The Old Curiosity Shop

“ It is a moot point whether the frequent change in the ownership of curios which goes on every day, as evidenced by the auction sales, stirs up the curiosity of the collector and awakens his interest in his hobby to a greater extent than when such curios are placed on view in local museums. The fact remains that, notwithstanding the constant circulation of curios, many find a permanent home in museums. ”

“ Old Curiosity Shop is a novel by Charles Dickens, published in 1840. The story centers around Little Nell, the grandchild of the keeper of the shop, and her weary quest for a safe retreat for her grandfather and herself. The grandfather, in an eager desire to secure a fortune for his grandchild, became addicted to gambling. ”

“ Second-hand dealers of all kinds flourish here, and the medley of ancient books, musty reliquaries, antique jewelry, and battered images minus such trifles as a nose or ear, makes the street into one continuous curiosity-shop. ”

“ Old men were there, whose eyes were dim and senses failing—grandmothers, who might have died ten years ago, and still been old—the deaf, the blind, the lame, the palsied, the living dead in many shapes and forms, to see the closing of that early grave. ”

“ To see the old man struck down beneath the pressure of some hidden grief, to mark his wavering and unsettled state, to be agitated at times with a dreadful fear that his mind was wandering, and to trace in his words and looks the dawning of despondent madness ”

“ THE HUNTING GROUND In buried cities—Turned up by the plough—Among Saxon and Norman remains—In hidden chambers—In local museums—Dealers' shops—The engraver's art.
The multiplicity of collectable objects needed to supply collectors makes the uninitiated wonder where all these antiques come from. Countless numbers of beautiful objects have found their way into the melting-pot in the past, and what once was old has in some new form become once more a useful article, in its turn to be discarded and perhaps melted up and recast. ”

“ The place through which he made his way at leisure was one of those receptacles for old and curious things which seem to crouch in odd corners of this town and to hide their musty treasures from the public eye in jealousy and distrust. ”

“ If the peace of the simple village had moved the child more strongly, because of the dark and troubled ways that lay beyond, and through which she had journeyed with such failing feet, what was the deep impression of finding herself alone in that solemn building, where the very light, coming through sunken windows, seemed old and grey, and the air, redolent of earth and mould, seemed laden with decay, purified by time of all its grosser particles, and sighing through arch and aisle, and clustered pillars, like the breath of ages gone! ”

“ The old has become more and more a museum, preserved and perpetuated in the midst of the new, but without any further relation to it—it must be admitted indeed that such a relation is considerable—than that of the stock on his shelves to the shopkeeper, or of the Siren of the South to the showman who stands before his booth. ”

“ The scrambling mass of people are simply book lovers and book collectors, and Powner’s has got in a new consignment of books. Such scenes occur every Saturday. The big stalls in front of the shop are filled with all sorts of books, old Roman antiquities, books on sports, old poetry, collected by someone who had disposed of his books, or who had left his treasures behind him. ”

“ One beauty of the Old World shops is that if a visitor comes back to the place where he left them fifty years before, he finds them, or has a great chance of finding them, just where they stood at his former visit. ”

“ How many of us who have frequented the art sales in American cities, from the old Clinton Hall auction days to the present, would have imagined that Pliny took such things as seriously, Augustus Cæsar such things in jest? How old the new world is, how new the old!
From the time of the ancient Athenian vase shops, and even from long before that, to our own day, when we may browse in the realms of antiquarians at home, the bazaars of the Far East and the quaint inglenooks of Europe when we are traveling, collecting has been a passion with the many as well as a mania of the few. ”

“ 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. ”

“ The Strange Discovery and Disappearance of Stuart’s Washington ANTIQUE shops are isles of romance and mystery in the commonplace everyday life of New York, but if you wish to enter into the real thrill of adventure, you must forget the fashionable shop, where antiques have found a temporary resting place and you must not talk to the shop-keeper. ”

“ THOUGH the natural-history portion of the Marshlands Museum grew so rapidly that it threatened to overflow the cabinet, there were very few antiquities in the collection, a Roman lamp, an Egyptian scarab, a few old coins, and a Georgian snuff-box making up the whole of the scanty store.
"I wish we could get a few really ancient things," said Cathy one day, as she dusted and tidied the shelves. "Arrow-heads, I mean, and spindle-whorls, and bronze brooches, and all those delightful finds you hear of people digging up out of barrows. ”

“ There is one thing there which clings alike to the shop of the dealer in old iron, the ware-room of the tapestry maker, the laboratory of the chemist, and the studio of the painter: in all those gloomy dens where a furtive daylight filters in through the window-shutters the most manifestly ancient thing is dust. The cobwebs are more authentic than the guimp laces, and the old pear-tree furniture on exhibition is actually younger than the mahogany which arrived but yesterday from America.
The warehouse of my bric-à-brac dealer was a veritable Capharnaum. ”

“ 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. ”

“ Decrepit age, and vigorous life, and blooming youth, and helpless infancy, poured forth—on crutches, in the pride of strength and health, in the full blush of promise, in the mere dawn of life—to gather round her tomb. ”

“ What a soothing, luxurious, drowsy way of travelling, to lie inside that slowly-moving mountain, listening to the tinkling of the horses’ bells, the occasional smacking of the carter’s whip, the smooth rolling of the great broad wheels, the rattle of the harness, the cheery good-nights of passing travellers jogging past on little short-stepped horses—all made pleasantly indistinct by the thick awning, which seemed made for lazy listening under, till one fell asleep! ”

“ 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. ”

“ Supremely fine examples of old furniture, china, silverware, bronzes, miniatures, and the like, have not often been “picked up for a song.” The collector must remember that the pastime of collecting is not one of recent development. Indeed, the ancients were collectors of the rare, curious, and beautiful. The Medici were renowned for gathering in their places objets de virtu, and few collectors of note of to-day could outvie the enthusiasm of Horace Walpole, who turned Strawberry Hill into a veritable museum. ”

“ These be ideal surroundings. In the ancient shops, too, are things of rarity and price, artfully displayed to the gaze of unwary purchasers who do not know the secrets of the trade in antiques and curiosities, and are quite ignorant of the fact that they pay twice or thrice the value at such places as these for the old china, the silver, the chairs, and bookcases of quaint design that take their fancy. ”

“ The mystery and romance woven around all the various works of art and useful objects that have withstood the destructive powers of time and men is captivating. How did all these things get into the fashionable antique stores? ”

“ They prowl about all sorts of out-of-the-way places; storage houses, auction rooms, in garrets of houses that will be torn down and in cellars of old family dwellings, unoccupied perhaps for generations. They sense the value of a thing the moment they see it. Some of them are scholarly gentlemen who have a great book knowledge, who know more than professors in our universities and curators of our museums. ”

“ The antiquer first locates an antique-shop, which he does by walking along a street until he is struck in the nose by a peculiarly fusty odor, faintly resembling recently disinterred boots, and finds the proprietor sitting in a gloomy corner of the shop writing, or pretending to write, in a ledger and giving an excellent but unconscious imitation of a large spider observing the approach of a juicy bluebottle fly. ”

“ Many collectors have become such through an increasing interest in old furniture, rare china, early silver, and other classes of antiques and curios, inspired in the beginning by the acquisition of some object of the sort, personal contact with which has served as an example of the pleasure which collecting holds in store for one. The true collector is not merely “a gatherer of things,” indifferent to the guidance of a discriminating taste. ”

“ The latter shops, of course, are of the greatest importance to the itinerant or catch-as-catch-can antique-hunters; for it is only in them that one stumbles on something rare and costly that has lain hidden in a shop-corner, regarded by the shopkeeper as a mere piece of junk—something, for example, like one of Marie Antoinette’s crown jewels or a piece of genuine fifteenth-century arras tapestry or one of Henry the Eighth’s marriage certificates or a coal scuttle which was used by Madame du Barry—something that can be bought for a dollar and a quarter and sold for ten thousand. ”

“ The lapidary has from the first felt himself at home with Nature, and has found room for many of her devices and eccentricities, which he could not now bear to turn out of doors. Neither are we inclined to quarrel with him about his arrangements, though his shop exhibits nothing which will remind us of a frontage in Pall Mall or Bond Street. Moreover, when we look a little closer, he is not such a mere dreamer after all. Commerce has not been forgotten, nor is a certain kind of elegance lacking. ”

“ It is also a common practice to sell as antiques purely modern unwashed pieces reproduced in the old designs, particularly if such pieces have been aged artificially by some such method as exposure to bazaar traffic for a few weeks or months. ”

“ In the course of our adventures at home we found that tea-collectors were more numerous than we should have dreamed them to be, perhaps because the subject embraced collecting in almost every field—furniture, old silver, china and pottery, pewter, brasses, books, prints, and what not ”

“ What could be simpler and yet more beneficial to the patron than to add the signature of an Old Master to a painting and let the patron discover it for himself? Many of the most priceless Old Masters in existence have reached America in this way, and many a millionaire’s home would be a gloomier place to-day were it not for this simple but pleasure-giving little device.
There are certain technical points about antique-collecting in Europe that are easily picked up by the antique-collector in two or three years’ time.
Venetian glass, for example, breaks more readily than ordinary glass. ”

“ I love auction rooms without catalogues, without plush chairs, where specialists have not been allowed to separate the goats from the sheep.
“Finds” are rare in our times when every grocer’s wife who inherited a library from her great uncle, the preacher, knows more about auction-room prices than the average collector of books; when every push-cart peddlar examines his ill-smelling day’s collection for antiques.
Books and works of art have become objects of speculation. ”

“ But a book, or anything else, owned and displayed as a mere curiosity, is of not much real value, no matter what price it may bring at auction. The things that make a good museum what it is are not curiosities at all, in the vulgar sense. They illustrate some science or art and make its study easier and more interesting; they throw light on geology or history or sculpture. Once in a while we see a museum collection of books made for this object, to illustrate the art of binding or the history of printing, or the depredations of book-eating insects. ”

“ The collection of watches is a hobby indulged in by but few; there are, however, many single examples included in household curios, and not infrequently several handsomely engraved old watch cases are seen exhibited in the modern glass-topped curio tables so fashionable in twentieth-century drawing-rooms—now and then the interest in them being increased by the musical bells of the repeaters, many of which were made a century or more ago. ”

“ Antique shops along Fifth Avenue and the main streets are conducted as up-to-date business places, and up-to-date business has a romance of its own, a twentieth century romance that has little to do with the individual and less with sacred time-honored traditions that touch the heart. Most antique dealers kill the charm their curios and works of art awaken in us. ”