Antiques Road Show or How to Tell a Sow’s Ear from a Silk Purse

by Suzanne Poor

Talk about media hype. There’s not a Monday night (unless we’re down the shore, which is rare these days since the place was rented all summer) that I don’t look at Antiques Road Show on Channel 13. I suppose it’s also on NJN, which I could get because my little TV has both UHF and VHF, but we are creatures of habit.

One of my worst habits is that I’m a pack rat. I never throw anything away. Ever since there was the remotest hope that I might actually earn a Ph.D., I’ve saved every one of the quarterly publications of the Modern Language Association (MLA), thinking maybe someday I’ll write another very important research paper and need one of the articles on Jonathan Swift. Consequently, my office at home is a mass of PMLA tomes, none of which I have ever opened. And ever since we had to move our offices last fall and hauled our archives home, there’s hardly room to walk around. The same is true of all the closets in the adjacent room where our home computer is. Overflow from the real office and the home office obscures serious stuff like old handbags,
20-year-old bank statements, framed prints and paintings from long-forgotten friends and lovers.

As a devotee of the Road Show, thinking that one day something in the above described mess will prove valuable, I inhale every vignette. There are actually people I know talking to people I’ve never seen before on that show. Lark Mason is one of them. Right after we came back from China and I’d had a piece published in the New York Times about our visit there with Wang Shixiang, I received a letter to Lark from Wang because Wang in Beijing couldn’t do business directly with the U.S.
The next thing we knew, we were all at Sotheby’s honoring Wang, who owned the world’s most extensive collection of Ming and Qing Chinese furniture at an auction of similar artifacts. My Times piece had been translated into Chinese.

Lark is no longer with Sotheby’s, but one of the experts on Chinese antiques is on the Road Show. Everything I have from China is a tourist piece or, like all things here today, fabricated there.

17th-century highboy — a marriage gone awry
Once I’d sent a Polaroid photograph of a 17th-century English highboy to Sotheby’s, thinking I’d sell it and stop worrying about bills for a while. But it turned out to be a marriage of two different highboys, both authentic but not by the same cabinetmaker. Rather than thousands and thousands of dollars, it was worth about $1,200. Duped like me, someone had once paid a fortune for it.

I watch the lemmings on the show bringing their stuff to be analyzed or berated or belittled while I’m cooking dinner. I laugh at some of the items people collect, and I’m astonished at others and their prices. Just the other day Courier and Ives prints were estimated at astronomical prices. I raced up to the TV room thinking the three framed images of hunters were Courier and Ives, but no, they’re copies of 1803 prints — at least I think they’re copies.

Handbags galore
And then the other night someone brought in handbags, ladies’ purses. Why did you bring these in, someone asked? Because they’re ’50s and ’60s vintage. One was a black alligator bag, with brass fittings, shaped like a rhombus with the narrower end at the top. I thought, I have one of those. I used it for a while back then, but ultimately hated it because it looked like an old lady’s purse. It still does. It had a short handle, just when shoulder straps were introduced. Well, said the expert, this bag would sell at auction for about six thousand dollars. That got my attention. “Why so much?” the owner asked. Because Grace Kelly carried one. It was the rage back then. “These are precious.”

I tore upstairs, rooted through the over-stuffed closet horrified that I’d thrown the purse away. But no there it was, way in the back. In perfect condition; the lining was leather as well. It wasn’t dyed black either, but rather a natural brown.
Six thousand dollars for a pocketbook? As Iago says in Othello. “Put money in your purse.” Now I can. The lesson? Listen to the hype. Save everything. You never know when you’ll be able to sell something you thought was ugly for big bucks. Beauty, of course, is in the eye of the buyer. And the media.

By the way, there’s more than one way to skin a cat; sometimes a sow’s ear looks exactly like a silk purse.

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