/2013/01/29/woonsocket-blends-industrial-history-with-culture-and-dining/YRwQB4Ri5bFCaUlFaAqtWL/story.html

A new antique store has opened up at 107 W. Main Street in downtown Elkin.

Kim and Mark Smith head up Antiques on Main and bring more than 22 years of  experience.

“I love antiques; (I’m) totally am into hand made items too,” said co-owner  Mark Smith. “What’s special about antiques is that you can buy items and use it, stuff you can’t find in a big box store.”

“I like character in the items,” said Kim Smith. “I like seeing pieces that  you can use.”

Both are familiar with Elkin.

“Elkin has a great downtown, especially with its location,” stated Kim. “I grew up my whole life in Surry County and lived and went to school in neighboring Dobson.”

“I grew up in a tobacco farm in Benham,” said Mark. “I’ve spend plenty of  time in Elkin. It’s a great city and we love the people and downtown community.”

The couple admits that it can be a difficult business, especially in today’s economy.

“We’re here though. We’re making the investment, and we’re staying for the  long haul,” said the couple.

The business owners have already began to sub out the shop to local antique  dealers who rent booths in the store.

“Doing so brings variety,” said Kim. “Not everyone likes pieces that I like.  Now they have options.”

The couple has experience ‘picking’ too, an antique term given to dealers who  shop an pick items of interest. One such item is a dresser from the 1830s, a  mahogany piece with extreme craftsmanship and dove tails.

Items are being shipped into the store gradually, informed the owners.

A prized personal possession to the Smith’s is a wooden sugar firkin, a tool  used by bakers of the 1700’s. The item was picked in Virgina.

“It’s a primitive measuring device for bakers,” said Mark.

When asked how you would make use of the item today, a grin-filled Mark  responded, “You set it on your window as a decoration and look at it.”

Antiques on Main is open Monday through Saturday from 10:00 AM until 6:00 PM  and on Sunday from 1:00 PM until 6:00 PM.

Source: www.elkintribune.com 

NAPLES, Fla., Jan. 28, 2013 /PRNewswire/ --
US Antique Shows, a division of GLM and the nation's leading producer of antique and antique jewelry and watch shows for the consumer and trade markets, is
expanding its portfolio with the acquisition today of the Miami National Antiques Show & Sale from Dolphin Promotions.

The Miami National Antiques Show features 150 exhibitors annually, presenting a wide range of quality antique furniture, decorative and fine arts. Now in its
36th year, it is one of the longest-running antique shows in south Florida, an international antiques marketplace during the winter season. The next show will be held January 24-26, 2014, at the Miami Airport Convention Center.

Dan Darby, GLM Vice President and US Antique
Shows Group Director, said, "The acquisition of the Miami National Antiques Show & Sale further strengthens US Antique Shows' unique position to deliver well-timed and ideally-located shows to support the southeast Florida
antiques marketplace."

The acquisition also creates a strategic tie between the Miami National show and US Antique Shows' Original Miami Beach Antique Show.

Andrea Canady, US Antiques Director of Business Development, explained, "Because of the Miami National show's proximity to The Original Miami Beach Antique Show, many dealers and buyers participate in
both events. Producing both shows will allow us to develop more distinct and comprehensive selling opportunities for dealers, while broadening the reach for
each of these two well-established events."

For more information and announcements regarding the Miami National Antiques Show, go to www.miaminationalantiqueshow.com.

About US Antique Shows
A division of GLM, US Antique Shows produces fairs in Miami Beach, Las Vegas, New York and Los Angeles, and draws annually more than 1,500 dealers exhibiting merchandise to nearly 30,000 consumers and retailers. Additional information is available online at www.USAntiqueShows.com.  

About GLM
GLM creates face-to-face and online buying, selling and
networking platforms for consumers, dealers, retailers, designers, and product developers, through consumer and trade shows, as well as online community  development. GLM's shows include The Original Miami Beach Antique
Show, the New York International Gift Fair®, the International Contemporary Furniture Fair®, the National Stationery Show, and Surf Expo, among others.  Additional information is available online at www.glmshows.com.

Source: www.bizjournals.com
 
 
 

PLANT CITY --
Antiques and Treasures was the winner of the Plant City Downtown Business and Merchants Association's second annual contest for the best window decorated
for the holidays.

The store at 107 N. Collins St. won $65 for winning the Christmas-themed contest. The contest was decided based on votes from shoppers.

"We wanted to bring attention to our downtown shopping opportunities as well recognize merchants and businesses who add to the holiday look and feel by decorating their display windows," association President Darcy Stottlemyer said.

Gail Ogden, one of the shop's owners and the one who decorated the window, accepted the check from the association.

Source: www.tbo.com

Hasbro Games, the makers of Monopoly, recently announced that the lineup of beloved player tokens will be enhanced by a new updated token. Based on player
votes cast on its Facebook page, the company will soon cast aside one of the original tokens. Voting will take place until Feb. 6. If you want a special Valentine’s gift for your loved one with the original tokens, then consider buying the “Golden Token” Monopoly game with all of the original tokens available in mid-February at Target stores.The eight classic Monopoly game pieces include the racecar, thimble, shoe, Scottie dog, battleship, top hat, iron and wheelbarrow. Those player tokens harken back to the early days of Monopoly and demonstrate the culture of America in the 1920s-30s. Back then, players selected tokens based on their jobs or
cultural relationships. For instance, women typically selected the thimble token and farmers took to the wheelbarrow. The Scottie dog was a symbol of politics as
suggested by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s favorite canine of the breed.

But times have changed, so it’s time for some new tokens.

The Monopoly game was originally used as a teaching tool at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business to educate students about the world of
finance and the buying and selling of real estate holdings. The game evolved in and around the cities of Germantown and Reading and, over time, the game was
offered for sale by Charles Darrow. With a playing board that suggested street names from Atlantic City, N.J., Monopoly has become a part of the American
experience.

Initially, Parker Bros. rejected the game, saying that it was too complicated to play and took too long to complete. However, the company heads changed their
minds and purchased the rights to the game, and Monopoly was first marketed by the company in 1935. Today, Monopoly is the most played commercial board game in the world. It is licensed in 80 different countries and produced in 26 different languages.

 In February 2011, one of the earliest versions of the Monopoly board game sold for a whopping 90,000 pounds in the United Kingdom. The circa 1933 game set
on circular oilcloth measures 33 inches in diameter with hand painted squares highlighting streets, avenues and railroad depots. It was produced by the hand
of Charles Darrow. It is one of only 5,000 game sets ever produced, and it is said to be the last surviving example in existence.

To cultural historians, the Monopoly game token choices are a sign of the times. Now, 2013 Monopoly players can choose new tokens including a robot evincing our contemporary interest in robotics, a diamond ring showing our cultural love affair with bling, a cat which is the pet that many report is a worldwide favorite, a helicopter highlighting advancements in air flight like
the newly introduced cargo “blimp,” and a guitar maintaining that it is always cool to be a rock star, no matter the era. Personally, I was surprised that a
cellphone was not a new token option since we are all connected to those objects on a daily basis.

Don’t let “chance” decide which token remains on the board for your next game of Monopoly. Go vote. 

Source: www.centredaily.com

Entering the 59th Winter Antiques Show, at the Park Avenue Armory, is like  time-tripping back to the Gilded Age. You might say it’s always that way at this
august fair, where collectors can purchase all sorts of fine and decorative arts objects for their multiple homes. (The rest of us, primed by “The Heiress” and
“Downton Abbey,” can nurture fantasies.) But it’s especially so at this version of the show, which celebrates the Preservation Society of Newport County in Rhode Island and evokes that area’s landmark mansions.        
 
Linda Rosier for The New York Times An Andy Warhol “Jackie” (1964), a work on canvas being shown
at the Geoffrey Diner Gallery booth.                  
 
Front and center is a loan exhibition, “Newport: The
Glamour of Ornament,” which consists of art from eight Newport homes; it has been installed in an elaborate pavilion modeled on the Breakers, a Vanderbilt residence. The design (by Jeff Daly, a  former senior design adviser to the director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art) takes advantage of the Armory’s high ceilings by featuring a photographic backdrop of the mansion’s Great Hall that rises above the surrounding booths.    

Among the imposing works inside is Giovanni Boldini’s
full-length portrait of Elizabeth Drexel Lehr (later Lady Decies), a gamin  beauty ambushed later in life by Weegee in his notorious photograph “The Critic.” Here too are a silk brocade ball gown by Charles Frederick Worth and sculptures by Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney,
founder of the Whitney Museum of American Art.        

These items, and the others in the loan exhibition,
aren’t for sale. But those wishing to buy a piece of the Newport set’s lifestyle  need only stroll across the aisle to the Associated Artists booth, where there
is a late-19th-century side chair made of gilded maple with pearl intarsia insets and upholstered in red silk embroidered with dragons. The work of Herter
Brothers, it once graced the William H. Vanderbilt mansion in New York.  

Nearby at Elle Shushan’s booth, which is a kind of
period room with faux-stucco walls and a quaint wrought-iron gate, is a porcelain miniature of Consuelo Vanderbilt (the great-great-granddaughter of Cornelius) at age 7. The Vanderbilts did not entrust this portrait of their
young heiress to just any artist; Alyn Williams, president of the Royal Society of Miniature Painters, also painted King Edward VII and President William Howard Taft.  

As usual, the 73 exhibitors offer much beyond the
gilded mirrors, grandfather clocks and crystal chandeliers favored by Newport’s “summer cottagers.” Here you can find Japanese scrolls, medieval French books of hours, Chinese porcelain, Roman mosaics, Scandinavian ceramics, Italian glassware and a surprising quantity of humble-looking folk art and Americana.    

This being inauguration week, many dealers are devoting
special attention to presidential portraiture and ephemera. At Hirschl & Adler a porcelain vase bears a portrait of Thomas Jefferson. And among the
historic documents at Kenneth W. Rendell Gallery is a signed letter from Abraham Lincoln to Maj. Gen. George B. McClellan, dated 1862 and concerning tactics for
the Peninsula Campaign of the Civil War. 

The all-American booth of Adelson Galleries includes
the expatriate John Singer Sargent, whose unstarchy approach to the society portrait is fully apparent in the sparkling “Portrait of Dorothy Vickers.” Here
too is a visionary landscape by George Bellows, with white mannequinlike figures frolicking beneath a salmon-colored sunset.      

For striking folk art, look to the fair’s northeast
corner. An unidentified artist’s 1830 painting of a girl in a red dress, at David A. Schorsch-Eileen M. Smiles, exudes the magnetism of an Alice Neel portrait. Across the aisle Frank & Barbara Pollack have a fascinating early-19th-century drawing by Hannah P. Badger, an instructor at one of the nation’s earliest coeducational schools; it shows female students poring over books and a globe in a tidy classroom with a colorful checkerboard floor.        
 
Allan Katz Americana has a large selection of
sculptured trade signs, like the giant lace-up boot that once marked an Albany shoe store or the pinstripe-suited man advertising a tobacco shop. (Back in his day, around 1900, the shop owners pumped smoke through the man’s cigar.)  

At this fair 20th-century furniture is outnumbered by
older pieces. But Lost City Arts has a real showstopper, a sinuous vermilion wood desk and matching tri-legged chair from 1965 by the furniture designer Wendell Castle of Rochester.        

Most dealers advertise their specialties in focused
displays — see “Glass Past” for a clean and stunning example — but a few try to mix it up. At Jonathan Boos spiky Bertoia metal sculptures accompany  postcard-sized paintings by Oscar Bluemner, Arthur Dove, George Tooker and others. At Geoffrey Diner, meanwhile, a Warhol “Jackie” has been cast adrift in a dark-walled booth of Tiffany glass — bait, perhaps, for a new generation of
robber barons.     
 
The Winter Antiques Show continues through Feb. 3 at the Park Avenue Armory, 643 Park Avenue, at 67th Street; (718) 292-7392, winterantiquesshow.com.

Source: www.NYtimes.com

One of the questions that I am often asked is, “How can I spot a genuine antique?” and my answer is usually the same, “well, it takes years of practice and dedication, as well as a willingness to rely on your gut instinct, as to 
whether something is a good buy or not”.

I count myself as extremely lucky. I grew up in the antiques business, my father being a dealer before me. Every week we would visit local shops, auctions  and car boot sales looking for salable items that we could supply to other  dealers and collectors. Upon our return we would discuss and research the day’s  purchases, whilst displaying them on the dining room table, waiting for
our  clients to arrive.

This was a time before the internet, where any research was done either by nipping down to the reference section of the library to find the item listed in a relevant reference book or by telephoning a network of specialist dealers and collectors, in the hope that someone would recognise a maker or artist. This could be extremely time consuming, often taking several weeks to pinpoint an 
exact opinion and value.

Over time, I was able to recognize a certain quality in any item and this ability enabled me to sort the wheat from the chaff, allowing me to sell off the cheaper, poorer quality items and concentrate my research efforts on the better  ones. Using this strategy I am able to determine whether an item is mass produced and of poor quality, or is something that demands more research.

For example, the presence of a signature on a painting tells me that the artist is proud of his or her work, and perhaps has taken painting seriously enough to put their name to it. This probably means that the artist has held 
exhibitions of his or her work, and has sold their paintings through a gallery or auction. If you are lucky there is sometimes evidence of this on the reverse,  a gallery mark or auction lot number etc.

If this is present, there are various publications available for research. Using this information, I can find out who the artist was, where he or she was from and in more recent years, when was the last time one of his or her 
paintings was sold at auction and the amount it fetched. This then can give me  a  ballpark figure of what this particular painting could be worth.

Studying a hallmark on a solid silver item can reveal the age, quality and  maker of the piece which again, upon research can determine its value. One  factor to always take into consideration is the condition of the piece, a
crack,  a chip or a blemish can drastically reduce the value of any antique, as investors will usually try and buy the best examples possible, in order to get the biggest return. Buyers beware though, the value of all antiques can go down as well as up and I am speaking from experience as I have a house full of them!

Top Tip: Buy the best example possible of items you like, you might end up having to live with them for quite some time!

Source: http://blogs.independent.co.uk

Holy Ferraris, Batman! 

The $4.6 million sale of TV's original Batmobile grabbed most of the headlines from the Scottsdale car auction this weekend, but the huge prices
paid for Ferraris and other exotics were the real
story.

Two Ferraris sold for more than $8 million, and 23 cars sold for more than $1 million in Scottsdale. That helped set an all-time sales total record for Scottsdale of $223.8 million—$40 million more than the record set last year, and $60 million more than the pre-crisis peak of $163 million in 2007.

 McKeel Hagerty, CEO of Hagerty—the collectible-car insurer and price-tracker—said that the auction sales and recent private transactions show that the collectible-car market is roaring to new levels. Even pick-up trucks and Broncos are selling for hundreds of thousands, with one 1969 Ford Bronco selling for $500,000 in Scottsdale.

 "It's almost a little shocking," he said. "There has been this 30- to 40-year run-up. But barring any outside
negatives, the future looks very bright for the market right now."

Craig Jackson, the CEO of auctioneer Barrett-Jackson—which topped $100 million at Scottsdale—said that many of the buyers in 2006 and 2007 were in real-estate. Today, many of the buyers are in oil and gas.

 "You see a lot of guys now making their money from fracking," he said.

Of course, not all collectible cars are selling. About 17 percent of the cars failed to sell at Scottsdale this year, up slightly from last year's 15 percent. Hagerty said one of the "flatter" parts of the market is American classics from the 1940s and 1950s—especially those cars that have had highly customized updates.


But the average sale price this year of $100,176 per car beat last year's price of $85,169. Ferraris continue to lead the way. A pair of Ferrari 250 GT's topped the sales charts. Hagerty said that because the vintage racing Ferraris have such global appeal, rich collectors from virtually every country are now bidding against each other for the top Ferraris— creating a price class of its
own.

 "It's a more globally balanced market now, where buyers can come from anywhere," he said.

 Hagerty added that while the big prices get all the attention, buying a collectible car doesn't have to cost millions—or even $100,000.

 "It's about success not excess," he said. "It's about owning something fun that you've always wanted, or didn't know
you wanted."

Here, according to Hagerty, are the top 10 sales by price, along with the auction companies that sold them (prices
include buyer's premiums).


 1. 1958 Ferrari 250 GT California LWB Spider sold for $8,250,000 (Gooding)

 2. 960 Ferrari 250 GT SWB Competizione Berlinetta sold for $8,140,000 (RM)
 
 3. Batmobile Sold for $4,620,000 (Barrett)
 
 4. 1959 Porsche 718 RSK Roadster sold for $3,135,000
(Gooding)
 
 5. 1957 Maserati 150 GT Spider sold for $3,080,000
(Gooding)
 
 6. 1935 Mercedes-Benz 500K Cabriolet A sold for $2,750,000 (Gooding)
 
 7. 1933 Duesenberg Model J Disappearing-Top Convertible Coupe sold for $2,695,000 (Gooding)

 8. 1958 Ferrari 250 GT Speciale Coupe sold for $2,365,000  (Gooding)
 
 9. 1947 Talbot-Lago Record T26 Grand Sport Coupe sold for $2,035,000  (Barrett)
 
 10. 1955 Mercedes-Benz 300SL Gullwing Coupe sold for $2,035,000 (Barrett)

Source: www.businessinsider.com