Transcriber’s Note

The cover image was created by Thiers Halliwell and is placed in the public domain.

See [end of this document] for details of corrections and other changes.

THE
COLLECTOR’S WHATNOT

REAR VIEW OF THE STATUE OF PROFESSOR KILGALLEN IN FLORAL PARK CITY, FLORIDA

Note the manner in which the sculptress denotes motion and vibration by the addition of the stump, which expresses with one bold stroke the action of the subject in rising from meditation. Visitors to Floral Park City are advised to walk all around the statue in order to get these different expressions of mood.

THE
COLLECTOR’S WHATNOT

A Compendium, Manual, and Syllabus
of Information and Advice on all Subjects
Appertaining to the Collection of
Antiques, both Ancient and not so Ancient

Compiled by
Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot, Milton Kilgallen
and Murgatroyd Elphinstone

Boston and New York

Houghton Mifflin Company

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1923, BY HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

The First Edition of The Collector’s Whatnot consists of 3127 copies, as follows:

Twenty-seven on choicest domestic leaf, bound in teakwood, with leather hinges, numbered A to &, with the Authors’ thumb-prints in red ink in each copy.

Three thousand one hundred copies on American antique wove, bound in manila boards.

The Second Edition consists of one thousand pure and pink copies, bound to sell.

The Riverside Press

CAMBRIDGE · MASSACHUSETTS
PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.

To

The Resigned Husbands and Wives of

All True Collectors

This Book

is most feelingly

DEDICATED

PREFACE

The American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities was formed on February 14, 1911, by Eben S. Twitchett, B.B.S., Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot, D.A., C.O.J., Raymond L. Pry, A.B., A.M., S.I.W., and Professor Milton Kilgallen, F.R.S., of Balliol College. The present volume is largely made up of the papers delivered by these distinguished pedants before their equally distinguished society.

The 14th of February is a red-letter day in the history of antiques and antiqueing; for the exhaustive researches and diligent labors of the members of the Academy have not only awakened untold numbers of people to the refining value of something really old, but have cleared up those highly important moot points; that is, when does a thing cease to be merely old and become an antique; and when is an antique not an antique?

One of the finest contributions to the literature of antiques, for example, was Dr. Pry’s masterly monograph on Chisel Markings and Screw-Driver Scratches of the Lower Connecticut Valley (Bulletin of the American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities, Vol. IV, No. 7, pp. 3682 et seq.). In this monograph Dr. Pry pointed out that an old Colonial frying-pan was a genuine antique, worthy of being used as the central object in a modern mantel-ornament grouping. The workmanship, the artistry, the incomparable grace of a genuine De Ruyter frying-pan puts it in the same class with a great painting or a great ruin. A De Ruyter frying-pan in first-class shape is, in fact, infinitely preferable to some great ruins, especially if the ruins come under the head of third-class ruins.† On the other hand, a genuine Oppendink frying-pan, carefully made during the same year that, say, the De Ruyter frying-pan was produced, is worthless as an antique. Both are antiques, yet one is not an antique. There are some who persist in buying Oppendink frying-pans and hanging them on the walls of their living-rooms, alongside a beautiful old Colonial hack-saw and a rare Colonial egg-beater; but their numbers, thanks to the magnificent, careful, and far-reaching work of the American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities, are gradually becoming fewer.

————

† Grasswink, H. Q., Ruins: Brick, Stone, and Human; Their Classification and Idiosyncrasies.

This is only an isolated example of the Academy’s efforts. Its field agents have collected, collated, segregated, documented, annotated, and filed over seventy-three hundred pounds (August 28, 1922) of reports on American-owned antiques alone. Some of them have undergone the most severe dangers; while two have even made the supreme sacrifice in their pursuit of duty. This tragedy cast a shadow over the entire Academy; for among its members there were no more ardent or well-informed students of antiques than Judson F. Rapp, Litt.D., and Herman Hymen Heller, of Cracow University. The beautiful Rapp-Heller monument, soon to be erected either in Washington, D.C., or in the lonely spot in Northern Maine where Dr. Rapp dug up the first known specimen of folding iron Colonial camping-stool, will represent the Spirit of Antiqueing in a most dignified and touching way. Sketches for this monument have already been prepared by Mrs. Claudia Gaines Gumme, the distinguished sculptress; and the accepted sketch shows a stern-visaged New-England housewife refusing to accept seven dollars from Professor Heller for a beautiful Colonial cradle, while Dr. Rapp surreptitiously examines the bottom of a ladder-back chair in the shadow of a convenient highboy.

The details of the tragedy are probably still fresh in the minds of all antique-lovers. Dr. Rapp and Professor Heller, it will be remembered, had secured for the society a flawless specimen of early well-sweep with bucket attached. They took the well-sweep and bucket to their rooms and prepared to study their treasures with the painstaking care which characterized all their efforts. Dr. Rapp was a native of Calais, Maine, and therefore had developed his New England conscience to a high degree. Professor Heller, though born in Kishinew and educated in Cracow, had thoroughly absorbed the New England traditions and ideals in the nine years he had lived in America. He often laughingly remarked that his New England conscience had become so acute that he was thinking of changing his name to Lowell or Fitzgerald.

In making a careful examination of the well-sweep with their magnifying glasses, Dr. Rapp and Professor Heller reached markedly different conclusions as to its age. Dr. Rapp, as shown by the hasty notes which he jotted down at the time, was of the opinion that it dated back to 1683. Dr. Heller, on the other hand, basing his conclusions on the moss-layers at the end of the pole, was firmly convinced that it could not have been made prior to 1765. Each scientist labored for hours in the effort to win over the other to his views. The arguments finally became bitter, and eventually they attacked each other with their magnifying glasses, which were unusually large and heavy. The noise of the struggle was heard by several neighbors; but it was not investigated, as Professor Heller had long been accustomed to distil alcohol, sampling the results as he went along, and frequently becoming rather noisy. The neighbors, unfortunately, thought he was sampling a new batch. On the following morning, when an attendant came to clean the Professor’s apartments, both Dr. Rapp and Professor Heller were dead. This is a beautiful example of the devotion to a cause which characterizes the work of all the members of the American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities.

The finest fruit of the work of the Academy, however, came when it commissioned Professor Milton Kilgallen, F.R.S., of Balliol College, to collate and edit the notes, papers, and reports of America’s greatest antique-collectors for the benefit of the present and future generations. The monumental labors of Professor Kilgallen, which have extended over a period of seven years, cannot, of course, be included in any book weighing less than seventeen pounds. The ensuing work is merely a sketch or bird’s-eye view of the Professor’s toil, published in the present form by the Academy in order that antique-lovers may, in a few hours’ reading, obtain an idea of the vast amount of material suitable for individual research work which has been collected in the Academy’s files through the indefatigable energy and enthusiasm of Professor Kilgallen.

The Kilgallen family has long been distinguished in the realm of Arts and Sciences. Colonel Everard Kilgallen, father of Professor Milton Kilgallen, became celebrated at the age of twenty-two for his exhaustive treatise on “The Seasonal Movements of the Potato Bug.” His wife, the beautiful Sheila Catherwood-Trapp, daughter of Sir Almeric Catherwood-Trapp, D.S.O., K.C.B., F.R.G.S., was noted for her bird studies, and particularly for her inimitable paintings of the lesser flycatcher, on which she specialized. So realistic were her paintings of the lesser flycatcher that flies have actually been observed hurriedly leaving a room in which one of these works of art was hung.

This accomplished couple had two sons, Morton and Milton Kilgallen. Both, curiously, were educated at Balliol; and both became full Professors during the evening of the same day—June 21, 1906. Both sons inherited from their gifted parents the love of science and research. Professor Morton Kilgallen devoted his life to ichthyology.

Professor Milton Kilgallen had planned to devote his life to entomology. Fortunately for all antique-lovers, his first researches were made among the borers. This chance brought him in close contact with antiques; since it is among the antiques that many of the wood-borers seem best able to function and to express their individuality. Although he has never lost interest in the borers, his early love for entomology has been abandoned in favor of his second love, antiques. He has devoted himself to the study of antiques with the enthusiasm which has always characterized the activities of the Kilgallen family. His tall, somewhat wooden figure and his rich mahogany-colored features—due, probably, to his somewhat eccentric but constant use of furniture polish as a face lotion—are familiar to antique-dealers from Odessa to Otaru and from Edinburgh to Eski-Shehir. His knowledge of antiques verges on the supernatural. Other antique-collectors cannot account for it; but he himself ascribes it to a trimonthly subcutaneous injection of the special furniture polish from his own laboratory. With the charming simplicity that always characterizes his speech and acts, he declares that if one wishes to place himself en rapport with an Indian, one lives like an Indian; if one wishes to familiarize himself with the gorilla, one lives the life of a gorilla as nearly as possible. If, therefore, one wishes to become thoroughly familiar with furniture, one must live like furniture: that is to say, he must think like furniture. The whimsical directness and incontrovertibility of this suggestion is typical of the man; and if we are to believe him, it accounts for his penetrating knowledge of all sorts of furniture. Other collectors have tried the same system, but most of them either went blind or lost their reason.

Professor Milton Kilgallen has the largest collection of worm-holes (in furniture, of course, not in the earth or other substances) in the world. In his beautiful residence on the Maine coast is one room devoted entirely to these little miracles of patience. Some of them are plain, without edging, while others are cross-sections. It is almost impossible for Professor Kilgallen to state from day to day how many he has in his possession; but at the lowest estimate there are more than twelve thousand. Professor Kilgallen is also an ardent collector of samples of patina, or the polish which comes on ancient articles from constant handling and rubbing. These samples range all the way from an arm of a desk-chair once used by Savonarola to the elbow of a frock coat worn for several years by the Honorable William J. Bryan, which last he obtained with great difficulty. Not counting kitchen utensils and garments patinated by the Professor himself, he has more than 1178 specimens of patina, which establishes a world’s record for a single collection.

The American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities counts itself fortunate to have secured the services of the world’s greatest expert on antiques in the preparation of this book and in the collecting of the enormous mass of data which is always open to any member of the Academy or to any antique-collector in good and regular standing. If this book shall further the cause of antique-hunting and somewhat lighten the arduous labors of those whose lives are dedicated to finding something old to put in the house, then the American Academy for the Popularization of Antiquities shall not have come into existence in vain.

Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot, D.A., C.O.J.
President, A.A.P.A.

Floral Park City, Florida
September 30, 1923

CONTENTS

LIST OF PLATES AND
OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS

ANTIQUEING AHEAD

By

Eben S. Twitchett

ANTIQUEING AHEAD

By

Eben S. Twitchett, B.B.S., F.A.A.P.A., etc.

It was Mr. Leslie Stephen, I believe, who remarked, of the repartees of the late Dr. Samuel Johnson, that it was futile to defend them except to those who enjoyed them without defense. Some color of this same good-humored contempt, this faintly supercilious laissez-faire [or, as the French phrase has it, this spirit of leave it lay], has too long characterized the attitude of antiquers in general toward those who seem, to the esoteric view, at least, Philistine, gentile.

Antiquers have, as a rule, contentedly held themselves above the indignity of proselyting; a little jealous, perhaps, of their relative rarity, they have looked askance, or two, even, at those who strayed, unbidden, into their company. It was, they felt, enough to be an antiquer and to antique; they knew no restless itch for converts; they believed, or affected to believe, that the antiquer is as impossible of post-natal evolution as the ventriloquist or the Ethiopian.

Herein, as Professor Kilgallen has at last made manifest, antiquers have been doubly at fault—at fault in a parochial willingness to conserve for their own behoof an avocation at once innocent, diverting, and, if individual taste so incline, remunerative; at fault again in assuming that the antiquer must needs be born [in the vernacular] that way.

These errors, happily, no longer reproach the confraternity at large. The popularization of antiqueing, under the purposeful leadership of Professor Kilgallen, is, one may assert, almost a fait accompli, or, as the clever Gallic dictum puts it, an accomplished fact. And it has been incidentally established, surely, that the antiquer may be made almost as expeditiously and convincingly as the antique itself.

Plate I

OLD DUTCH OVENSIDE CHAIR WITH THE RARE PRETZEL BACK; PICKED UP IN A PENNSYLVANIA GERMAN SETTLEMENT BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN

Sketch by the Professor

The inspiring example of Milton Kilgallen, and the indisputable success of his endeavors, have, together, persuaded me that I have been even more at fault than those esoteric antiquers, if I may, for the last time, so describe them, toward whom, in the pride of my peculiarity, I have felt and spoken very much as they, in turn, have felt and spoken of the Philistine proper. For years, sedulously and vigilantly I have enjoyed a monopoly of the great branch of the art and science of antiqueing which continues to preoccupy my powers. I have made no effort to interest other antiquers in my province; I have thought of them, indeed, as scarcely less pitiable than those to whom an antique is a piece of, in the vulgar idiom, junk.

Too, even had I felt a need of sympathy and envy and applause in my secret ambitions and achievements, I should have been restrained from the essay to share my enthusiasm by my fixed belief that it could be acquired in no way except that accident of inheritance by which it came to me.

Peccavi, or, in the perhaps more pungent idiom of Cicero, I have sinned. I now make confession and, as far as may be, atonement. I reveal my guarded secrets, at last, without reserve.

I am still, I believe, the only antiquer ahead, sui generis, or, to adopt the scintillating Italian phrase, alone in my class. Rather, now that these lines have seen the light, fui, non sum. I have been, as the Latins put it, not I am. For it will be enough to whisper my revelations; there will be, to-morrow, I realize, more antiquers ahead than one can shake a stick—if the reader will indulge me in the solecism of ending a sentence prepositionally—at.

To this I am resigned. Long enough have I enjoyed the sole entry to an entire tense; long enough have brother and sister antiquers rummaged in the traditional and commonplace haunts of the antique, the past; long enough have they ventured no farther than the abode of the antiquer—the present. To-morrow, forsaking these well-trodden precincts, they will join me in the virgin, but pregnant, future.

Like me, they will stoop no longer to the facile, shameful processes of searching, in cobwebbed bins and attics, for antiques which any novice must recognize, at a glance, as old. Like me, they will even smile at the enthusiasms of those who scratch in the dust and crow, like barnyard fowl, at each inevitable discovery. Like me, they will know the pure joy of explorations and discoveries among the boundless stores of to-morrow’s antiques.

I must begin at the beginning, with my birth. My destiny was predetermined by the ancestry of which I sprang. My parents, both of sturdy native stock, were by instinct mated to produce the original antiquer ahead. It was inevitable, I apprehend. It was to be. It was.

My father, worthy fellow, had no clear knowledge of his natural talent. My mother, I sometimes fancy, was remotely, dimly conscious of her gift. I can recall, as yesterday, the exalted look with which she witnessed the removal, from our stately parlor, of the array of commonplace antiques with which it had been furnished, the joy with which she and my father arranged, instead, those potential antiques which only the gropings of their common hunger recognized for what they were.

Even I, then in plaid kilts, did not at once share their delight, their understanding. I found the red plush surface of that priceless varnished oak sofa a harshly ticklesome affair; I was, to be sure, impressed by the new frosted globes adorning the gasolier, the intricate arabesques of the plaster rosette on the ceiling, from which it sprouted downwards; I need not say, surely, that these globes, tinted a glorious winey purple, decorated with protuberant knobs and profound depressions, were none other than those very treasures of the Obenchain collection, famous in four hemispheres as the sole surviving set of admitted Roscoe Conkling gas-glass. They were, and I must marvel helplessly before the phenomenon of instinct which urged my father, a simple-minded barber in the town of Yonkers, to choose, unerringly, for the tastes of fifty years beyond!

His taste, untutored by any device of art, was all but infallible. He left me this, and with it the store of masterpieces which have, discreetly vended, placed me beyond the reach of that financial anxiety which, especially after the invention of the safety razor, clouded his declining days. My unhappy father! It was his lot to begin his profession in the full flower of the Whisker Period, and to survive those troubled years only to confront the ignoble age of the tubed cream and the tame, inglorious two-edged blade. It is impossible for me to think of him save with a filial tear, and yet how cheerful he was! How his place of business invited and allured the intellectual society of Yonkers of his day! How the racked, lettered mugs gleamed in the gas-lights! And how the air, of a Saturday night, was gay with innocent mirth and pungent anecdote!

Thus I began, equipped by lavish Nature as if to recompense in me the leanness of my paternal lot. Our house, long before I grew to trouserable age, was filled to flowing with such a collection as not even the indefatigable burrowings of the ineffable Rapp and Heller could, in these degenerate times, assemble. In the parlor—incredible as it may sound—stood, not one, but two Ulysses Grant cuspidors, one nicked a trifle, but the other flawless—the priceless forget-me-notted Grants, I mean, not the relatively common gilt-edged type. They were even then my father’s chiefest pride; I—gratified in other boyish whims—was never suffered to use either of them except by stealth. He treasured them, born antiquer that he was, undreaming that the pair would one day yield his son a thousand-fold their modest cost. I owe him for them; my mother, herself no less percipient in other lines than he, would have discarded them when, after the unforgetable visit of Moody and Sankey, my father forewent his self-indulgence in tobacco; but his taste was true. He clung to them with a dogged, blind attachment for which I bless him still.

PAIR OF WONDERFUL OLD FRENCH STATUETTES NOW THE PROPERTY OF DR. TWITCHETT

The owner has identified them as Sèvres and pronounces them portrait statuettes—No. 1, Victor Hugo in one of his moods; and No. 2, a certain Marquis de St. Quai, probably a patron of Victor Hugo.

It was my mother who provided me with my inheritance of objets-d’art, or, as my Parisian friends prefer to say, objects of art. In its way her instinct was as infallible as my father’s own, though possibly more limited in scope. Indefatigably she scrimped and saved to bring together the nucleus of my subsequent collection. It would be cruel, in the present era of inflation, to set forth the catalogue. My estimable colleague Van Loot, forewarned as he is, would not survive the list, even if I omitted the prices, but I owe her memory at least the tribute of some little particularity in the connection. It was she who far-sightedly sacrificed our Thanksgiving turkey to procure the figures of Messrs. Moody and Sankey, obtainable then, in the admirable porcelain work of the period, for the trifling sum of three dollars each, and even urged upon the buyer at that price by the agent of the pious firm which held the monopoly of their production. My mother, I remember, shrewdly beat him down to $2.75, and exacted that ten cents of this sum should be paid in trade at my father’s shop—the agent happily requiring his professional attention at the moment.

It was typical of her, this combination of prodigality and thrift—the distinguishing characteristic, as Professor Kilgallen has so often said, of the true antiquer. Without knowing why she did it, my mother could and did perform prodigies of economy to lavish the slow, niggard savings in which they fruited on the gratification of her driving, dominant passion for that which, she must have realized, would be one day an antique. It was what we learned to expect of her, my father and I; he complained only covertly, when our Thanksgiving dinner revealed itself to be the usual baked beans and pork, and cautioned me with emphasis against repeating in my mother’s hearing the remarks he permitted himself on the subject in the relative privacy of the shop.

As zealously as my father his Grant cuspidors, so did my mother cherish and guard the images of the exhorters. They stood like tutelary saints at either extreme of our mantel-shelf, dusted by no hands but her own, at once the pride and solace of her lot. In spite of breath-stopping offers—among them the blank, signed check tendered me by Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot in person—I have never brought myself to part with them, although, having now become obvious antiques, they possess but a purely sentimental interest for me.

So, too, have I preserved the glass cane which our journeyman barber, a roving, sportive soul, brought with him from the Centennial Exposition at Philadelphia, during the closing days of the fruitful Grant Period. I cannot forget the intensity with which my mother thirsted for possession of this trophy; she gave the adventurous journeyman no peace until he consented to part with it, taking payment in the laundering of his stiff-bosomed shirt, which, indulging a taste for display perhaps out of harmony with his station, he rarely wore more than a week without having it restarched and ironed.

The cane, affixed with a bow of wide red ribbon to our parlor wall, became, presently, a proof that our family had visited the Centennial. I held my tongue in the presence of impressed visitors, learning swiftly to avoid the unstimulating truth and, no doubt, even then in vague, secret sympathy with my mother’s aspirations. She must invent a reason for buying a thing at once so impractical and so little decorative; she did not guess that she saw in it an antique beyond price; perforce she explained her purchase on the disingenuous and unworthy ground that folks would be bound to think we’d went there and bought it right off them glass-blowers our own-selves. But I knew. I understood. Even then, I must believe, I was an antiquer ahead.

For, with my own savings, one Christmas in the Arthur Period, I bought, as a gift to both parents in common, no less a treasure than a genuine Garfield toothpick-container—the miniature, in genuine pressed glass, of a silk hat, which, inverted, stood for a decade in the centre of our table on all occasions of state, and which, with its original content of toothpicks, including four showing signs of actual use, I reluctantly disposed of to the buyer for Queen Mary’s collection at a price which both modesty and my gentleman’s agreement forbid me to confess.

It was only natural that I should react to the twin stimuli of inheritance and environment. My early days were spent in the constant and inspiring contemplation of articles of vertu which the most discerning taste of the contemporary moment would not have recognized as even potentially antiques. I could not, indeed, enter our house without contemplating the statuettes of the Christian Slaves who knelt, one on each side of the steps, mutely supplicating the beholder’s piety and pity. If I would strike a sulphur match in the front hall, to light my way up the stairs to bed, I must do it on nothing less precious than a perfect specimen of the Benjamin Harrison match-holder—the peculiarly rare and exotic type, I mean, wherein a mother hen and a young chick are depicted, the mature fowl’s plumage being formed cunningly of colored sand-paper and the wee chickling being made to say, in a loop issuing from its open beaklet: “Don’t scratch me—scratch Mother.” This, even in those unappreciative days, was held far preferable to the alternative device, wherein a frowzy vagabond is illustrated, his raiment a mosaic of sand-paper fragments, with the legend: “Scratch your matches On my patches.” We possessed a number of these, in addition to the rarer article already described.

Our home, simple though it was, and afflicted always with the pressure of harsh poverty, was veritably a treasure-house of potential antiques. It was impossible to enter any room without coming under their subtly stimulating influence—even the bathroom contained, from my earliest recollection, the most perfect specimen of the Garfield tin tub I have ever seen, and the incidental plumbing, though hidden, according to the mode of the moment, under a mask of painted pine, was in entire harmony with the spirit of this dominating piece. Our mantel, in addition to the figurines already mentioned and illustrated, was laden with the tokens of my parent’s discernment and discretion. There was an all but priceless decalcomania picture on varnished wood, portraying the glories of Niagara Falls; there was a wealth of companion pieces, illustrating the Natural Bridge, Ausable Chasm, the Town-Hall of Darien, Connecticut, and an especially rare piece [circa ’84] purporting to be merely a souvenir of Sulphur Springs Grove, Erie County, New York, and long since unobtainable except at auctioneers’ sales of large and unusually complete collections.

I inherited, among other treasures, my father’s unusually well-preserved file of Police Gazettes, running back to that celebrated issue in which Lillian Russell’s portrait appeared for the first time. The man, simple and unpretentious as he was, possessed a true genius for preserving such memorabilia and discarding items of little or no value. These pink pages were his pride and treasure through dark days of stress and privation; he handled them reverently, even when they were fresh from the press, and insisted that those of his patrons who examined them should treat them with circumspection. Invariably, with the advent of a new issue, the previous one, tenderly smoothed and flattened, was laid away in the closet, to be bound when occasion permitted. Connoisseurs have told me that I erred in parting with this collection when I accepted the proposals of that prince of antiquers, Morton Fitz, in 1913. I realize that the file must inevitably have appreciated heavily in value with the passage of another decade, but I have no regrets. It was too difficult for me to look over those ageing pages without yielding to the weakness of tears. Eheu, fugaces ... not even in the recent era of display of certain anatomical details could the eye rest so happily on opulent, artless curves ... the flesh-tones, too, thanks to the happy selection of the paper, were poignantly realistic. I am not sorry that I parted with them all. I am, always, an antiquer ahead, and these had become antiques of the past. Ave, and farewell.

There must be an end even to the reminiscences of an antiquer. And my purpose, in this paper, has not been to excite a vain envy in the readers of the “Atlantic,”† but rather to invite them to antique, hereafter, in the hereafter, to espouse, if they will, that all-but-maiden fancy which has beguiled my leisured hours for twice two lustrums [forty years]. They, too, if they please, may be antiquers ahead instead of back.

————

† This essay, with others of Mr. Twitchett’s charming papers, inevitably first saw the light in the periodical which, most happily, reflects the spirit of the antiquer.

My great discovery of my own talent for this field of art came to me, seemingly, by chance; but, after all, who dare affirm that such things owe their origin to blind accident, that there is behind events so pregnant no purposeful and actuating Cause? Not I, of all men. I say seemingly. So be it. The way of it was this:

Workmen had demolished a decaying building which stood, in those days, within a few squares of my father’s humble cottage. With other boys of the vicinity I had looked on, fascinated by the appeal which wanton destruction must exert on youth. Like them I had dreams, too, of buried treasure below those venerable timbers, and burrowed hopefully among the litter which the wreckers left behind. One of my playmates after another kicked aside, in these explorings, a metal object. I found it, and, inspired by that inherited passion for the antique which has ruled my days, held it, examined it. A cry of joy escaped me: I detected, along one of its blunt edges, the corrosions of what seemed to me might have been spilled blood. I looked more closely still, crouching, now, shielding my treasure from the glances of the bigger boys, able, if they guessed the nature of my trove, to snatch it from me and make it theirs instead. I slunk away. In safe seclusion I looked again. There could be no doubt. To that sinister rusted edge stout, short hairs still adhered! I thrust the precious relic inside my shirt and sped homeward. In my ingenuous, artless youth I made sure that I had found a token of some ancient deed of blood; that luck had led me to a trophy such as no other youth in all Yonkers—at that day—could hope to possess. I hid it lovingly below my Sabbath garments in my bureau drawer, and gloated over it, in private, when the thing seemed safe.

Plate II

MAGNIFICENT OLD FLAT-FRONT EARLY NEW JERSEY SIDEBOARD DISCOVERED BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN IN AN OBSCURE PART OF NEWARK

Inevitably, I was taken in the act. My father found me fondling my relic and took it roughly from me.

“What you got there, Eb?” He held it gingerly, for his profession had, of course, made him fastidious. He was always careful of his hands, my father. He always washed them with soap, before coming home to meals, even after shaving a dozen customers! My treasure displeased his cleanly instinct, I could see.

“A murderer’s knife,” I whispered. “It’s mine! I found it under the McWhorter house. See—there’s some hairs stuck to it!”

My father flung it from him. “You’d ought to know the difference between bristles and hair—and you a barber’s son! That ain’t a knife—’tain’t nothin’ only Dib McWhorter’s old sow-scraper! Seen a hundred jes’ like it! Folks used to keep ’em for hog-killin’ time, when everybody kep’ a pig and done his own butcherin’. Scrape the bristles with.”

I was crestfallen at the sordid truth. For a moment I almost shared my father’s fastidious disgust. But, when he had gone, my instinct reasserted its control of my emotions. I recovered the sow-scraper from the rag-carpet where it lay. I replaced it reverently in its hiding-place. Why? I told myself, then, that my father was wrong; that it was no sow-scraper, but in truth the instrument of some forgotten, gory deed. I clung to it. And, later, when it had lost its first vivid appeal, I fetched it down to exhibit it to that great patron of antiqueing, no less a person than Cornelius Obenchain Van Loot himself.

He had stumbled on our humble dwelling in one of his tireless searches for the antique—quests which, the world knows, have led him even farther afield than Yonkers and Poughkeepsie. He had bought from my mother an excellent set of bedroom enamelware [circa ’88] and his appetite had been whetted by the success. He wanted more. I remembered my relic. This man, to my untutored eye, seemed artless and even a little contemptible—an opinion in which, I perceived, my mother concurred. [He possessed then, as now, that remarkable faculty of the gifted antiquer for convincing vendors of his complete simplicity.] I might persuade him, I reflected, that the bristles were human hair; it seemed unlikely that he could be expert in such distinctions, unless he had been, like me, a barber’s son. I shall not soon forget his cry of joy as his eye fell on my scraper. It was the one time in my acquaintance with him that he permitted himself to betray satisfaction before a bargain had been closed. It cost him, on this occasion, twenty dollars.

“By all the gods, a sow-scraper—a genuine, unquestionable sow-scraper, with bristles, intact, in excellent condition! Boy, did you come honestly by this? No tricks, now! Is it your own to sell?”

I established, with my mother’s ardent corroboration, my character and my title. The great Van Loot believed, at last.

“Priceless,” I heard him murmur. “Perfect! Superb!” and then aloud, to me: “Little man, I’ll give you twenty dollars for this old piece of iron. Twenty dollars—!”

“I guess you will,” I said, even then actuated by the instinct of the antiquer. “Who wouldn’t? See any green in my eye?” [A phrase since fallen into disuse, but at that date much in favor.] “You gimme fifty and we’ll talk.”

We compromised at forty. It was a triumph rather for my family than for me, for my mother expropriated the cash before I could escape, and subsequently invested it, happily for me, on a mustache-cup dutifully gilt-lettered “Father,” a small bone carved in the crude semblance of a human hand and attached to a long slender rod [an instrument employed, as all antiquers know, in the day of red-flannel underwear, for the comforting purpose of scratching an itching back without the tiresome routine of removing clothes], and a pottery sculpture of a pug-dog, which articles, ripened into antiques by the amiable, intervening years, yielded me some thousands per centum on the investment. But the episode was far more significant than it seemed, in its effect upon my life.

Forty dollars was the price current of a sow-scraper. I consulted my father, cannily. They had been made, it appeared, by the local smith, at a uniform price of twenty-five cents. His memory is accurate. Informed of the transaction he used emphatic speech in regretting his failure to lay in a stock, in the days of plenty. It would have paid better, he averred, than barbering for Jay Gould himself, or curling Ferd Ward’s own whiskers!

From that day I was a blooded antiquer ahead. I have no passion for the merely old; it would be as unexciting, for me, to delve and seek for treasure in dusty corners, after the habit of the commonplace antiquer, as to angle for goldfish in a glass bowl. I play the nobler game. I antique, not in yesterday, but in to-morrow.

Ah, the fascination of it! The intoxication of tearing the veil from the inscrutable hereafter, the blood-quickening element of risk, as one selects and stores away the antiques of to-morrow-years, against the day of rarity and famine! Ah, the triumph of a well-stocked bin, sealed till the day of reckoning! I have enjoyed these delights alone; I share them, now, with those who have the soul to follow in my steps.

Since the closing days of the first Cleveland Period, I have systematically antiqued ahead, privately, unadvertised, secretly exulting. Even now, those earlier bins and cupboards have begun to justify my penetrating choice. Who, of all the unthinking thousands who beheld the wired bustle in its heyday, thought to preserve a full dozen against to-day? Who, but Eben S. Twitchett, ridiculed as a crank and a fanatic by his neighbors, unhonored and unsung by myopic antiquers, the prey of dealers in alley trash?

Who, but Eben S., had the forethought to store, in ample camphor, a perfect set of Harrison red flannels, and no less than six petticoats of the same material and date? Who, of all the gray-haired collectors who seek and cherish them to-day, but might have laid by as full a stock as mine of lapel-buttons [circa ’94] bearing the obsolete argot of the period—quip and jest which have all but lost their significance now? Or the buttons advertising bicycles—The Rambler and the Tribune—built with a truss—the Victor and Columbia and Pierce? Who had the wit and courage to store away the stereoscopes and the twin photographs that in them found perspective—priceless and unattainable to-day? The Chinese Tea Pickers? The Yellowstone? Brooklyn Bridge? Who boasts of these but Eben S. Twitchett, with his mid-ninety bin crammed to overflow with perfect specimens? Who stored the spun-glass trinkets of the Chicago Fair? Who, if he chose, might break the market in cylindrical phonograph records of “Ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay” and “The Stars and Stripes Forever”? Who, I ask, possesses one gross of American flags of the McKinley Period, each exquisitely inscribed with its “Remember the Maine—to hell with Spain”? Who can supply collectors with uncut, first edition pamphlet copies of the Great Cross of Gold oration, each with its rare Bryan print—that almost unobtainable portrait including hair?

The reader bears with my little pæan of triumph. These things are history, among antiquers of high degree and low and middle. But who, of all those who beat on Eben S. Twitchett’s doors to-day, who plead and supplicate for even a peep into the sealed bins of the Roosevelt Epoch, who, of all these, has the courage to antique, in this year 1923, for the antiquers of to-morrow?

Eben S. Twitchett has. Time, the great revealer, shall one day let in full light on the storerooms where his treasures are laid down, to-day as yesterday. What will Time see there? Ah, that is for each forward-looking antiquer to determine for himself. I cannot bring myself to share too many of my secrets, even now. And the true antiquer would regret a guidance too exact; the allure of the avocation lies, for the select few who find the true spirit of the art, in the very element of doubt. One may lay down the wrong thing; it may never achieve the quality of an antique. Who can tell?

For me, I put away, from time to time, such trifles as commend themselves to my tried instinct. Just now, by way of illustration, I am putting down a complete line of felt pennants such as the travelling public loves to flaunt from burdened Fords—Brick Creek, Iowa—Wappingers’ Falls—Keeseville and Ogunquit. These must, one day, be seen as rare and lovely things; I give the hint for what it may be worth. The pocket-flask, too—the still—the vanity-case—the cigar-lighter—and the flower-holder with which the stately limousine must be equipped—the photographs of screen divinities! It will not be long before I shall unseal my bin of portraits where J. Warren Kerrigan and Francis X. Bushman, autographed, await the questing antiquer’s delighted eye.

Plate III

FROM PROFESSOR KILGALLEN’s COLLECTION OF BEAUTIFUL OLD WOOD-CARVINGS

Figure of Pocahontas; believed to be the work of John Alden

Only yesterday, I sold the last of my cigarette pictures. Della Fox! I had a hundred of her, once. It seemed impossible for us Yonkers boys, trading acutely in that fresh, delighted loveliness, that it could ever be antique! I must have felt, intuitively, even then, that it must be. Wanting that intuition, too, I would not have stored away the thumbed installments of my nickel weeklies—those precious specimens that one may view, now, under glass, on free days, at the Metropolitan Museum of Antiques.

Time has done it. And time will do it again. Antiquer, antique, but antique ahead!

HINTS FOR BUYING FROM
ORIGINAL SOURCES

By

Cecilia Lefingwell Prynne (Mrs. Gütz)

HINTS FOR BUYING FROM
ORIGINAL SOURCES

By

Cecilia Lefingwell Prynne (Mrs. Gütz)

If, in passing a New-England farmhouse, you see a fine piece of old furniture through the open front doorway [which is not probable, as the front doors are seldom used], or if perchance you spy upon the veranda, or in the fairway beside the barn, some rare old bit of glass, a bow-backed pine Windsor chair, a tambo-door sideboard, or a hooked rug, or any other article you may wish to purchase, it will be well for you not to approach the subject directly, but in a somewhat roundabout manner, as the peasants of this section are [on account of bitter experience] extremely suspicious of strangers; and if they perceive that you wish to buy anything of them, they are likely to become instantly so fond of the object of your desire that they will decline to part with it; or they may get the notion that you are connected with the prohibition enforcement laws and are merely disguising your real interest in how hard their cider has turned. Therefore the editors have asked me to prepare a few model dialogues which may be found useful in this connection. The form of approach suggested can profitably be studied by the motorist collector.

Dialogue One

[Mr. B., a Chicago collector of hooked rugs, has observed a fine specimen hanging on a clothes-line beside a New Hampshire farmhouse. Mr. B. descends from his car and approaches the proprietor, who is sawing wood near the kitchen wing.]

Mr. B.: Good-morning. I stopped to inquire if you have a calf for sale.

Peasant: Did ye?

Mr. B.: I am willing to pay quite a good price for an original she-calf in fair condition.

Peasant: Be ye?

Mr. B.: I would pay $350 for a really excellent she-calf.

Peasant: Let’s see the money.

Mr. B. [displaying the sum mentioned]: But have you such a calf?

Peasant: Yes; but I wouldn’t never sell her under $355.

Mr. B.: Done with you at $355! Go fetch her. But stay;—I have nothing to wrap her in.

Peasant: What ye want to wrap her fer?

Mr. B. [laughing graciously]: It is customary in the city to wrap all purchased articles, and besides she might take cold. Let me see what you have to wrap this she-calf in. Ah! There is a worthless old hooked rug. That will do to wrap my purchase in.

Peasant: Well, I don’t know. That there rug’s wuth somethin’. I’ll have to charge ye two dollars extry for the rug.

Mr. B. [restraining his excitement, handing the peasant $2.00 and removing the rug from the clothes-line]: Very well. I hereby purchase the rug; and upon second thoughts I find I have no definitely pressing need for a she-calf at this time. Good-morning and the best of luck to you!

OLD NEW ENGLAND PRINT OF THE FIRST MEETING OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR THE POPULARIZATION OF ANTIQUITIES

From the collection of Miss Cora Kilgallen Brütche, of Appleby, Pa., two (and possibly three) of whose ancestors took part in the meeting.

Dialogue II

Mrs. C. [wishing to buy for her salon in New York a fine old white pine fan-backed rocking-chair she has discovered upon a farmhouse veranda]: Can you tell me if there is a family of the name of Pibuddy living in this vicinity?

Peasant: No, I can’t.

Mrs. C.: Or Littlefield?

Peasant: Never heard of ’em.

Mrs. C.: Or Smith?

Peasant: They’s some Smiths up at Baxter’s Dam Corners. Them who ye lookin’ fer?

Mrs. C.: Yes. They are the very ones. I want to take them a cradle for their baby, as they are relatives of mine. Have you a cradle for sale?

Peasant: No, I ain’t.

Mrs. C.: Or any watermelons, perhaps?

Peasant: Don’t grow none.

Mrs. C.: I’m so sorry. I haven’t seen these dear old cousins of mine for so long; and I did want to take them some little thing to please them. I’d give as high as three or four dollars for a cradle or a watermelon.

Peasant: I don’t see no way to oblige ye.

Mrs. C. [affecting to discover the rocking-chair]: Oh, I know what we could do. My chauffeur is very ingenious. I could give you forty cents for that old chair and he can make a cradle out of it as we go along.

Peasant: That chair’s wuth more’n forty cents. It’s wuth a dollar if it’s wuth a penny!

Mrs. C. [handing the peasant a dollar]: Thank you! Please place it in my car. [Exit.]

Dialogue III

Miss D. [entering country general store because she has seen through the window a magnificent 1804 Seneca grate-burner stove with a fire-back showing the arms of Massachusetts which she wishes to add to her collection]: Have you by chance seen a lost Mexican hairless dog with one white forefoot, three brown, and a slight limp?

Storekeeper: Who?

Miss D.: I am looking for a lovely little dog without any hair and very susceptible to low temperatures.

Storekeeper: We don’t handle none.

Miss D.: He is lost, but I should fear to find him here because your store is so chilly and he would lack warmth. I wonder you do not buy a new stove. Permit me to send you one.

Storekeeper: Who be ye?

Miss D.: I will give you my address. [Hands him her card.] I fear if my lost little hairless dog should wander in here he would find the air too cold. On that account I wish to offer you a modern stove in place of that fearful old thing yonder. When the new stove arrives, will you be so kind as to have this old one shipped to me, express charges collect, as a slight compensation for the trouble I am taking on account of my dear little dog’s health?

Storekeeper: If you send me a new stove, I’ll do it, by ’Ory!

Miss D.: That is all I wished to ascertain. Thanking you—[Exit laughingly.]

Dialogue IV

[Professor K., the well-known historian, has heard that a Fisherman of Martha’s Vineyard owns a set of Venetian glass comfit boxes once the property of Henri Quatre. He enters the Fisherman’s shack.]

Prof. K.: Good-morning. I am interested in getting your opinion of a set of Whitman, bound in green cloth or morocco at your option. May I show you—

Fisherman: No, ye can’t. I don’t take no interest in politics.

Prof. K.: Then perhaps I could get your opinion of a line of haberdashery I carry. My own necktie, or scarf, if you prefer that term, is an example. Do you like it?

Fisherman: Can’t say as I don’t: can’t say as I do.

Prof. K.: It would become you better than it does me. Let me exchange it with you for some bait. I observe that you keep your clams for bait in those funny-looking little red glass boxes, yonder. I will give you my necktie for the clams, but I shall have to ask for the boxes also, since the nude clams would soil my pockets.

Fisherman: No. Them glass boxes was left to me by my grandmother and I wun’t throw ’em in with no clams.

Prof. K.: As you will. But how am I to carry the clams unless I have the boxes? Ah! I have it! I will borrow them of you and return them by a messenger from my hotel.

Fisherman: How do I know ye will?

Prof. K.: I will leave my hat, coat, and trousers as security. [He removes them as he speaks, and ties the scarf about the Fisherman’s throat.] There, look in the cheval glass and see how vastly it improves you. I will return the glass boxes by the messenger and you will kindly give him my clothes. Au revoir! [He takes the comfit boxes upon his back and instantly swims with them to the mainland.]†

————

† It was by following these hints that the Rockfund collection of petiteries was largely made. Collectors will do well to wear several suits of clothes.

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS

By

Murgatroyd Elphinstone

THE SECRET OF SUCCESS

By

Murgatroyd Elphinstone, A.B., A.M., F.R.F.H.A.

(Lecturer on Scrollwork and Frets at Sinsabaugh University, 1917–18)

The secret of antique-collecting is persistence. My friend G——, who spent three years of her life walking through the mud and dust of Maine, New Hampshire, and Vermont roads in an attempt to locate the Log-Cabin-With-Flag-And-Cider-Barrel cup-plate, which she needed to round out her set of cup-plates, claims that the true secret of antique-collecting is good health. She is no judge, however, as she encountered a series of unusual misfortunes in her search for the missing cup-plate. First she was caught in a bad northeaster without her goloshes, and developed a severe case of rheumatic fever. Then she fell down and broke her arm. Shortly after that she was struck by lightning. And a little while later she was run over by a Ford which appeared from nowhere as she was trudging up a mountain-side one glorious golden morning in search of a farmer who was reputed to use cup-plates as fly-poison receptacles. G——, in her droll New England manner, throws me into convulsions by saying that she thinks the Ford, like Topsy, just growed. I am sure that if G—— had persisted in continuing her search for the missing cup-plate, even though she had to travel on crutches, she would eventually have been successful. Therefore I say that the secret of antique-collecting is persistence.

It is persistence that brings to light the unexpected treasure. It is persistence that effects unexpected results. It is persistence that enables the antique-collector to secure for fifty cents or one dollar a genuine antique that is worth from one hundred to five hundred dollars until it is put up for sale at an auction, when it isn’t worth so much.

STATUE ERECTED TO PROFESSOR KILGALLEN IN FLORAL PARK CITY, FLORIDA, BY GRATEFUL CITIZENS OF THAT COMMUNITY

Professor Kilgallen himself kindly took the entire responsibility for raising the fund for the beautifying of Floral Park City by the erection of this splendid bronze, which is the work of Mme. Olga Mugsawflovich of Moscow.

A guiding star for all antique-collectors, whether amateur or professional, may be found in the adventures of the old Elon D. Whipplefish house just outside the little town of Sunkset, one of those delightful little settlements surrounded by cranberry bushes, sand, and Down East accents on quaint and picturesque Cape Cod. The Elon D. Whipplefish house was built in 1742 by Isaiah Thrasher, a direct descendant of the Marjoribank family of Lower Tooting-on-Wye, England, one or more of whose members came to America on the Mayflower. Considerable haziness exists concerning the descendants of the Marjoribanks family owing to the fact that the name was pronounced Marshunk by those familiar with English pronunciation, and that some American records refer to the Marjoribanks as Marsh or as Shawbank or as Bunk, owing to the difficulty of properly separating the pronunciation and the spelling.

At any rate, Isaiah Thrasher was a descendant of the one or more members of the Marjoribanks family who came to America on the Mayflower; and he inherited from his ancestor a number of rare old pieces of English furniture, including a very fine old chest. The top of this chest was missing, the feet were worn away, and several of the boards had been removed, stolen or lost from the front and sides. Nevertheless it was a very fine old chest, and very rare. Probably not more than twenty-eight or thirty of these chests, all told, were brought over in the Mayflower. He also owned an extremely fine cradle of the same general type as that which is said to have sheltered Peregrine White, who attained fame by being born among the furniture of the Mayflower, though there are some who say that some of the furniture had to be moved out before Peregrine could get in. This cradle was of wicker and had probably been made in the Orient, whence it was brought to Holland, and there picked up, just before the Mayflower sailed, by one of the Marjoribanks family who had a fine eye for odd pieces of furniture. Another of his possessions was a beautiful turned chair with an unusual number of spindles. It had so many spindles that any one who sat in it could easily spend two or three hours counting the spindles. This came over in the Mayflower, and was unusually rare, owing to the fact that most of the Mayflower tourists eschewed chairs and stuck to larger and more space-filling pieces of furniture, like desks, whatnots, highboys, lowboys, clocks, bedsteads, and chests. Most of them were evidently content to sit on the floor or lean against a highboy, when not asleep or in motion.

The mere fact that Isaiah Thrasher inherited these rare and beautiful pieces of furniture from his ancestors filled him with a love for the good and the beautiful. When, therefore, he moved from Plymouth to Sunkset in 1742 in search of more religious freedom than obtained in Plymouth, the farmhouse that he built conformed in every way to the best standards of Colonial architecture. The doorway was perfect; all of the beams were hand-hewn of the finest oak; the balustrades on the staircases were as gracefully curved as the lines of a woman’s throat; the fine corner cupboards throughout the house were gems of the joiner’s art; the fireplaces were generous and hospitable, flanked by settles, brick ovens, and cupboards of pumpkin pine, and duly decorated with spits, cranes, pot-hooks, trammels, trivets, and sturdy andirons.

Isaiah Thrasher found all the religious freedom for which he sought in Sunkset; for there was practically nothing in Sunkset but religious freedom and cranberries. He died at the age of eighty-two, and his house passed into the hands of his nephew, Jared Titcomb, who was noted on Cape Cod for being the champion cranberry-sauce-eater of the district, and also for having accounted for three British soldiers just after the battle of Concord by pushing a stone wall over on them. Jared Titcomb in turn bequeathed the house to his son-in-law, Rufus Whipplefish, who was noted for nothing, so far as can be learned; and when Rufus died, the house descended to his son, Elon D. Whipplefish, who had the reputation of making the hardest cider in Duke’s County. It was from this owner that the house took its name—the Elon D. Whipplefish house—and it was through this owner that I became familiar with the house, its history, and its contents.

The house stood well out on the outskirts of Sunkset, surrounded by a heavy growth of apple trees, pine trees, lilacs, willows, rosa rugosa, actinidia arguta, stinkbush, poplars, and cranberries. For this reason it had been overlooked by antique-hunters, who buzz around Cape Cod in the spring, summer, and autumn with the same eagerness with which flies buzz around a cow in September.

I shall never forget the thrill which shot through me, therefore, when my friend L——, who rather fancies himself as an antique-collector, but who never knows enough to collect anything until some one has told him that it is worth collecting, came to me one day and stated that he had visited an old house near Sunkset, but that there was nothing in it worth having. In fact, said he, the old man who owned the house was probably a nut, since he was saving an old chest that had no top and no legs, and looked like something the cat brought in.

The flash of second-sight which should be possessed by all true antique-lovers, and which almost never deserts me except when I am confronted by a reproduction so perfect as to deceive even the man who made it, warned me that this chest was probably something very rare and unusual, and possibly even a most important piece of Americana. With an air of careless unconcern perfected by years of antique-hunting—an air, I may add, which must be cultivated by all persons who hope to make a success of antiqueing—I obtained from my friend L—— complete directions as to the location of the House Of The Chest. As soon as L—— had gone on his way, I dropped my air of unconcern, snatched up a pint flask of gin, which I find to be of inestimable value in dealing with the stern and rockbound New-Englanders, and hastened at once to Sunkset.

It was a brisk autumn day, and the odor of stinkbush was particularly apparent as I made my way through the grove of trees which surrounded the Elon D. Whipplefish house. I shall never smell stinkbush again without thinking of that red letter day; though I must confess that at the time it depressed me slightly.

Mr. Whipplefish was seated in his beautiful old kitchen with his feet resting comfortably in a beautiful old brick oven; and as I knocked at his back door, he cried out in his kindly New England manner that he didn’t want any, and to go away. Pretending to misunderstand his words, I opened the door and walked in. Then, lest there be any unpleasantness, I dropped my hat as though by accident, and in stooping to pick it up permitted the pint flask of gin to slip from my breast pocket and fall into my hat. This is a gesture which has saved the day for me on many and many an occasion where all seemed to be lost save honor. A few days of practice will enable any one to drop a pint flask from his breast pocket and catch it unharmed in his hat with the utmost nonchalance.

Having done this, I affected great embarrassment and looked at the flask ruefully, as though it had betrayed me in an embarrassing manner. Mr. Whipplefish’s manner at once became more affable, and he asked me with gruff Cape Cod hospitality what I wanted.

One thing led to another, and by the time we had consumed the pint of gin, he was permitting me to examine the furnishings of his home without protest.

The briefest examination of the topless and legless chest sufficed to convince me that I had encountered a genuine treasure. All of the worm-holes of the tertiary class bore the unmistakable stigmata of the Dutch worms of the first quarter of the seventeenth century. Those familiar with Dr. Christian Eisenbach’s† monumental work on the furniture worm will recall that a peculiar recurrence of frosts during several successive winters in Holland so affected the nervous systems of the Dutch furniture worms that they bored to the left in successive échelons, or steps, and cut into the borings of the worms beyond them.

————

† Bores and Borings. Dr. Christian Eisenbach. Leipzig, 1847.

The best test of the Dutch worm of the first quarter of the seventeenth century is to place the forefinger over any worm-hole in a given space, place the lips over the worm-hole next to the left of the obstructed orifice, and blow firmly into it. If the hole is a true Dutch hole of the early seventeenth century, a small cloud of dust will emerge from the hole next to the one in which the blower is blowing and will usually enter his eye.

If it is not a seventeenth-century Dutch hole, the blower can blow all day without obtaining any noteworthy results except a flushed face.

My first venture in applying this test to the Whipplefish chest resulted in a cloud of dust which entered my eyes, nose and ears and nearly choked me. Succeeding tests on other holes resulted in similar clouds of dust of such proportions that I was at length forced to desist in order to remove the accretions from my eyes.

This was incontrovertible proof that the chest had been in existence in Holland during the first quarter of the seventeenth century, and that it had undoubtedly been acquired by the Pilgrims during their enforced vacation in Leyden before sailing for America in the Mayflower.

Plate IV

PRICELESS BIT OF OLD STAFFORDSHIRE WARE (A PAPER-WEIGHT) COLLECTED BY PROFESSOR KILGALLEN

Cursory glances around the interior of the Whipplefish house, after my eyes had been cleared with the assistance of Mr. Whipplefish and a little gin and water, revealed, in addition to the cradle and the spindled chair which I have mentioned, some very fine old wrought-iron latches and H and L hinges on the doors, which were in themselves beautiful specimens of the art. The lintels and sills of the doors were simply but exquisitely carved; while the oak rafters which held up the ceilings were so mellowed and patinated by age that their rugged strength was most attractive. All of the downstairs rooms were sheathed in boards of pumpkin pine nearly three feet in width and without a knot in them.

How symbolical of the changes that have taken place in our country is the pine, that simplest of trees! In the earnest, upright, early days of America, the pine grew without knots. To-day every pine tree has so many knots in it that a person must rise at midnight in order to get them counted before breakfast. And similarly, to-day, the ancient ideals of honor and honesty seem to have departed from us. This is particularly apparent to one who moves much in antique circles. Behind each corner lurks a human harpy who would gladly take candy from a child or use a sand-bag if all else fails.

Concealing my passionate desire to relieve Mr. Whipplefish of all his belongings, I dismissed the subject of antiques as being of no consequence, and spoke at some length with him concerning gin. When he voiced his appreciation of the flavor of my particular brand, I informed him that it was genuine pre-war gin, and that it was practically priceless.

While this was not strictly true, I had none the less manufactured it according to a tried receipt given to me by an employee of the Cuban Legation in Washington who dispenses great quantities—which he makes himself—as genuine pre-war gin. His statements are believed in Washington; and the gin is used at many important social functions in the capital and always spoken of reverently as pre-war gin. Consequently I believe that I am within my rights in speaking of it in the same way.

When I had made plain to him the extremely valuable nature of the gin, I told him frankly that since he seemed to have a discriminating taste in such things, I was willing to let him have an entire quart of it, and that in exchange I was willing to take his old chest as a pleasant reminder of my visit to Cape Cod.

After some grumbling Mr. Whipplefish agreed to this exchange, whereupon I repaired to my room in the Sunkset House, mixed the gin, and hastened back to the Whipplefish home with it. I carried the chest away the same day, and have since refused an offer of two hundred dollars for it.

During the next two days I did not go near the Whipplefish house; but at the expiration of the two days—which, in Mr. Whipplefish’s case, I judged to be about the life of one quart of gin—I returned and found him in a state of nerves.

The antique-collector must learn to be patient. Nothing is gained by rushing matters. If I had gone to Mr. Whipplefish before he had finished the gin, I could have done very little business with him probably. The antique-collector must also learn restraint. If I had offered Mr. Whipplefish a case of gin for his chest instead of one quart, he would probably have smelled a rat. He might have held the chest for a higher price, or he might have had the gin analyzed. Either course would have caused me considerable embarrassment.

At any rate, I found him in a state of nerves on my second visit. The offer of another quart in return for his cradle met with an instant response. I subsequently sold the cradle for six hundred dollars. On my third visit I got the spindled chair for three quarts of gin. I am holding this chair for fifteen hundred dollars† and expect to get it.

————

† Prospective buyers will kindly communicate with the publishers.—Eds.

By this time Mr. Whipplefish was growing somewhat accustomed to my presence, and seemed almost willing that I should help myself to whatever I wanted so long as I placed a bottle or two of pre-war gin in his hand as a little token of remembrance and esteem.

For two bottles of gin per room I was permitted to remove the pumpkin pine wainscoting from the downstairs walls of the Whipplefish house. I used a part of it to sheathe my own library, which has been pictured many times in the pages of The House Elegant; and the remainder I sold for seven hundred and forty-five dollars.

The doors of the inside rooms cost me one quart apiece, with the hardware thrown in. The big front door and carved sills with a graceful fanlight came higher. That cost me half a case, but it was worth it, as I have since refused an offer of twelve hundred dollars for it.

This purchase also caused me a large amount of worry; for Mr. Whipplefish, not being so young as he once was, fell downstairs several times during the half-case period, and led some people to think that he might die of over-exertion. In fact, he was found in a rigid state by neighbors two or three times before the six bottles were gone, and was thought to be dead; but each time he proved merely to be ossified, and came back to life before the undertaker arrived.

My feelings may well be imagined during this trying time. Since there were several things which I still wished to remove from the Whipplefish house, my anxiety over his condition was naturally tremendous. It affected me to such an extent that my hand slipped on one occasion when I was mixing a batch of gin, and I got in twice as much essence as I should. I was forced to throw away an entire quart of alcohol.

Eventually Mr. Whipplefish finished the six bottles without succumbing; and after allowing him several days in which to recover, I returned to the chase. He was, of course, very glad to see me, and did not demur at all when I gave him two bottles and removed the big brick fireplace with its quaint brick oven from the kitchen. I could easily get five hundred dollars for this fireplace if I wished to take the money; but I put Art above Commercialism, like every true lover of the Beautiful. I shall always keep this quaint and hospitable hearth, unless somebody offers me so much money that I cannot refuse.

My final purchase from Mr. Whipplefish and the celebrated old Whipplefish house was made on July 14th. I remember the day very well, for it is the anniversary of the fall of the Bastille. Hereafter the date will always be associated in my mind with two falls.

Early on the morning of that day I called on Mr. Whipplefish and found him shaking all over. His first question was, “Got any gin?” I at once realized that the time was ripe to get the magnificent hand-hewn oak beams in the kitchen—beautiful things that I had coveted ever since I started coming to the house. Mr. Whipplefish was wholly reckless at that time, and insisted on a higher price than I cared to pay; but the beams were such rare and delightful pieces that I threw caution to the winds. Mr. Whipplefish, with his Yankee cunning gleaming in his little blue eyes, insisted on an entire case of gin in return for these beams.

And I—I paid it. It may have been foolish of me to do so; but the lure of the antique, which no true collector can resist, led me on. I gave him the case for which he asked. Then I took out the beams.

As I was loading them on the team to take them away, kindly old Mr. Whipplefish stood in the doorway of the historic old Whipplefish house, waving a partly empty bottle around his head and crooning an old Cape Cod melody to me by way of farewell. Unfortunately, in the middle of the song, the bottle struck the side of the doorway. The house, weakened by the many removals, at once collapsed, burying Mr. Whipplefish in the remains.

July is the busy season on Cape Cod; and since it was supposed that Mr. Whipplefish had been killed, no effort was made to dig him out on that day. On the following morning, however, he was heard crying for more gin; so a number of natives rather reluctantly desisted from their regular summer occupation of relieving the summer visitor of his bank-roll, and dug him out. He was little the worse for wear, for he had shielded the partly filled gin bottle with his body as the house caved in on him, and the stimulant had eased the trying hours.

This, however, was not the end of the old Whipplefish house. A few months after the collapse a retired harness manufacturer from Rochester, New York, who was travelling on Cape Cod in search of the antique and the quaint, passed the ruins of the old Elon D. Whipplefish house, lying amidst the pine trees, poplars, stinkbush and cranberries.

As I have said before, persistence is at the root of all successful antiqueing. W——, the retired harness manufacturer, for some unknown reason made up his mind that he wished to restore the Elon D. Whipplefish house to the exact state in which it was before its collapse.

Plate V

RARE BIT OF OLD WORCESTERSHIRE WARE

Table ornament collected by Professor Kilgallen. The little circles are all in gilt.

Under his guiding hand and bank-roll it rose again amid the poplars, pines, and stinkbush. All Cape Cod yielded up its treasures to him, and almost every family on the Cape enriched itself from the Bright fortune. If they didn’t have genuine antiques to sell him, they manufactured them. To-day the Elon D. Whipplefish house stands in Sunkset, a monument to Isaiah Thrasher and the Marjoribank family from whom he descended.

W—— paid Elon D. Whipplefish three thousand dollars for the lot and the ruins; and with this money Elon bought into a nice two-masted schooner. He went into the business of running rum up from the Bahamas; and when he saw the stuff that goes into the bottles that he sold, he went on the water-wagon. In a little over a year’s time he became a wealthy man, and bought a house on Mount Vernon Street in Boston, where he could be near the movies and the atmosphere from which his distant ancestor, Isaiah Thrasher, had fled in 1742.

OLD RUGS, OLD IRON
OLD BRASS, OLD GLASS

A Brief Brochure on the Search
For the Antique

By a Professional

Jared P. Kilgallen

OLD RUGS, OLD IRON
OLD BRASS, OLD GLASS

A Brief Brochure on the Search
For the Antique

By a Professional

Jared P. Kilgallen, J.D. and R.P.

(A Second-Cousin of Professor Kilgallen)

The lure of the antique! Who is there that has not thrilled and flushed at the words?

I confess at the outset: I am a collector and you may even call me by that damning word “dealer,” too, if you choose, since, like all non-amateur collectors, I part with items of my collection from time to time; or, if you prefer to put it so, from day to day. No collection is a permanency until it is established in an endowed museum: all private collections are constantly in a state of fluctuation, or flux; for the taste of the true collector is as constantly altering. Other contingencies also affect collections. For instance, no collection of Colonial utensils is safe from carelessness, and I have known a pair of the virtually priceless old hand-wrought 1852 B-mark Brunswick sheep-clippers to be thrown out upon an ash-heap by an Irish housemaid under the impression that they were valueless even to herself. (I know this because those very clippers formed a temporary part of my own possessions immediately afterward.)

Every collector is aware also that after the visits of even the best-introduced people almost any small article in a collection may be missing; and under such circumstances the tracing of the lost item may prove too embarrassing to be considered. My good friend, Dr. G—— R—— Vet. M.D. and Surg. of Erie, Pennsylvania, missed a valuable metal medallion of President Rutherford B. Hayes (circa ’78) in this way, after the visit of a number of his wife’s relatives to the famous old G—— R—— Manse at Erie. What is a collector to do in a case like this, when a complaint might endanger actual estrangement? Dr. G—— R—— informed me himself that when he discovered his loss he thought the matter over for some days and decided to say nothing about it.

DR. TWITCHETT AND MME. AUGUSTULA THOMAS’S HUSBAND (MR. THOMAS) WEARING THE INSIGNIA OF FULL MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR THE POPULARIZATION OF ANTIQUITIES

Now, to take up my own specialties (if I may call them so), I have the temerity to assume that my long experience in securing and handling these has possibly given me a little knowledge that may be of use to the amateur collector. I do not claim too much, perhaps, when I state that hooked rugs and early American iron and glass were familiar items in my possession long before the present craze for collecting them came to rage so wildly and widely. I have had exquisite hooked rugs, and rare fragments of such rugs, for instance, as far back as 1886.

American glass has always been a passion (if I may use the word) with me. In fact, among my friends and relatives, my search for really good glass has made me almost something of a by-word, jocularly speaking. The reader will easily connote that what I consider good glass is not a thing to be found every day in the week and that I am somewhat particular in my taste. Well, I confess it, and to substantiate the confession perhaps I should essay some description of what I mean by “really good glass.”

Glass, to be perfect in my eyes, should be absolutely in the condition in which it left the retailer who sold it to the private purchaser. I am aware that broken, cracked, or partially decomposed pieces have some value to the beginner, and I myself do often handle them, as a dealer, it is true. But it is sound glass that has kept me so diligently on the search day after day, year after year. Sandwich and Stiegel I leave to the beginner who likes to pay $17 for a ruby finger-bowl that was a drug on the market at two-for-a-quarter five years ago; who gladly signs a check for $125 in exchange for a dozen Benjamin Franklin cup-plates regularly turned out at the Sandwich factory for thirty cents a dozen, up to the time when the strike closed production in General Benjamin Harrison’s administration; but for myself—well, even a quaint old Colonial Sandwich lamp chimney, manufactured during Grover Cleveland’s first term, or as far back as the supremacy of Chester A. Arthur, does not excite me. A friend of mine proudly exhibits a lamp chimney said to have been persistently mistaken for a spy-glass by Lafayette himself on a Christmas Eve, on the occasion when he was so well entertained by the citizens of Yonkers, during his second visit to this country. I have never made the slightest effort to obtain this bit.

No. The perfect glass of my dreams—for I admit I am always dreaming of it—the perfect glass of my dreams is a bit of plain glass, very simple. It may be either pressed glass or moulded glass—I care not; and it may be browned in the making, or clear; I am indifferent about that. I do not even insist upon its antiquity, though the older it is the better, of course; but what I do value is the state of preservation in which I find it. That is to say, as I have already pointed out, a specimen of glass, to be really worth while, should be precisely in the condition in which it left the retailer’s shelf to pass to the original purchaser’s possession, and, above all, THE ORIGINAL CONTENTS SHOULD BE INTACT.

I admit that this is asking a great deal. It is more than one requires, for instance, of seventeenth-century Venetian glass, or of old Bohemian or of Bristol. Shall I be accused of jingoism when I say that I, personally, have found perfection only in American glass? (A Hungarian collector, now resident in this country, once asserted to me that he had found a sample of Scotch glass in the state I hold to be really worth while; but he was absolutely unwilling to show it, though I made every effort to induce him; and I ended by doubting him.) I do not claim that I have found worth-while glass frequently. Alas, no! For though I have looked and looked and hoped and hoped for it during many years, I have actually discovered but two perfect examples—only two! The first (a superb thing from Kentucky) I found absolutely by chance in the queerest, quaintest little place imaginable, up a passageway behind a hotel, early in the morning after the election of President Taft; and the second (not so pure, but nevertheless wonderful) I discovered only last September, among some shrubberies close to a summer mansion on the rugged coast of Massachusetts. What these discoveries meant to me, only one who seeks with a like patient enthusiasm could comprehend. I shall not describe my sensations; it is enough to say that there are pleasures one must keep to one’s self. I did not even speak of my discoveries at the time; but it may not be out of place for me to say now that they made me very happy. Indeed, after the second, I wandered for hours as in a dream, and even on the following day, when I chanced to meet a friend, he passed me, and then looked round over his shoulder at me for some time, all without recognizing me.

THE GLASS PERFECT

From a drawing by Jared P. Kilgallen, Esq., J.D. & R.P., of the item he considers most worth while in his collection. Note: This glass is no longer in original condition.

Now, a word upon the manner and means of collecting. As will readily be supposed, I do not follow the ordinary channels or patronize the customary marts of trade in antiques. I have nothing to say against the Antiquity Shops as such; and I freely admit that many of them contain genuine prizes for the persistent seeker; but after all they are for the amateur of careless purse. It is true that in a shop one CAN pick up a very small bit of rare value for nothing sometimes; and I have done it successfully; but the chances are against it, and, as it is always risky, usually I have thought better not even to try. No, the shops are not my field of endeavor. I say it in all modesty, but I have done better among the garnered old treasures of one quiet, private house than in a hundred Antiquity Shops.

In general, a collector needs what I may be pardoned for calling the Collector’s Eye. To illustrate my meaning: How many of my readers have not at some time missed an heirloom, or other treasured object that has simply disappeared? We all have these losses. The missing object has, most probably (as we say), just been “thrown out.” The true Collector’s Eye is ever busy in those places or receptacles where things are “thrown out.” Of course, most of one’s discoveries made in this manner consist of portions, rather than of entire objects of vertu; nevertheless, I have thus picked up many of my best things.

But the true Collector’s Eye is never at rest. Take an old gate in a fence, or a dilapidated building of any sort: the ordinary gaze may pass over these surfaces with mere ennui, but many of my best old hinges, latches, etc., have been wrenched from such environments, merely in passing, as it were. The Collector’s Eye will note the very fall of a fine old bit of blacksmithing from some careless horse. No doubt the uninitiated critic will cry “Fie!” upon this. “What? Are there collectors who collect horseshoes?” And may I ask: “Why not, indeed?” Aside from the intrinsic value latent in any fine old bit of iron, no true quoit-player would miss an opportunity to make a contribution to the beautifying and decoration of his home club. And let me whisper in the ear of the Philistine skeptic for his better information: Is he aware that in the finest Louis XV vitrine in the palace of Prince Oscar Schofield, at Zorn, under glass and reposing upon delicate shagreen velours, is the gilded shoe of the steed of Balaam? If no collector had picked it up, would it be there?

But I would impress upon the beginner: he must not be content with merely picking up things. He must, indeed, pick up what he can, wherever there is a fair opportunity; but I should not stand where I do to-day among collectors, had I stopped with merely “picking up” things. True, I have picked up many and many’s the good thing; but my BEST things were not obtained in this way.

I was quite a young man when I began collecting, taking with me a sack, and sometimes a wheelbarrow also, for this purpose, on my daily rambles. One day it struck me that a splendid old Colonial house, which I had often passed, must contain many lovely, quaint old things that would be charming for a person of taste to number among his curios. There was a “To Let” sign upon the house, and I confess that the thought of the difficulties in my way dismayed me. To seek out the agent, to obtain from him the name and location of the owner of the house, who might prove to be, perhaps, a resident of some distant city difficult of access—to do all this and then bargain and bicker with the owner (in case I reached him), to chaffer over prices, and in the end, very likely, to find him obdurately avaricious: what was the use? Seldom have I been more discouraged; but I think I may have mentioned that I am a collector. To the real collector, discouragement is never despair.

After thinking the matter over, I decided to go about it in the straightforward, manly way, instead of adopting the roundabout and involved means I have just sketched. There was the house; the frank thing was simply to go in and see whether or not it contained the treasures that the noble old classic façade seemed to suggest. And this was the course I sensibly determined to follow.

Owing to certain technical difficulties, I was obliged to make my visit after dusk had fallen, and then only by the inadequate illumination of a small, patented electric lamp; nevertheless, even so hasty and umbrous (if I may use the word) an examination of the contents of the place as I was able to make proved disappointing. The house had been fitted up for tenancy, not for the owner to live in, and the collecting of scarce an object in the whole interior paid for the expense of removing it in a small hired vehicle.

However, all houses are not alike; not even all unoccupied ones, and it should be emphasized that in this first experience of mine I overlooked something of importance. Many a time, afterward, in examining rental properties and residences offered for sale, I have recalled with a mournful smile that first omission; and seldom indeed has my patient search gone unrewarded by beautifully patined sections of brass or copper, perhaps, and some fine old bit of plumbing.

Let me say again, the Collector’s Eye overlooks nothing, and the great point is, not to follow the fad, but to anticipate it. There is not a single class of antiques that I did not collect long before the amateurs began to “pay prices” for such things, and I am now principally engaged in collecting the antiques of the future. I know better than anybody else what the priceless old things of the future will be, because I have formed the habit of picking them up at the time when they are thrown out.

Now, let me add just one word upon a bit of old textile now in my possession. I have hanging upon my wall a superb bit of old Kuppenheimer weaving. People say to me: “How in the world did you ever find a piece of that color? We have specimens of Kuppenheimer, but ours are not like THAT! How DID you obtain it?”

I shake my head and smile. A collector’s secrets are not for everybody.

And yet—and yet, I appreciate the honor that has been done me by the eminent association under the auspices of which this book is compiled, and I will drop just a hint. Reader, your Kuppenheimer (in case you are so fortunate as to possess one) can be of the same faint, elusive, subtly napless shade, if you will treat yours as I did mine.

And withal, I am compelled to admit that the unique quality of MY Kuppenheimer was the result of an accident. I will tell you part and let you guess the rest—if you can—and if you do guess it, you will have a Kuppenheimer worth owning.

Plate VI

OLD SKIPWORTH WARE

Dog on paper-weight. From Baxter’s Dam Corners, N.H.

I did not obtain my Kuppenheimer from Rochester. In fact, it had passed through several hands before it came to me, and then, as it still had that peculiar garment-like quality, which a real Kuppenheimer often possesses, I wore it, myself, for several seasons. In time the patina began to alter noticeably, but it was not thus that it acquired the sheen I have mentioned. However, I found myself somewhat conspicuous, and in the autumn of 1921 I placed the Kuppenheimer among my collections, which I keep on the other side of my apartment, opposite the window.

Now during the following winter, I happened to notice that the glass in the larger pane of the window became defective, during an absence of mine upon a collector’s excursion. There are a great many boys in my neighborhood, and I am a special favorite among them. One of them, evidently not knowing of my absence, had been trying to attract my attention with a large pebble and the window glass had thus been inadequate. Without thinking much of the incident, I placed the Kuppenheimer in a position that would remedy the inadequacy of the window.

Fellow-collectors, have you guessed the secret? In the spring I found the Kuppenheimer to be as I have described it. That is the true story of what is perhaps not undeservedly known as the Kilgallen Kuppenheimer.... I never wear it now, except upon Inauguration Day, in honor of a new President....