The Chimney Cupboard

The Crow's Nest 2-3

2012-01-27T02:17:00.000-08:00

“WE’REGOING IN ALICE STEP ASIDE THIS MAN MUST SEE MOTHER’S THINGS AND ADVISE ME YOUKNOW IT MUST CHANGE NOW YOUR TOO OLD TO LIVE HERE ANYMORE YOU’RE THE LAST ONESAND THERE ISN’T EVEN A TOILET HERE”

“TOILET!”hissed Alice. “THERE HAS NEVERBEEN A TOILET HERE. EVER. AND EVERY BLOOD EVERHAS DIED HERE. RIGHT IN OURHOUSE. EVER. EVERY SINGLE BLOOD DIED HERE ANDI WILL TOO!”

Bythis point I had stepped back and was reflecting on this-is-not-a-good-ideaself directives. Margaret ignoredAlice, stepped forward past her. Alice looked at me, ignored me and stepped behind Margaret following herup into the house. I cautiously followedboth of them. Margaret walkstraight to the right into a front room, through that, into the front hall andascended the front stairs. Alicestopped at the bottom of the stairs. I, having followed, hesitated a moment and then catching Margaret’s overshoulder look directly at me followed by “COME UP”, stepped around Alice andfollowed up the stairs. At the toplanding… that I vaguely took in as a… full Maine Federal staircase to upperlanding with a long neglected plaster cast decorated ceiling far above…Margaret opened one of two doors and stepped into darkness. I followed. It wasn’t actually dark for a whole battery of windows, onthree walls, lighted the room showing numerous mounds of objects and, at thecenter, a very large and fully exposed brick chimney rising through the floorto display two modest fireplaces and then condense to a perfect square as itshot straight up to a roof sixteen feet above. What we actually stepped into was a natural lighted, allnatural wood , very dry and very old attic dusty large space that was thereported unfinished second floor that also included an intended garret spaceabove that, too, was never completed.

Iblinked my eyes and stood still as Margaret spoke “SHE WON’T BOTHER ANYMORE. THESE ARE MOTHER’S THINGSOVER HERE”. She had walked to amodest mound in the back right corner by the windows. I walked over to her and the pile. I looked around at the whole space.. “THAT’S ALL ALICE’S RUBBISH” shesaid. “TELL ME WHAT TO DO WITHMOTHER’S RUBBISH. DO YOU WANTTHIS?” she said slicing the air with her right hand. “THIS! THISOVER HERE. THIS HERE. ALL THATTHERE. ALONG THE WALL THERE. THAT. THE BOOKS THERE. THAT RUBBISH THERE AND SO ON AND SO FORTH OVER TO THE CORNER THERE”.

Idid… “want this”. I wanted ALL ofit for my antiquarian impulse grasped ATTIC GOLD before me everywhere. I stood in the center of a very largevery old very abundantly piled full attic that had “never been touched” … oreven seen by ANY antiquarian. Dark, dirty, dusty GOLD … EVERYWHERE. “Yes I want it” I said stepping boldly to the final “soforth over to the corner there” and plunging a hand into a mound touching the“corner there” and extracting an 18^th century wooden noggin typetankard that set upon a small and fine… tea table.

“NOTTHAT” corrected Margaret. “THAT’STHE OLD CAPTAIN’S THERE. ALL THATDOWN OFF THERE. MOTHER’S IS RIGHTUP TO HERE. THE CAPTAIN CLAIMS SHEINCROACHES THERE. SHE DOES IF YOUASK ME. DOES SO ON PURPOSE. I KNOW MOTHER. CAPTURES TERRITORY AND THETHINGS IN THAT TERRITORY. MORERUBBISH. SELLS IT OFF. CARRIES IT OFF AND SELLS IT. VERY CRAFTY MOTHER WAS. THE CAPTAIN KNOWS IT. WE CANNOT GO PAST MOTHER’S RUBBISHTODAY. WE WILL CLEAR OUT THE BLOODRUBBISH SOON ENOUGH”. I stood withmy back to Margaret looking into the dark mound beyond the borderline. I slowly put the tankard back down onthe table making sure that it was EXACTLY where I found it. I surveyed the borderline. The mother’s rubbish clearly was newerthan the… rubbish… in the mound beyond the border.

Iturned back toward Margaret, walked past her to the other far end of thegestured “mother’s rubbish”. Atthat end I denoted a similar yet to be declared borderline bumping into a densecorner mound of very old “rubbish”. This older rubbish mound continued into the dark and aroundto the …windowless wooden wall that held the COMPLETELY BLOCKED second door…leading to the door we came in. Approaching the first “we entered” door this old dark rubbish moundchanged style and became rather current (late 20^th Century) in makeup. A white plastic bucket restedon the top.

The Crow's Nest 2-2

2012-01-22T02:01:00.000-08:00

2-2

Thirtyminutes later, after loading the purchased lot, standing beside my parkedtruck, watching Margaret back the mother’s old car out of the barn, turn itaround, pull along side of me and gesture for me to get in… WE… had turned offthe state road on to a dirt road, turned on to another dirt road, gone up overa rise and were descending to the river when Margaret turned on to a… third dirtroad… that rolled down across a creek and up into the farm yard of a verydilapidated large square hip-roofed Maine Federal homestead overlooking theriver. During all of the driveMargaret orated while I privately noted where we were and …went.

“THEBLOODS I’M SURE YOU KNOW WERE ONCE A FINE FAMILY. SEA CAPTAINS. COASTAL TRADERS. THENGENTLEMEN FARMERS BUYING PROPERTIES ALONG THE RIVER. MOVED INLAND. THEY BUILT THE FARM STARTING IN 1790. NEVER FINISHED IT. THEY ALL LIVED IN IT. THEUPPER FLOOR IS UNFINISHED. EXCEPTIN THE FRONT. THE HALLWAY. JUST BEAUTIFUL ONCE. RUINED NOW. THEY ALL LIVED IN THERE. ALL OF THEM FOR GENERATIONS. THEY ALL WERE DRUNKS. ALWAYS DRUNK AND COULDN’T GET ANYTHING DONE. THAT WAS AFTER THE CAPTAINS. THOSE WERE THE MEN. AFTER THAT THEY WERE ALL DRUNKS. WOULD START OUT WITH PROMISE. ALL VERY BRIGHT. DID WELLWITH EDUCATION. THEN BECAMEDRUNKS. EVERYONE OF THEM. DRUNKS.

“MOTHERBOUGHT THE FARM FROM THE LAST DRUNK; OLD EBENIZER BLOOD: OLD eb-bEE. THETOWN WAS GOING TO TAKE IT OVER. SHE BOUGHT IT FOR TAXES AND A WAGON OF WHISKEY. IT WASN’T ACTUAL WHISKEY YOU KNOW. SHE SET UP HIS CREDIT YOU KNOW. AT THE STORE. HE DRANK IT ALL. MOTHER HAS THE ACCOUNTS. DIDN’T MATTER. HE WAS ADRUNK.

“THISIS WHAT’S HAPPENED TO THESE FAMILIES. MOTHER ALWAYS SAYS WE MUST PERSERVE OUR FAMILY DIGNITY. THERE’S NOTHING LEFT SHE SAYS. THE SEA RAN OUT. THE LAND RAN OUT. THE FARMS RUN OUT. THE BOYS WERE KILLED. THE CIVIL WAR. OR LEFT. WENT WEST THEY SAY BUT THEY ALWAYS CAME BACK. BROKE. DRUNK. LIVED INTHE CITIES. BOSTON. PORTLAND. WHEN THEY GOT TOO OLD THEY CAME HOME AND DIED DRUNK. MOTHER SAYS WE MUST REALIZE THIS. OUR FAMILY WAS NEVER DRUNKS. FARMERS. TEACHERS. ITHAS SIMPLY PLAYED OUT. ABANDONEDIS WHAT IT IS NOW. ABANDONED. A FEW OLD FAMILIES WITH A FEW OLD HOMESON A FEW OLD FARMS. WAITING ITOUT. WAITING FOR THE END. THEY CANNOT SELL THE FARMS. NOBODY WANTS THEM. I WILL TRY TO SELL BLOOD’S FARM BUT IALREADY PLAN TO GIVE TO THE TOWN TO BURN. BURN IT. THEY DO THAT ONFIREMEN MUSTER DAY AND SUCH. VERYACTIVE FOR THIS THEY ARE. I TALKEDTO THE FIRE CHIEF. VERYEXCITED. TOLD ME ALL ABOUT THEPERMITS, LAND RIGHTS AND SO ON AND SO FORTH. VERY FINE FIRE CAPTAIN. MOTHER KNOWS HIS PARENTS. WAS NEVER TOO BRIGHT IN SCHOOL BUT FINE FOR THE FIRE DEPARTMENT. VERY DEPENDABLE FOR THAT. HIS MOTHER’S SIDE WERE ALWAYS THATWAY. DOWN ON THE INTERVALE.THEY’RE FROM. DOWN BELOW THE PEABODYPLACE. CAPTAIN PEABODY’S. THERE’S A ROW OF MILL HOUSES. DOWN IN THERE SOMEWHERE. MOTHER KNOWS WHERE.”

Atthis moment we came to a stop in the farm yard. The barn was up hill to the left. The house overlooked the river to the right. A large pasture opened in front. Everything was overgrown and inneglect. One shed roof hadcollapsed. Weeds wound around thehome. The granite stone steps tothe front door were over grown. The Federal fan above the front door was unpainted and weathered. Margaret got out. I got out. She walked toward the side door; a worn entryway that had ashort treaded footpath through the weeds leading to it. As she stepped forward I followed andas we did this the door opened and out …hissed a witch.

Afrail windswept female figure dressed in several layers of stringy old pajamalike clothes under an ancient and worn full length men’s coat… particularlyfilthy at its bottom front and having a twisted and matted fur collar… steppedforward through the open door. On she came leaning on a tall and old woodencane… that was more of a homemade staff. As she stepped forward with her long stringy gray hair… that matched andbecame lost in the dirty gray of her clothing… wisping in the breeze. sheemerged from the doorway and moved decisively toward Margaret hissing “YOU HAVENO BUSINESS HERE ANYMORE YOUR MOTHER IS DEAD GET OUT GO AWAY NO ONE IS ALLOWEDHERE ANYMORE.”

Margaretignored this, turned to me and said “THIS IS ALICE SHE IS THE LAST LIVING BLOOD SHE LIVES IN THE HOUSEMOTHER LET HER”.

“LETHER!” hissed Alice. “THIS IS MYHOUSE. THIS IS THE BLOODPLACE. I AM A BLOOD. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN MY PLACE. IT HAS ALWAYS BEEN THE BLOOD’SPLACE!” Her scanty mouthful ofsmall, twisted, dark brown teeth caught my eye as she hissed. She stared down Margaret from the headof the footpath to the door step. Her poise showed no fear and a directed glare. Margaret stopped.

The Crow's Nest Part 2 #1

2012-01-19T01:34:00.000-08:00

Part 2

Aftera decade more, more or less, one morning I arrived by appointment, rang the doorbell,was admitted, seated and viewed briefly without comment… by Margaret. She left the room and thenreturned. In the left aloneinterval I surveyed the offerings of the day. A small frontal pile of …not much… was backed up by alarger, dirty MOUND of …looks-like-just-come-out-of-the-attic… crud. I did not have time to inspect orcontemplate these objects for Margaret returned

Shewalked directly to the Mother’s chair and stood before it …looking down onme. I looked up at her.

“MOTHERIS DEAD.” She began. “SHE DIEDTUESDAY MORNING.” It was nowThursday morning. I was shocked. The mother had called me last Fridaymorning to make our appointment. Margaret watched me. “IDECIDED TO KEEP OUR APPOINTMENT BECAUSE MOTHER WOULD HAVE WANTED ME TO. WE HAD HER FUNERAL YESTERDAY. SHE IS BURIED. YESTERDAY.”

Islowly stammered a sort of I am sorry I am very shocked I am very surprised Iam… and are you sure you want me here… something utterance.

“OFCOURSE WE WANT YOU HERE. WE MUSTGO ON JUST AS WE HAVE FOR THAT IS WHAT MOTHER WANTS. SHE IS EXPECTING YOU TODAY. SHE IS EXPECTING YOU TO BEHAVE JUST AS YOU ALWAYS DO”

Itook that in and then queried “How did she die?”

“SHETHREW HERSELF DOWN THE CELLAR STAIRS. SHE DIED FROM THE FALL. SHEBROKE HER WRIST AND I COULDN’T GET HER UP. THE AMBUALNCE CAME AND TOOK HER TO THE HOSPITAL. SHE WOULDN’T SAY ANYTHING. SHE LOOKED AROUND AT ALL OF US. NOT A WORD. THEN WENT TO SLEEP. SHE DIED THE NEXT MORNING. IT WAS ALL VERY SUDDEN. THAT IS JUST THE WAY SHE WANTED IT. I KNOW SHE WANTED IT. THAT’S WHY SHE DID IT: THROWING HERSELF DOWN THE CELLAR STAIRS. OF COURSE THEY ALL SAY SHE FELL BUT I KNOW MOTHER.”

“Nowwhat do I do? I thought and that thought amounted to nothing for Margaretcontinued:

“WEMUST GO ON JUST AS MOTHER WANTED TO. I HAVE HER THINGS HERE FOR YOU AS USUAL BUT I AM ADDING SOME FROM MYSELFFOR THAT WILL BE THE WAY FROM NOW ON. THESE ARE FROM BLOOD FARM. WE ARE SELLING BLOOD FARM. I WANT YOU TO COME THERE. MOTHER WANTED YOU TO COME THERE. THERE ARE MANY THINGS THERE. SO MUCH RUBBISH. MOTHERHATED ALL THE RUBBISH. WE ARESELLING THE FARM AND THE HOUSE MUST BE CLEANED OUT. YOU MUST FIND ANYTHING WE MAY SELL FOR US. MOTHER ALWAYS WANTED YOU TO GO WITH HERBUT NOW IT IS TOO LATE. YOU WILLHAVE TO SHOW ME WHAT TO DO WITH ALL THE RUBBISH.”

Allof Margaret’s oration was just that; oration. Although delivered directly and in a booming voice ofcommand, it was hardly overbearing and simply …direct statement… that one couldnot reply to. The oration set thelay of the land and …that was that.

“DOYOU WANT THIS RUBBISH. IF SO HOWMUCH WILL YOU PAY!” she command while calming slicing the air toward the pilesto her right with her hand.

Ilooked at the piles, looked at her and said “One hundred twenty-five.”

“VERYGOOD NOW GET IT ALL OUT OF HERE AND WE WILL GO TO BLOOD’S FARM. PAYING CASH AS USUAL I PRESUME. PAY ME NOW PLEASE.” I did.

The Crow's Nest 10

2012-01-18T01:14:00.000-08:00

Irelate what happened to the portraits. Becoming part of my stock by purchase, I … ”put them away” meaning Ileaned them up in a warehouse, high, dry, dark, cool and safe. Of course I read the penciled names butdid nothing more. “I will wait” Isaid “until she is dead”. I didthis. By then I TOO understoodthat … “Do you know their names?” I certainly do. “Will youtell me the names?” I certainlywill not. …was THE appropriate historic AND commercial directive.

Thepaintings themselves were “what they are”. At the best possible they …could… be attributed to aregional Boston – coastal Maine portrait painter hoping for a high point of,for example, Chester Harding who painted just such ilk without hesitation orsigning them: A professional Mainecouple in Boston for the week, pre-painted body forms on prepared canvaseswaiting in the artist’s studio, a sitting for two, the faces painted in, thefinished and still wet portraits crated in their frames for the ride back homein Maine. Harding has receivedmore attention in recent decades just because he DID paint portraits of peoplelike this. His portraits are a oneon a scale of one to ten. A ten,should one need example, is John Singer Sargent’s “DAUGHTERS OF EDWARD DARLEYBOIT”. THAT portrait is an exampleof an artist who could paint… when painting a portrait, THESE portraits were an example of ajob painter getting money from aspiring middle class climbers who …knew nothingabout art; They received exactlywhat they paid for… and were very pleased and proud. For the mother, it is a credit to HER art sense that SHEknew they were “no good” and evidently determined this HERSELF; through herself-education of art in her lifetime. In the end she succeeded in bettering herself to her great grandparentsthrough the very medium of THEIR self betterment. WOULD they be proud of her? And further… and I include the selling of the portraits tome…, are these actions by the mother (her efforts at erasing the family trail)THE CULTURAL APEX of this family?

Thecommercial finalization of these portraits was based on the abovedenotations. I understood that …I…should not mention the names in pencil. Further I understood that the portraits were not to be sold by ME, aknown professional, for I would then “be asked” … a whole bunch of stupid art& history questions about them. No… I need not purvey them at a high bar to … get the most money. Why? Because within the antiques and fine arts trades are… a verylarge group of… aspiring middle class climbers who… are “dealers” …by theirself appointment and… business card. For I to get the absolute most easily accessible money for these …oil oncanvas in original frames untouched, as found… was very simple. I had a fellow-yet-much less-knowndealer friend simply show up with them at a country auctioneer’s office …with afew more “similar such” items and …cool & calmly… consign them to auctionwithout comment. From there after,antiquarian sleuth took it’s course. Of course the auctioneer found the penciled names. Of course he considered them fine-getting-finerfine art once the “names were found” and “Probably a Boston ARTIST likeHARDING”. Of course he couldn’tkeep the lid on this COMMERCIAL sunrise so…: In come the competing sea of above described business cardfoisting dealers who… never speak to or acknowledge each other except in candysweet kisses and … that NEVER mention their commercial interest in a pair of…just-not-quite-yet-discovered “IMPORTANT” “MAINE” prominent merchant familyportraits… that …throughout the whole commercial procedure… have nobody evermention anything about …anything.

Thebidding rises. The hammerdrops. The portraits are“discovered”, even getting a tiny photograph-with-note in an antiques dealertrade journal. They areprofessionally “cleaned”, “restored”, “researched”, “attributed”, including theframes. They appear with splendor“for sale”; offered with pride and prize by “that kind of dealer” who sell themto “that kind of collector” who …with pride and prize… hang them in their homeand “lend them” to a local historical society.

Myassociate receives the check and a slap on the back from the auctioneer, “BRING ME SOME MORE LIKE THOSE!”. Don’t worry, WE WILL.

The Crow's Nest 9

2012-01-17T02:14:00.000-08:00

“Theywere not particularly pleasant people you understand. He was a hard man; very gruff. There it does not show” said the mother gesturing toward theportrait of the man. Turningtoward the woman the mother stated “She came from the coast; North Yarmouth Ibelieve. Her people were seacaptains; merchant class traders. Nothing more”. Returning tothe male portrait she continued “He was trained as a bookkeeper in Boston. They met there. Married. Land and lumber it was in the end. After the Civil War these coastal traders could no longercompete with the steam traders. They moved inland to speculate on land”. The mother’s eyes turned from the portraits. I couldn’t tell if these were herdirect ancestors. I didn’t dareask. Margaret had left. She didn’t care.

“Do you know their names?” I asked

“Icertainly do.” said the mother.

“Wouldyou tell me the names?”

“Icertainly will not.” she said. “That’s why they are being sold to you so inexpensively.” There was an awkward pause.

“Iwill pay you now.” I said decisively and stood up.

“Takeyour portraits outside first. Iwill have your total when you come back in. Leave the front door open when your out please.”

Idid as I was told. In the daylightthe portraits looked better. Ididn’t stop to contemplate them. Ibelieved I was being watched. Iopened the truck cab and put the man in first, facing the back of theseat. As I did that I saw a clearpenciled name at the top of the frame. I kept moving and leaned the woman face forward against the man. I covered them with a packingblanket. The man’s name I hadread. His last name was themother’s maiden name. I went backinside.

Standing,I prepared to pay. The motherlooked up at me. “That oldminister; the broken down one.” she said. “He’s been after those portraits for years. Comes here. Comes right up to the front door. He’s broken down you know. Walks like a fence gate loose in the wind. Seems to watch me and seems to sense something. I don’t like that or him. VERY tight with his wallet. Wouldn’t even talk money on those. Claimed he’d got a right to ‘em througha sister’s husband’s grandfather. Claimed he knows just who they are. Well I know who they are AND know his broken downfigure…: HE’S HID behind the Biblehis whole life. He says to me thatGOD wants him to have the portraits. I say to him THERE IS NO GOD. He knows that, he does. Henever says anything more. I’d sellHIM to you if I could. A miserableman he is. Always comes right tothe door.” She stopped speakingbut was still looking up at me.

“Wellnow… PAY ME UP. We are done.” Shesaid turning the paper slip toward me. I bent to see the total and then began stacking the payment in piles oftwenty dollar bills; one hundred in each pile, excepting the last. The mother picked up the money bypile. “Good riddance to both ofthem” she said. “The next time hestops I will make Margaret take him up to the room and see the empty wall.”

Thefront door closed behind me, the key turned in the lock and a fresh breeze blewacross my face. I liked the feelof that breeze. It brought me backinto the real world and erased the feeling that I was in some sort ofunderground tunnel when inside with the mother. I was a little concerned that the portraits harbored somesort of old evil. “They can’t” Isaid to myself. “They’re just herold people. She’s erasing hertrail. That’s the whole point ofthis. She knows it’s the end andshe is cleaning it all out neat and tidy.”

The Crow's Nest 8

2012-01-11T02:32:00.000-08:00

Atthe next visit, after I was admitted and seated AND the mother was seated,there was a pause, a silence and then direct eye contact from the mother. “I expect that when I am no longer herethat you will conduct business in the same manner… with the same courtesy andpatience… with the representative of our family. I expect I have your word on this without asking forit. I expect you alreadyunderstand this and understand that in the future you may have by far greateradvantage in our business than you do now”. She paused, then continued, “I believe you understand me.”

“Ido… OF COURSE.” I said.

Wethen launched into the usual business ritual without any furtherdiscussion. In fact we launchedinto the usual business ritual for at least two whole years without any furtherdiscussion. At the end of abouttwo years, at the end of our business one morning, the mother seemed a littlefurtive and cast glances toward the corner of the parlor where one would enterfrom the living section of the house. She seemed to mark time in our business; to delay it’s wrap-up insteadof her usual very brisk “TOTAL CASH PAYMENT DUE NOW” process. At the next moment the door from theliving section opened and Margaret appeared. “Please show him the items we discussed” the mothersaid. “Go with her and buy them ifyou want it. The price is sixhundred and fifty and you will never get a better pair for that.”

Irose and followed Margaret to thefront stairs, then up the front stairs and then to the FIRST closed door uponthe landing. Margaret turned thekey that was in the door lock and opened the door. We entered, I following her. The room was dark, cool and smelled like old mothballs. I blinked to clear myeyes. The dim light showed thethick velvet curtains nearly closed over the four windows, a pair of Civil Warera twin cannonball beds of birch hardwood in their original old shellacfinish, a later washstand style bedside table between them, old Empire styledressers to the side of each bed, a drop center Victorian walnut and marbletopped dresser with a large mirror centered on the opposite wall and… a pair offormal style 1850’s portraits of a middle aged man and woman in their originalframes hanging on the wall to each side of this dresser. The portraits were dark. Not only painted with a dark pallet,the old surface had darkened. Tomy eye it was obvious that these portraits had been there since they were hungthere …before the Civil War. “Shewishes to sell these” said Margaret vaguely gesturing toward the portrait ofthe man.

Ilooked about the room. There wasNOTHING else in sight. I looked atthe rug on the floor. It was a1920’s era large Chinese style oriental rug that was lightly worn from theentrance to the room and up through the space between the beds. It was “no good”. I looked at the portraits. First the man. Then the woman. The frames were gold gilt andperfect. They had never ever seensunlight or been moved since hanging. The man was a cold, sober and well dressed gentleman with eyes thatpierced and followed you. Thewoman was softer but her eyes also cut with no quarter and… followed you. I stepped up to each portrait,scrutinized them and did not touch them. I noted that the upper inner edge of the bottom of the gold frames had theirgold gilt worn off exposing the white gesso base appropriately from… onehundred fifty years of dusting. The paintings had only been occasionally dusted for the past FIFTY yearsI guessed. I noted too whatappeared to be a very… very recent but very… very LIGHT dusting … probablywithin the last twenty-four hours. The portraits had clearly “been there forever” and were, most probably…”ancestors” of the current owners. Commercially they were just and ONLY that; “ancestors” or …”instantancestors”. I knew that at aglance and, evidently, so did the mother. Hence the price and hence also the accurate admonition that I would“never get better for that”.

“Iwill buy them.” I said

“Good.”Said Margaret.

Therewas a pause. She looked atme. I understood the queue andstepped to the gentleman, placed both hands at the lower sides of the frame,lightly pushed up and lifted the old fellow off the wall. A deeper toned rectangle appeared onthe faded Victorian wallpaper where the painting had hung. I sat the portrait straight down on thefloor leaning against the wall. Istepped to the woman and repeated the process. Then I picked up both portraits by the top of the frames,with the portraits facing inward, one in each hand and turned to Margaret. The portraits were light anddusty. NO ONE had EVER lifted themoff the wall before. Margaretturned, stepped out of the room, turned again and looked toward me. I followed, turning and pausing outsidethe door while Margaret closed and locked it. We then went down the stairs, I in front of her, andreturned to the front parlor where the mother waited. Upon entering the room I casually leaned both portraitstogether upon one velvet curtain. They faced the mother. Isat down. The mother looked at theportraits, said “Good” and marked them down on her paper.

The Crow's Nest 7

2012-01-10T01:30:00.000-08:00

Thedaughter, Margaret, came into the room during our business all the time. She always came in after we’d “been atit” for awhile. Hers were thewords “been at it”. She alwayscame to “check on mother”. It wasalso to inspect our commercial progress. Margaret cared nothing for antiques, her mother’s antiques, the home’santiques or about what was currently being negotiated. I never saw her ever pay any attentionor even acknowledge any object in any way. That was fine by me for it was bad enough wrestling themother. To have the second incommand default …was actually a help. Periodically the mother, once Margaret was in the room would seek herinput. “What do you think?” ALWAYSbrought only “Whatever you do is fine Mother”. The mother would then return full bore upon me and …Margaretwould leave. Toward the end… andbeginning the day of the Indian blood, Margaret slowly became the principaldistributor of the household. Ibecame her principal agent. Thisrelationship was not by my choice and took me a while to detect.

Margaret’sreasons for coming in usually included the notice that “Mother and I are goingto be going to (variable blank filled in with a destination including “garden,cemetery, Parson Hill, East Parson, the church” or “Blood’s Farm”. This last was the only possiblefavorable-to-me for I had determined that this was a house size place where themother stored and hid …more of her accumulations. In my mind it soon became the actual top of her old fencepost. Margaret rarely mentioned itand I sensed, correctly, she …hated “Bloods Farm”.

I,of course, delighted in words “Blood’s Farm”. Early in our business I had purchased a brace of old Belgianflintlock pistols, rusted and neglected, that after a little query push, I hadbeen told she “found at Blood’s Farm”. Decades later I knew that this meant she had actually purloined themfrom some old minister’s reserves, had stored them at the farm (hidden themthere until enough time passed to assure safe sale) and finally… afterdetermining that they were not as valuable as she thought them to be, “I passthem on to you” for a “too much” (from my perspective) cash payment. EVEN after decades of enlightenment, Istill was utterly desirous of “Blood Farm”.

AfterMargaret made her statement of Mother’s future for the day, we were expected totidy up our dealings and I leave, after payment, PROMPTLY, which I did. Beginning shortly after the Indianblood, Margaret began to take on a more purposeful role. She came to the room earlier,apparently by direction. Therein,the mother would instruct her to take me to somewhere in the home to look atsomething specifically… that was for sale and did have a purchase price. This was an unprecedented change in ourdealings and from the first I was awe struck. We began with a simple “Show him the table in the fourposter and see if he’ll buy it.” Off we went out of the parlor up the front hall and then …UP the frontstairs to the second floor, a landing beside the giant staircase that had anequal twelve foot ceiling …and little else. There we walked by the Mother’s sewing machine at the stairhead, by one large closed door,then by another matching closed door to come to a third matching closed doorbefore a… FOURTH matching closed door. This forth one was at a right angle to the others and at the end of thelanding. Before this last door wasa refinished trunk and a smaller old trunk. Otherwise and again noting the old sewing machine, the wholeexpanse of the landing was empty.

Atthe third door Margaret turned a key in the door lock, opened the large doorinward and …I followed her in. Thecurtains were drawn but enough light snuck past them from the three giantwindows that I “Yes I can see”. The “table” was quickly pointed out. It was a late, circa 1840’s, candle stand. These are common old Maine homesteadtables. Carrying the traditions oftheir earlier 18^th century mentors, they are made the same but havethe awkward and heavy lines of the Empire and Transitional Victorianstyles. They are usually a dark,dark brown old finish. Togetherthese mean “they suck” in antique picker jargon and this means they are “hardsell” because the professional antiquarian seeks the much earlier and finercandle stand. These “clunkers” intheir “brown slime” finish fuss along in the trade. They stand guard, always for sale, in the antiques showbooths of lesser dealers who “think” such a stand “is good”. The are purchased for a modest sum byhomeowners filling a space with “antique furniture” that THEY think “isgood”. Usually they pay just slightlytoo much for them and keep them in their home “forever”.

Ineeded only a second to appraise this stand but did actually step to it, pickit up and look at it’s underside. Then I said “One twenty-five OK I’ll buy it” sort of automatically whileAUTOMATICALLY starting to turn to take in the whole contents of the room bypicker practice AND… attempt the hope that there would be “something” (good)that I could “get” to ….MAKE UP FOR THIS PIECE OF CRAP I JUST PAID TOO MUCHFOR. There was no such luck.

Margaretsimply turned around, said “Very good” and walked out the door. I barely finished my turn before SHEhad turned, outside the door, with a glower that stated I was lingering behindand to …come out now. I did. She closed the door. She locked the door. She left the key in the lock. I stood there holding the stand by it’sneck and… then followed her all the way back down the stairs and into the frontparlor. I set the stand downbetween the business chairs. Margaret nodded. The mothersaid “Good” and recorded this purchase on her paper slip. She then added that slip up, turned ittoward me. I stood up, looked atthe total and brought forth my cash payment. Within minutes I was outside the front door listening to themother turn the key to lock it. Istood at the door facing the street and holding the stand by it’s neck. I paused to survey the street thenstepped over to my truck with my freshly purchased …items of plunder. The whole process, from the bedroom tothe street was executed by the two women with the same dexterity and adroitprocedure that one associates with a matron sweeping crumbs off the crisp linentablecloth during a tea.

The Crow's Nest 6

2012-01-09T02:56:00.000-08:00

Thiswent on for decades. MY roving eyeendured. Ever reaching furtherinto the piles accessible to me, ever repeating that scrutiny. Ever, ever, slowly, slowly hearing eververy slightly more from the mother of her own legacy. From that came the tale of Simon, the fence post and… themention of “The Crow’s Nest” “in the attic”. I did not understand then that The Crow’s Nest was aboutthirty feet straight up above where I sat. I don’t recall realizing much of anything about Simon or TheCrow’s Nest.

Oneday, during negotiations over a trivial offering; an old set of croquet clubsin their old box with their end stakes, wickets and painted balls...: These lay next to a framed shadow boxof old G.A.R. (Civil War; Grand Army of the Republic) encampment medals that IHAD purchased but … those lay before a gnarled globe shaped form of old ropewrapped about a barn pulley set… that I didn’t want… we reached a momentarySILENT impasse. The mother feltthe croquet set was “good” and “valuable”. I did not and had rejected it outright. This brisk action created the silentimpasse. The mother scrutinizedme. I remained silent. She further surveyed me and then said“You are very patient”.

Iquickly responded, without thinking, “It’s the Indian in me”. The Mother actually drew back at thatbut said nothing. Then, aftercollecting herself in her business arm chair she said “I never would havesuspected”. Then she paused and asI said nothing she continued. “Iknow that you would have never said something like that unless you knew what itmeans. I know also you wouldn’t havesaid that to me unless you knew that I would know what it means”.

Actuallymy utterance was very not thought out and these from the mother were notreaching any point with me either. That was fine for the damage was done and I needed to explain nothing.

Hernext statements clarified all this. “I have Indian blood too, You must have already determined that. How long? Ihave always wondered why you kept at it here so long. Why you proceed the way you do. Why you try to maneuver me the way you do. Why I must always flank you… and why… Ihave come to actually enjoy all that. Now I know. I neverconsidered that. Well: It is that we are equal afterall.”

Allthis I took as a bad directive for our dealings. I do, in fact, have the old New England icon “Indianblood”. I do consciously know thatthis makes me different from my fellow old New Englanders. I have known that a long time but onlyas I became older have I been able to refine this difference into actualiota. The two iota being broughtforward here are the inexhaustible ability to “wait” and the completenon-compliance with the moral standards of the Christian Western world. This last, a complex and broad socialand inner-self construction, I refer to as “moral hygiene”. I don’t have that; moral hygiene. The Mother now knew it. She didn’t have moral hygieneeither. She also knew I would“wait” and what that actually means. It means I knew I could wait until she was dead.

Atthis exact moment; a moment of great and permanent change in our dealings, wewere interrupted by the Mother’s daughter coming into the front of the houseand into the parlor. Ourconversation ended right there and was never continued although from there onit lurked silently through the rest of our dealings and produced lastingresults.

The Crow's Nest 5

2012-01-08T02:11:00.000-08:00

Thestatus of the visits remained this way for at least a decade. The only enhancements were beingbriefly left in the front parlor alone for some transaction related developmentusually involving being shown “something” that required the mother to scurryoff into the home. This left meample opportunity to scan the piles in the front parlor and to walk the lengthof the front hall peering at the collection in a vague hope of seeing somethingthat was “good”. Nothing ever cameof these efforts. The frontparlor’s gatherings never changed except to have annual Christmas holiday giftsand gift wrap doings floated on their top. These disappeared after the holidays. The front hall collection never had anyalteration or addition. The wholeaccumulation gathered more dust, lived in its half light darkness and grewdrearier to my eye with each visit. I did denote that to the right and left of the inside front door therewere minor changes. Theserepresented recent acquisitions being processed.

Theoutstanding example of this was in the corner, to the left of the door, whereone stepped in. There appeared anebony wood cane with a gold top. Stout, the gold cap was larger than usual. It had initials and an 1884 date engraved on the verytop. I know this because I handledit without asking on the first visit that it appeared. The mother said that it was “Dr. So& So’s” without denoting it was “not for sale”. I had heard the mother mention this visiting doctorperiodically and her reference to him as “that old PILL”. Evidently this doctor, a small man bythe mother’s standards, visited the area from the Boston area briefly each yearwhen going (fly) “fishing in Weld”. The cane remained there for half a decade and I never touched itagain. On a visit after thatamount of time had passed, the mother rose from her business chair during onevisit, went into the front hall and down to the front door returning with thecane. “I want to sell this today too.”she said. I paused for I knew thestory. “My grandfather was giventhis by an old doctor from Boston. God knows who he was but his old initials are on the top here” shecontinued by pointing to the gold top. “It’s gold you know. HOWMUCH?” Again I paused. Her eyes flashed across mine showing aYankee trader’s earnest support of her command. “Twenty” I said defensively and without consideration. “SOLD” she said and turned to mark iton her paper slip. This tiny paperslip, in her own hand, always determined all transactions of any visit. An inclusion on that day’s slip was amark in stone meaning “SOLD”.

Thecane was not much beyond the obvious that some old Bostonian doctor had bescrewed out of it by the Mother. She had noted the accidental leaving… that was probably brought on by a glasstoo much of sherry. The mother wasperpetually given bottles of sherry by visitors which she used to great affecton ministers, professors and… old doctors from Boston). She did nothing about this caneleaving… and… waited until enough time had passed to assure her that she hadclear title and then… sold it. This dexterity, I slowly determined, was a working method and process ofacquisition for the mother. Idecided that even my own wallet was not safe from her roving eye. I had already… and from the very startof the visits… made sure to “GET” my purchases “OUT” very… very promptly and tobe sure they ALL got out. Themother was skillful at NOT pointing out that a purchase of mine “was stillthere”. Once that front doorclosed behind my back… that visits dealings, I determined… were done. The front door closed tight.

The Crow's Nest 4

2012-01-07T02:31:00.000-08:00

Themother’s purpose of my call to the home was to purchase the “antiques” for“money” and leave. My quick scanof the offerings would, with luck, show as many as three items out the usuallyten to twelve selections as possible purchases. The rest had to be rejected, one by one. That ritual never ceased. Disappointment and resistance was usualfrom the mother but I, as an antiques dealer, stuck from the very first visitto a “no mercy purchases” policy that… saved me from acquiring ANY of themother’s unacceptable crud. She,with her scanty antiquarian knowledge, self denotations of “old”, quest forcash and Yankee trader skills, was formidable. “NO” and “NO MONEY” were the brutal praises I adopted andkept up from the very first. Eventhe few “possible” items were usually marginal. About every third visit a “something” did appear but thatwas not an informed discovery by the mother. A “visit” came increasingly often as the mother determined IWOULD actually buy something. Through three seasons they approached once a month. During the summer season a visit wasrare.

Themother was all business, a business woman true and a Yankee true too. I quickly determined that her offeringswhere both residue chosen from the bowels of the home and… her recentacquisitions. She purloinedanything, some how got it to her barn, sorted it, hid her selected plunder inher… fence post… and contacted me. Only the need of money brought forth anything. Her fence post was the region in the older back section ofthe home that ascended off of her dining room and was called “up the backstairs”. This true back stairs,distinguished from the front stairs that ascended off of the front parlor whereI sat, led to a series of four small rooms “upstairs”. Generally referred to as “backbedrooms”, these rooms had… excepting the one room furthest from the top of thestairs and toward the front of the home that the mother used as herbedroom… become packed with themother’s plunder that is better described as her rubbish. I was never allowed into this region ofthe home until the mother was dead. This fence post and it’s trail allowed the mother to gather, store andreview her plunder obsessively and privately from when she arose at dawn towhen she retired. Choice morselsfrom this fence post would be selected for me to …purchase.

Iwas able, in most cases, to denote what she offered as a “she found” or as an“old family” thing. I could senseit, smell it and usually SEE it. She either never detected this skill or simply Yankee tradered forwardby never acknowledging it. Probably the latter for she was skillful. It was only the pitfall of her lack of professionalantiquarian knowledge that occasionally left her…pasture gate open. Sometimes I simply hopped over the gatewith glee.

Whatcaused that was the few times when she actually found something good and…didn’t know it. We must return tothe location where we were seated to understand this well. From the front door to my seat in theparlor, we passed up and turned right off of the “front hall”, this veryconcisely named. Along each sideof this hall was packed more of her antique clutter. It would pass as a collection but as it was a mish-mosh andmounded assemblage with, in the end, no truly fine object gathered, her antiqueclutter best describes it. All was“not for sale”. All had a hideoustale of acquisition, tale of heritage, tale of value and tale of why it was“there” and “not for sale”. Forexample, a mangy trunk full of “old papers” and tied with an old silk ribbonwould be exacerbated orally as so & so’s Civil War trunk “he brought home”with the papers being “his papers” even though a briefest scan would show thatthey were nothing but 1890’s grocery receipts from the local country store andthat WHOSE papers these papers were was doubtful while the trunk itself hadbeen “cleaned” by the mother, was ugly and never saw any Civil War anywhere butwas… NOT FOR SALE. This directivefound in object after object continued up both sides of the hall, included thewall hung iota, the “under the stair” in a darkened space and climaxed at theupper hall end by a wide and cheaply made wicker bookcase, circa WWI, that themother had actually purchased “at the train station” to hold her extremeprizes. These included a “CivilWar” sword, numerous natural history items like a single mountain sheep hornand… old (“RARE”) books all… NOT FOR SALE.

Theback edge of this sharp saber of a collection was that, to a passingprofessional antiquarian, it showed concisely that “this lady has no idea whatshe’s doing”. Therefore… and oneday, I entered the front parlor and there in the middle of the room on theratty Victorian carpet sat, among ten other objects, the most outstanding1750’s crown & heart cut crest banister back arm chair with a beautiful andperfectly worn original black painted surface AND …beautiful and perfectly wornoriginal woven splint seat AND… beautiful and perfect …original height. I said, moved, touched, breathed,peeked and fumbled NOTHING.

Withinten minutes I owned the chair for a modest $125.00, a coolly calculatedpurchase price based on a “she probably paid twenty” rock skip across the waterof RISK ALL guessing merged with that “no idea what she’s doing” notedabove. WE moved right on to thenext …little hand painted late Victorian HAIR RECIEVER that I HATE but actuallyBOUGHT during that aura of giddy that overcame me; a …mercy purchase.

Igot that chair out of there and it remains to this day the “best” notch on myantiquarian stick for the “BEST BANNISTER BACK ARMCHAIR” I “found” “ever”. HOW she got it… to the center of theparlor upon that rug… from the first seemed a… must be an eternaldarkness. I did suspect right awaythat somehow, somewhere in her travels… locally… she “FOUND” that chair, anobvious “escape” from a southern coastal New England colonial SOMEWHERE …thathad been carried by ox cart up into middle-of-no-where-Maine during thatcolonial era, become outdated and put away and… stayed that way for a centuryor TWO until THIS WOMAN somehow got it before her and… bought it. This last is crucial. As she had, I guessed with my rockskip, actually paid money for it, the chair became indiscriminately “FOR SALE”due to this capital outlay. ItMUST BE SOLD to get back that outlay so even though understood to be a “good”“old” “chair”. The dollars spentstopped there until my rock skipped one hundred dollar clear “PROFIT” relievedthis… crisis situation.

The Crow's Nest 3

2012-01-03T01:19:00.000-08:00

Mythirty year visit ritual was always the same. I would follow the mother into the front parlor. She would approach and seat herself atan opened Empire style fall front desk that was against the front wall of theparlor between the two front windows. She would gesture for me to sit in a large Victorian Renaissance Revivalwalnut armchair that had been drawn forward from it’s permanent position to theright of the desk. She always satin the same older Greek Revival Empire arm chair in front of the desk.

Beginningwith the first visit and continuing ever after, these were the fix positions ofour business meetings. Themeetings were… for me to be offered, review and …presumably… purchase a scantyselection of items brought forth from within the home as “antiques” that I “wouldwant”. As the Mother had only avague notion of “antiques” based primarily on what she herself determined wasantique, this moment of the meeting always had a potential impasse. The impasse was that my roving eye veryquickly determined that the items brought forth for a meeting… did not make theantiquarian cut.

Thewhole of the front parlor room had been the exact same for six generations ofthe family’s residence: The exactsame from the first day of it’s finished decoration. The exact same until all of the family was dead and I soldall of the items from their fixed positions… in about ten minutes. The left wall had a large andtraditionally formed Empire “sofa” placed between two built-in bookcases with avery large 1830’s oversize gilt gold framed …portrait… of a free standingresurrected Jesus having his wounds inspected as he showed himself beneath hishalo glow. “Copied from one in theLourve” was the standard and unchanging explanation of this “not for sale”“masterpiece”. Well painted,perfectly framed, gigantic and flush with it’s palette of Empire tone opaquereds, greens and grays, the painting was most probably a Portland - Portsmouth– Boston (!) knock off job painting done for EXACTLY what, when and where this…“masterpiece” stood. Thispainting, facing me and behind the mother as we transacted, loomed overall,forever.

Behindme was a smaller transitional Victorian …horsehair covered “sofa” that waspositioned forward of a long, long unused Empire Greek Revival fireplace. I define the style to note that thiswas NOT a colonial hearth but, in fact, a rural Maine specimen of a bombasticwhite-gilt gold painted grand decorative inclusion with a black portal at it’sbottom for “a fire” and the top mantel crested with a …tipped slightly forward…oversize robust split turned gilt gold “MIRROR” (Empire looking glass) above…that did have... when after thirty years I did remove it from the wall… aPortland, Maine “maker’s” (read “vendor’s”) label. It came to Portland by train and PROBABLY came to the homeby TRAIN too.

Themother, due to the exaggerated tipped angle of the looking glass could seeherself and… the back top of my head… in the “MIRROR” “IT”S NOT FOR SALE” as wetransacted. To either side of thefireplace were… built in and painted in their original touch-of-gray off-white(that was the color of the whole of the woodwork and trim of the “frontparlor”)…. bookcases. Before thesewere a gathering of Empire and Victorian chairs and rocking chairs. Upon the bookcases were …oldbooks. Upon and before thesebookcases; on the tops of them, on the floor, to the sides extending into thecorners of the room and… continuing off behind the Jesus painting sofa on theother side was…mounds of boxed, bagged, piled and…DUMPED… PERMENANTLY STOREDfor …over a century… “stuff” …heaped in just such a manor that an antiquesdealer would FOREVER eye it “in hopes” that a treasure would be “seen”.

Thewindows and the open and wide entry to this “front parlor” completed the timecapsule by having GIGANTIC floor to TWELVE FOOT ceiling high heavy thickmassive faded dust soiled for a century dark forest green and ochre earth tonedyellow… “drapes” that were, had, and forever after remained “never touched”ever including their original and permanently poised Empire ties tied… . When the home was sold, “THEY” wentwith it.

Thewall, aside from Jesus, had perfectly positioned “old framed prints” upon ascanty and subdued patterned, faded …but original… 1830 Empire style…rural-cheap… “wallpaper”. Originally a bosomy rouge pink, it was now a pink-gray-brown waterstained and pealing at the ceiling molding… yuck.

Inthe center of the room, on the floor and upon the “cat destroyed” cheapVictorian carpet were, at each meeting, the items “for sale”. Beginning with the first visit andcontinuing ever after, once seated there then began a three hour session of…Yankee dickering.

The Crow's Nest 2

2011-12-31T01:37:00.000-08:00

The Crow's Nest

Ibegan in the home with a telephone call from the mother. Their telephone was a wall mountedcrank telephone then. A localoperator assisted the call and the conversation. As the era of the crank had vanished except in interiorMaine, the operator had a singular relationship when contacting the outer worldfrom the village especially with elderly people.

Thewall mounted telephone was just past the door that lead to the “front part” ofthe house. This position excludedthe telephone from the living area of the home and defined it’s usage to theformal front business section of the home. This formal front faced the street. The door by the telephone marked theboundary of the house that defined the mother and the daughter’s usage withinthe whole. Simply, they lived inthe back and did their business in the front.

This“front part” (their words) must be understood well. The “living” part of the home was the older and originalsections of the home dating from the 1780’s. To this original home was added, in the 1820’s, a full,classic and New England grade perfect Greek Revival “addition” that was, infact, a whole home… of the latest and most fashionable style. So perfect and so formal was thisabutment that it never was fully assimilated by the family as being part of theoriginal homestead. The… alwaysclosed… door from the older home into the newer addition forever represented aborder line to the “front part”.

Fromthe street, the front part began with the front door and it’s perfect GreekRevival Doric pillared porch. Thisporch reach toward the main street of the village. It was abutted by a full grown sugar maple tree on it’s leftand a full grown American Horse Chestnut tree on it’s right. Visitors such as myself were receivedat this front door… only. Localvisitors and family friends were received at the kitchen door. These visitors walked past the frontdoor, back into the yard and through the shed door open between the barn andthe house to the concealed from view kitchen door at the rear side of the home…only.

Iwould walk up a flat stone path to a single step onto the front porch. I would walk two more steps to thefront door. I would push aprimitive electric door bell button that would set off a loud buzzer while Ifaced… and never used… a beautiful cast iron Grecian door knock that hadobviously been “there” “since it (the addition) was made”. To my right were the perfectly poisedrequisite three New England style slat back “porch rockers” and a smallcompanion table… all painted in an old and deep forest green paint. Before them stood a row of largeearthenware flower pots with their just modestly tended Geraniums. Stylistically flawless, the whole porchwas “just modestly tended” JUST PERFECTLY so as to assure that “these peopleare real local Mainers” who have lived “here” “forever” and not someone whomoved here “from away” (out of state).

Thedoor bell would be answered very slowly. I would hear the mother begin her expedition from her kitchen throughthe “living” house to the “front part” door. I would hear this door open… and close. I would hear her continuing up the“front hall” to the front door, hear her turn the key she kept in the door lockand this door lock unlock. Then Iwould hear her turn the ancient door knob (that I would watch turn on my side),hear her pull upon the… slightly stuck at bottom… perfect large Greek Revivaldoor… painted in old whitewash. The opening door would pop and then very gradually recede to reveal herface peeking through a crack to assure it was me. Then she would swing the door fully open.

“Comein come in thank you for coming so promptly” was always said as one sentenceand then IN I was following behind her “up” the “front hall” a mere twelve feetto turn right into a most… stunningly untouched circa 1825 Maine full Empirestyle decorated and never ever altered ever… front parlor.

Atthis moment it must be denoted that two spaces need description; the “fronthall” and “front parlor”. This isnot a tedious exercise. This ispart of the tale. Way up above andat the very top of this “front part” of the home was the crow’s nest. WAY, WAY up above the front door was a…perfectly proportioned, centered and matching Greek Revival window that looksout over all of the main street of the village. Behind this window was … the crow’s nest. It is the scale… and it’s perfectlypreserved time capsule state… that must be conveyed to understand this home,the “front part”, the first floor spaces, the stairs ascending, the upstairsrooms, the stairs to the attic, the attic and, finally, the crow’s nest.

Wewill wind our way there with description and tale merged.

The Crow's Nest

2011-12-28T06:24:00.001-08:00

TheCrow’s Nest

Atthe top of the attic stairs; at the very top of the home, there was aroom. This room was called “TheCrow’s Nest”. There was a homemadehand painted sign on the closed door that said “The Crow’s Nest”. Several painted crows surrounded thistitle. This painted sign had beenmade on an old stiff paper shirt board. It was now warped and chipped from dangling from it’s single tack. Eventually I removed the sign and soldit. That was after a thirty yearassociation with the sign and the room.

Thename; “The Crow’s Nest’s” came from the woman whose room this was. She derived the “crow’s nest” from hermother who had once had a pet crow. The pet crow’s name was Simon. That name came from “Simple Simon”, the poem. The Mother had named the crow when she was thirteen. She had captured the baby crow, raisedit and… exhibited it at a local northern Maine fair. She exhibited Simon annually for over a half decade.

Simon,although a docile and loyal pet, ranged free from the Mother’s family farm innorthern Maine. Coming and goingas he chose, he excelled in one single passion; the gathering of small shinyobjects. No quality valuationcontributed to Simon’s collecting passion. Only shiny and size. He had to be able to carry his discovery off and be able to hide it inhis plunder trove.

Theplunder trove was the rotten hollow that formed a deep dish at the top of alarge and tall corner fence post at the upper end of the back pasture near thegate. From her childhood bedroomin the farm house the mother could see Simon tending and guarding his plundertrove.

Thevaried objects Simon found and hid in the fence post top were a continuing sagaand intrigue. Most wererudimentary and unsatisfying such as a shiny new tack, a copper wire piece or abottle cap. Other objects werevery intriguing and down right …evil. Simon purloined a sterling silver thimble with someone’s initials on it. One day a silver plated woman’swristwatch appeared. A silver beadnecklace suggested that Simon hopped in the open widow of a home and hunted ona woman’s dressing table. A silverwatch chain and a tiny silver cigar clipper, it too with engraved initials,suggested Simon had no gender sensitivity in his collecting. These finer items never ceased toentertain the mother when she inspected Simon’s fence post but also… theybothered. It was obvious to themother that Simon had stolen these items and that could only lead to trouble ifhe were found out Thatconsideration lead to a very ridged policy of the Mother never ever disturbingSimon’s fence post and that… was just fine by Simon.

Simonmet his end by purloining a small silver match case covering a box ofmatches. He open the match boxwith his beak, pecked the matches and they blew up in his face, instantlyblinding him, causing him to fall of the fence post and be found dead at it’sbase by the mother. She buriedSimon at the base of his fence post, did not disturb his plunder and waited. For the rest of her girlhood she wouldperiodically check Simon’s plunder. It was always the same. Even after she’d grown, moved away, married, had growing children of herown and only rarely returned to home, she always would slip away and checkSimon’s plunder. On one visithome, the fence post top was empty. Simon’s plunder was gone.

“Mice! I HATE MICE!”

2010-02-11T05:49:00.001-08:00

“Your offer is absolutely unacceptable!” the women yelled from the top of the stairs. She turned her back to us. We were at the bottom of the stairs. The old man looked at me, then to the box of old papers on the floor between us. I looked away from the women and toward the old man.
“Don’t worry about it.” I said to him. “I’ll put it back”.
“No, no. Leave it. I’ll move it.” he said. He was frail, in his mid seventies and the box weighted forty or fifty pounds. I reached down and picked it up. The dirt on the cardboard box brushed across my jacket as I put it on my shoulder.
“Let’s go.” I said, turning to the door.
Outside, we walked across the yard towards the doorway of a shed attached to the barn. “I don’t know what she wants.” said the man. “She thinks everything is valuable. She never even touched those papers. Why, I’d ah given ‘em to ya. Jesus. Sometimes I don’t figure her”.
“I wouldn’t think she’d care either.” I said. “You never know what someone will say when you want to buy something”.
We approached the shed door. It was a wide doorway on a building connecting the farm house and the barn. The roof was sagging, as was the door frame. Originally one could pass from the house to the barn through this building but the accumulation of household rubbish prevented access from the inside. As I stepped into this entry the women’s voice boomed from the door of the house.
“WHERE YOU GOING WITH THAT!” she demanded.
“WE’RE PUT’EN IT BACK.” yelled the old man. We turned toward her. I kept the box on my shoulder.
“WHAT BACK?” she yelled.
“THEM PAPERS!” he yelled.
“WHAT PAPERS?”
“THE ONES YOU WON’T SELL!”
“IN THE SHED?”
“THAT’S WHERE WE GOT ‘EM”.
“THEY WEREN’T IN THE HOUSE?”
“NO! THERE ON THE FLOOR OUT HERE. BOXES OF ‘EM!” The women paused in the doorway then started down the steps and across the yard. Her short fat form bounced her stubby arms at her side and her battle weary dress blew in the spring breeze. She looked like a toad jumping off a toad stool. We watched her approach. “Oh Jesus.” muttered the man. I put the box down on the step.
The women came directly over and we parted at her arrival so she could inspect the box. The box was full of old paper; letters, pamphlets, magazines, newspapers and any other paper detritus a rural Maine farm generates. “That?” she said turning to me. She put her hand into the box and lifted the top layers of paper. “You want to buy that? You’d pay ten dollars for that?”
“That box and any of the others in there you want to sell. There’s eight in there. We counted ‘em. They used ‘em to start the fires”. The women looked at me. Then she stepped from the box into the shed.
“I thought you wanted to buy the books!” she said.
“No. Those are too good for us. They’re very nice books and you have’em fairly priced. A book collector will buy them.” She turned to me in the doorway.
“Those boxes over there?” she said pointing to the mound of old cardboard boxes next to the stacks of old firewood. “You want that”.
“We buy old paper.” I said. “I’ll pay ten dollars each for any of those you want to sell”.
“You said there’s eight?
“We counted eight.” said the old man. “Including this one. We didn’t move ‘em”. The women walked across the dirty shed to the mound of boxes.
“Huh.” she said. “I never looked in those. Just old paper?” she said, tuning back to us. “Well... along as there’s only papers in ‘em, I sell you THOSE. WHY anyone’d want those’s beyond me”. She poked into a box on top of the mound.
“Watch out for the mice.” I said.
“MICE!” she said
“This box was full of ‘em.” said the old man gesturing toward the box between us.
“I HATE MICE! This whole place is full of mice!”
“You want to sell the boxes?” I said taking out my wallet and exposing four twenty dollar bills as fast as I could. The women, seeing this, walked back to me and reached for the money.
“GET those out of here. TAKE the MICE TOO!”. She took the money and stepped out into the yard. I promptly picked up the box, walked to the back of our pick-up truck and put it in. Then I loaded the rest of the boxes while the women watched and the old man pulled them away from the wall of the shed. “MAKE SURE ITS ONLY PAPERS!” the women yelled in at him when I was picking up the second box.
“Only papers.” he muttered to me.

I am a dealer. I specialize in buying and selling rare books called Americana; specifically ephemera. I buy low and I sell high. The above scenario is typical of how I find old paper.
We have now celebrated the centennial of one of the grandest ephemera hunts in the world. In the winter of 1896-97, two English scholars found what they described as “a single small page, measuring less than six inches by four...; a rubbed, tattered, mutilated waif from a rubbish heap”[1].
The vocabulary of this discovery accommodates the ephemeral theme of my work. Bernard Grenfell and his partner Arthur S. Hunt, Fellows of Oxford University, were digging the house rubbish of ancient Egyptian villages for their precious old papers. In describing the recovery of the mutilated waif, Grenfell parallels their work “to that of gold-mining”. “The gold-miner follows a vein of quartz”, he states, while the digger of old paper he reports, “has to follow a stratum, or vein of.... house-rubbish”[2]. The age of the Grenfell’s house rubbish was 350 AD. His mutilated waif was made of papyrus. It’s language was Greek. It’s content was, Grenfell stated; “the earliest, and far the earliest, record of the words spoken by our Lord Jesus Christ upon earth; the oldest... in which the name of Jesus is written”[3].
Grenfell continues his narration to offer a remarkable parallel between his work place and mine. He divides the interest in the old paper from Egypt into three periods[4]. The third period begins when he, as a scholar, actually visits the sources of the old paper and finds it himself. That moment, dated by the centennial we celebrated, he calls the beginning of scientific examination of old papers from household rubbish[5].
Grenfell’s first and second periods describe my realm of ephemera discovery. In the first period, the majority of ephemera is disregarded and “destroyed in undisturbed ignorance”. I recall that era of Americana Ephemera for I found old paper then and tried to sell it. The conditions of the first period is best illustrated by a fellow dealer’s query to me of “What was the best piece of paper you ever sold?”. I reflected for a moment on the treasures I’ve found and said “It was probably something in a box that I didn’t even know was there”. That is the truth. At one time, I could not sell old paper to anyone. No one wanted it. Grenfell notes that in this period, Egyptian papyri was “burned”. So were many of my finds of old paper. It was the easiest way to get rid of it. Usually I just left the old paper in the household rubbish when “considering the wholesale plundering of ... antiquities”[6].
The second period is distinguished by the emergence of a market for old paper. For papyri, they became “marketable, though ... no one could read them”. This old paper was “uselessly dispersed in paltry private collections, where, when they had gratified a passing curiosity or ministered to a momentary spirit of emulation, they were allowed to gather dust through years of neglect, till at the last, the futile cabinet of curios was dispersed, and its items were lost sight of altogether”[7]. This era brought forth the “freebooting” and “crafty dealer”[8]. This “cloak-and-dagger” character dominates the processing of old paper to furnish a “history of the scufflings of kites and crows... rather... of ghouls”[9]. A better description of my workplace is difficult to find in print. It well defines our current moment of Americana ephemeral study.
I am a ghoul and I am a good one. I find old paper and I sell it. I loot sites. I plunder, destroy and pillage. I cause irreparable loss and mutilation. I consider myself a distinguished member of this “vulgar crowd”[10]. For over forty years I have been doing this and I consider myself very fortunate to find the noun “ghoul” to describe myself.
The movement of Americana ephemera through the market place to the curio cabinets of paltry private collections makes up the majority of my business. This large body of collectors who purchase our rare discoveries is an incessant rabble that I endure daily. The above description of “marketable, though... no one could read them” summarizes my ever refining cynicism toward my clients and their collections of Americana. In fact, it is this cynicism that has brought me to our nation’s scholars. I sense we are at the beginning of the “scientific” examination of Americana ephemera.
At this time, we have passed the apex of the fad of collecting ephemera. I have plundered and sold too many subjects of art and history to NOT understand that markets change. The principal guardian of market change is price. When a subject of collector infatuation becomes too expensive, they stop buying it. Old paper is getting very expensive. Old paper that is source documentation Americana is the most expensive old paper in the marketplace. The collectors can no longer afford it. Further, they cannot understand what it is that they are buying at such a high price; “no one can read them”. I know this because I sell it to them.
In the past decades our sales to university collections, museums and affiliated scholars has grown tremendously. No longer do I have to explain why I catalog formerly disregarded ephemera. The opposite is happening: My new clients are explaining it to me. The purchasing by institutions of our source documents is spreading throughout our nation. These institutional collectors no longer follow established trails but are increasingly dabbling in the imaginative splendor that our finds embrace. Nearly twenty years ago we altered our cataloging to accommodate this creative directive by archivists and scholars. We are now cataloging every single piece of paper we loot from the sites of house rubbish. Do not get me wrong: We always took every piece of paper, stuffing all into garbage bags and dumping them on floor of our barn. Therein we would sort it for rarities and... sell the rest by the bag. No longer do we do this. To accommodate the refreshing quest of the scholar for the better footnote and the proportionally creative actions by archivist to build centers for better source document discovery, we are trying to come to these new collectors. Every piece of paper we find is offered for study.
Although it is still a long path of ghoulish plunder between the stubby women in the battle weary dress and the climate controlled security of a research center, I see a grand opportunity in Americana. The minds, the facilities and the money is there. Scholars need new and fertile grounds to explore. The monoliths of conservancy with their workstations and eminent staffs may easily manage formerly overwhelming mounds of house rubbish. The cost is nominal. Although the price per Americana rarity has been chased upward by paltry private collectors, that is over. This cost now requires a mental conception of the material that evades all but the most educated collector. This same inflation has flushed these materials into sight. The empire of scholarship in our nation may now see historical ephemera, one piece at a time, from a distance. Herein lies the future and its opportunity.
The grand collections and bibliographies of Americana have finally been surpassed. We all already know about those materials. They are all available to all of us at all times. Consequential and romantic as these collections are, they offer little opportunity for the scholar. Further, the challenge to these large collections by the new USERS of Americana ephemera does not allow them to excuse themselves by generalities such as “we have boxes of that stuff in the basement”. A lot of good those boxes are and I , too, have had as many, if not more boxes of the same old paper myself. We have put our boxes out where a student may see them. MORE students are coming to US daily. Yes it is a tedious mound of rubbish to process with our state of the art workstations. But: Is it going to be left to the ghouls within the history of ephemeral study to process it? I am a ghoul and I know better then to pretend to be a professional archivist or historian. I put my hands in boxes filled with mice. I pillage old homes in New England for treasure. I sell it for gold. Will I be the one who realizes the potential of our discoveries. I doubt it. My new clients are smarter then that and their number is grow daily.
I do not expect to find the scholar in the shed of a farm house in rural Maine, bent over a box filled with old paper and mice. I do not expect these students to gather their source documents in garbage bags, throw them into a pickup truck and pedantically offer a petty cash settlement for removal of house rubbish. What I do is an ancient occupation and I love it. My ghoulish expertise of tactics and plundering cannot be matched by many and I do challenge one to try it for personal proof.
I return to Mr. Grenfell who offers the validation and directive we need to join forces and garner a progressive relationship. He bought openly from dealers, particularly the scruffy, provincial “HEY! I FOUND THIS!” set that are the most ghoulish of the ghouls. His procedure was so refined that it merits emulation by scholars today. He would buy in an open scheme where he would not examine what he bought or care who the end institution was that preserved the discoveries. This led to many pieces of old paper being placed in many libraries. He did not have the time in his life to examine all of them. He died before the majority of his finds were read by anyone.
The finest example of this is his purchase of a 2 1/2 by 3 1/2 inch fragment for the John Rylands Library in Manchester (England). This waif, purchased from a ghoul and gleaned from an “unspecified” site escaped his (or anyone’s) attention for decades. When finally examined by a disciple of Grenfell’s, it was found to be a fragment of a New Testament leaf “not later than A.D. 150”. Again Grenfell’s house rubbish accomplished the impossible by pushing the time gap between the manuscript and the apostolic age to scant a thirty or forty years[11].
For our consideration today, Grenfell’s creative action of old paper gathering within his lifetime caused him to mingle amongst the ghouls whom he, evidently, understood well. He intuitively sensed that they are the most adept at plundering and... will never leave the scene. Perhaps he even enjoyed the ghouls. While I, as a ghoul, have come forward to extend my hand to the scholar, perhaps the quest for the destiny of Americana ephemera will allow the scholar to join me in the market place. This is as perilous and trying an environment as it’s history demonstrates but it has an equal tradition of it’s own that matches the historic excellence of scholarship. It should be the student of history who would be most able to persevere amongst the freebooters. Between the source and the end user there is no alternative to this day that will flank the crafty ghoul. I ask the scholar to join me in the rubbish heaps of old paper upon our landscape.
“YOU WANT THAT?” they say to me.
“Yes, I do.” I respond and so do my new collectors; our nations scholars.

Bibliography

Baikie, James: A CENTURY OF EXCAVATION IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS. London: Religious Tract Society; 1924.

Deuel, Leo: TESTAMENTS OF TIME. THE SEARCH FOR LOST MANUSCRIPTS AND RECORDS. New York: Alfred A. Knopf; 1965.

Grenfell, Bernard P.: “The Oldest Record of Christ’s Life. The First Complete Account of the ‘Saying of Our Lord,’” with and introduction by F. G. Kenyon. McCLURE’S, Vol. IX (1897), pp. 1022-30.

Grenfell, Bernard P., Arthur S. Hunt and D. G. Hogarth, with J. Grafton Milne: FAYUM TOWNS AND THEIR PAPYRI. London: Egypt Exploration Fund; 1900.

[1]: Grenfell, Bernard P: “The Oldest Record of Christ’s Life,” McCLURE’S, Vol. IX (1897), p. 1022.
[2]: Grenfell, B. P. and Hunt, Arthur S.: FAYUM TOWNS AND THEIR PAPYRI. Egypt Exploration Fund, London, 1900., p. 24.
[3]: Grenfell: “The Oldest Record of Christ’s Life”, p. 1022.
[4]: Grenfell and Hunt.: FAYUM TOWNS AND THEIR PAPYRI., p. 17-20.
[5]: Ibid., p. 18.
[6]: Ibid., p. 17-20.
[7]: Baikie, James.: A CENTURY OF EXCAVATION IN THE LAND OF THE PHARAOHS. The Religious Tract Society, London, (1924), p. 10, 13.
[8]: Deuel, Leo: TESTAMENTS OF TIME. THE SEARCH FOR LOST MANUSCRIPTS AND RECORDS., Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1965, p. 114-115.
[9]: Baikie, James.: op cit., p. 9.
[10]: Baikie, James.: Ibid., p. 11.
[11]: Deuel, Leo: op cit., p.346-347.

James Hutton's Goblets

2010-01-29T07:08:00.001-08:00

“A very dull old gentleman,” he thought.
“I wonder what his goblets may be worth.”

(Stevenson, Robert Lewis: “A Lodging For The Night”. 1877. The last line of the story.)

James Hutton is a different sort of picker than (the previously blog posted) Baxter or Lane Cooper. The latter two physically charge old New England homesteads and barns. Hutton visits them. I, as a picker, visit them too but my picking is methodical compared to Hutton. Hutton wishes to be served well prepared tea while he purchases, most nominally, the tea table it is served on. To him, purchasing the content of a garret and removing that same, is tedious. He prefers a solid silver teapot, purchased as plate. Excepting these differences, we all, as New England pickers, join together in opposition to the generic pickers that now have recognition through television programming. We seek fine New England decorative arts from …fine New England homes.
James is only fine New England decorative arts, while I am an "every bedroom, every bedroom dresser, every bedroom dresser drawer" "empty". I arch to the archeology of the Fine New England Home. James stays with "the decorative art only".
At the time of Baxter's pickle bottle find… that I then sold to Peggy (Abbott)… where upon she sold me her Connecticut ladder back chair that …was her mothers… and …had always been in the family… I: Knew that the chair should not have been sold by Peggy, that her mother would find out and that I would be called upon. The only gap was that… only I saw the chair. Baxter did not. BUT he did hear from Peggy that she had sold me "that old chair". Right away he visited me with no purpose… once. Then again. Both times he nosed around but mentioned nothing. I knew he was looking for the chair. He paused his visits and then appeared twice more without purpose. Evidently he did not see the chair… for sale. After this fourth visit, James Hutton arrived for a visit. Baxter had told him about "a chair" and Hutton, also familiar with Peggy's estate, knew exactly what chair it was. He seated himself at the barn door in an old Boston rocker and rocked slowly in it while looking at me.
"Where is Peggy's chair?" he asked.
"Chair?" I said
"That chair. Her mother's. The ladder back. The good one."
I stood up and stepped three steps to the far side of the barn, reached behind a stack of old lumber and… behind a bench covered with old Staffordshire china that was covered with an old table cloth and… lifted Peggy's chair from darkness into light.
"That chair." Said Hutton.
"My chair." I said.
"HER MOTHER will kill her WHEN she finds out". Pronounced Hutton knowing full well that I was already aware of this.
"How will she?" I said.
"OH!"
"Yes? YOU go tattling?"
"OH!" (pause) "How much is it?"
"Not for sale yet. Cooling off."
"How much THEN?"
"What do you want that for?"
"I collect things from that family. You know that."
"So do I".
Hutton looked around the barn, rocked back and forth, looked at the chair then looked at me. "This isn't the first time she's done this you know."
"Probably not." I said "I know I've come close before; things the mother gave her that she didn't want either. But. I believe this is my first no-no.
"The KEEP THIS UNTIL YOU DIE!" stated Hutton. Then he laughed.
I smiled. We both know this border line well. It is a fine border as long as the object is "no good". It is painfully difficult when the object is "good". The "painfully difficult" usually ends VERY promptly after "YOU DIE": A family tussle. Cash. Ends. It may end in the dealer's favor if they are… still alive.
"Your not going to keep that until YOU die are you?"
"No. Just wait it out. Your telling Mother?"
"I only tell Mother what I want to buy from her. She still has quite a bit you know".
"I'm sure she does. They always do. Most of it never unpacked no doubt. The old family teapot… up attic in a box. Down basement in a crate. The box unopened since packed. Professionally. By the movers. Now two decades ago. EVEN THOUGH she still regularly mentions JUST THAT TEAPOT as if it were in the dining room waiting for tea. A nightmare. Actually a classic New England estate nightmare these days."
"She DOES unpack a box every now & then. That's when I go by. I see her. She mentions a platter or "crockery" as she calls it; English Rockingham. She has a ton of that. I go over. I always buy something. She knows her stuff too. Always the best is set aside displayed. Or going to Peggy. "Peggy will want that" she says.
"Peggy doesn't know what that is I'd say".
"That does no good. Just let her give it to her. Then SHE'LL sell it. As we've have here". Hutton turned to the chair. "Mother had that painted. You can tell. New seat too. Professionally painted. She'd never do that herself. It's really quite well done. Cost a fortune these days."
"Cost a fortune then. It's awkward to sit in" I said.
"Who cares. It looks great. Very proper."
"I'll price it, but not yet. It will not be cheap".
"Neither are mine." Hutton replied and catching eye contact.
"Chairs? Like this?" I said.
"No. Goblets." He replied. He got up from the rocker, walked to his car, took a small box out of the trunk, returned to the rocker, sat the box on the barn floor in front of his foot and then pushed it across the floor toward me.
I bent from my chair, pulled the box over, opened it, removed a paper wrapped ball, unwrapped it and held up… a single heavy, vigorous, free blown and cut lead glass goblet with a cut thumbprint style pattern covering the exterior, a cut fluted stem below and a wide flair ground pontiled base. Holding this base I struck the rim of the goblet to release it's characteristic bell tone ring. The goblet was perfect, probably "English", circa 1815. "Nice" I said.
"There's four. One's broken. But that's why I own them." Hutton said. I looked up and he continued. "Mother gave her those and told her NEVER SELL THEM. And never use them. And never break them. She obeyed. The cleaning lady broke one. She called me about repairing it. I told her the best, fastest, cheapest way to repair it was to sell all four to me and be rid of them. She did that but not without hysterics, a promise to never tell and …still ALWAYS mentioning… do-you-still-have-them."
"How much?" I asked and unwrapped the rest including the broken one. They were still as packaged by Peggy. Hutton had done nothing with them. Even the little flakes from the broken one were carefully wrapped.
"I don't mind selling them to you because I will tell her I did and then she may pester you about them for eternity. Or you can return them to the mother. You may have to do that." Hutton said. He paused and rocked then said "I want ninety dollars each for the perfect ones. You can have the broken one. English, right?"
Ninety dollars each, from Hutton, was a big price with a little professional (read: intimidation) discount: He figures one hundred each but discounts to me at ninety. He probably paid fifty for the whole box. He expects resistance and, probably, no sale. That is fine with him for he'll spar with me for months.
"Ok." I said.
Hutton paused then said "English right?".
"Probably Irish actually" I said.
"That's a lot" he said.
"In general yes. But these"
"THESE WHAT!"
"Are seriously fine. Look at the form. The heft. These were for -at table-. These were used. With that base they'd never tip over. What did she do: Bust it with the vacuum cleaner? Smacked it off the sideboard? Feel the glass! As for the pattern; you can't fail. You can drink anything out of them."
"That's it?"
"Two twenty-five each".
"NO!"
"Oh please. You should never have sold them."

They Vacuum the Alamo

2010-01-27T03:58:00.000-08:00

Forty-five years ago, I spent 13 days in a cardboard box in my backyard. I wore a coonskin cap and peered over the edge of the box. I clutched a treasured and venerable toy flintlock rifle I had convinced my parents to purchase for me at Gettysburg. I scanned the green yard, was shot at and returned fire. Periodically, at the height of battle, the box overturned and I fought hand to hand on the grass. I do not recall loosing the battle, being killed or becoming a captive to be eviscerated alive the next day. I defended the Alamo with all my honor and guts. Through the haze of discharged percussion caps and various dinner calls, it has become vague to me as to whether the time elapsed was exactly thirteen days. I do remain assured that MY re-enactment of the historic conflict was devastatingly accurate.
A half decade later, my imagination had traveled to more restricted visions of the world and I became an antique dealer, a rare book dealer. I retained a nagging habit of preferring American history in ancient print or curious artifact, but my commercial instincts kept my passion for Davy Crockett’s ANYTHING concealed. I became a very good antique and rare book dealer for the next forty years and remain one today. I still fall deeply in love with American History and my ...imagination. Or what’s left of it.
In the course of the rare book business, I was offered an opportunity to travel to San Antonio to... buy and sell rare books. We specialize in Western American History known as “Western Americana”. We hate “old books” preferring to deal in “source documents”, the seemingly trivial slips of paper that historians prowl through to “write books”. We buy and sell the footnotes of American History.
“San Antonio is where the Alamo is, I can go there.” I thought to myself. I loaded by wife and daughter and we were soon eating Frijitas on the street. I had to “check-in” at the trade fair as well as contact the few experts with whom I deal that were anticipating my arrival. We find the “rare books” in old barns in Maine and sell them to the “higher calling”. We, I suppose, are at the bottom of the food chain of American Western History. I have altered this somewhat by attracting the attention of numerous individuals who... “know what they are doing”. This provides for the payment of the cost of bringing the family to see... “The Alamo”. It is “The Alamo”. My then five year old daughter will be glad to explain this to you if you don’t have enough... imagination.
After breakfast on the second day, I scheduled our visit. It was a cool morning and we approached from the far side, on foot, away from the tourist army’s route. The village is more run down in this direction. People sit huddled on park benches guarding shopping carts filled with worldly processions. There is a large and transposed post office with a Woolworth’s kitty-corner from it on this approach. We went in both. Both are upon bloody ground. The post office is where the bodies were burned.
We arrived ten minutes before the opening so wandered the streets peering at the exterior architecture and landscaping. Both are subtle and fine, having now lived sixty years in this format so that the little weeds and patina of time has blended the fortification into a charming whole. If you don’t like my use of “fortification”, you may substitute “church”. At the Alamo, one must remember these words are interchangeable. These past sixty years represent an extraordinary period of stability for the structure and landscape. I believe it is the longest time it has ever been the same... ever.
I wanted to be a little misty on my tour so was gratified that only the fewest others arrived. Several couples took photographs of each other, a Texas Lawman tended to the locks and gates. I read the sign requesting “men” remove hats. Shouldn’t that be “persons”? I crossed the worn brass line that Travis drew with his sword. I would stay until death.
When we were admitted, Mary and I rushed to our right and peeked in the room where the surviving women and children hid. Then we peeked in every other room. Then every display case. The exhibition space in the Alamo has been cleaned up since the early days. They’ve removed all the curiosities that used to be mounded about. As an antique dealer who hates clutter... I have mixed emotions about this clean, minimal display. Mary and I both read the “DO NOT TOUCH THE WALLS” signs. We both looked at the walls.
Then we looked at Davy Crockett’s rifle, so inscribed, “presented 1822” at Nashville. The stock was not broken. He did not die clubbing anyone with that gun. After my battle in the cardboard box, my rifle had its stock broken. I mourned this for several days and then concluded that it was MORE authentic because... Davy’s was broken... too. It was several decades later that I finally realized that Crockett had more than one, in fact, many... “guns”. Periodically one of these is bought and sold out in antiques land.
Then we left the room, which it is; a room. We, as a family, walked the enclosed grounds. Sixty years has grown into a bewitching tour of Pecan trees, cactus, foot paths and very modest use. The visitor comes, peeks and splits. The local traffic bee-lines from one end to the other. An occasional young child touches a mounted cannon barrel or drinking fountain. The service systems are concealed from view.
There is no trash and everything has a sign explaining all. A Yucca growing in a drainage ditch was a major aberration. The wind had overturned a potted tree. Two women attendants surveyed the situation and called in a male to correct this promptly. Our family covered every foot path in detail. It was very refreshing. No one else seemed to care.
I carefully choreographed the excursion to conclude at the “museum - gift shop”, something most other visitors bee-line to directly through the side door. We approached along the deserted side with the Yucca in the drainage ditch. When we entered I was gratified to be greeted by cased curiosities and clutter. They’ve preserved some of that old style museum display and intermingled it with the trashy souvenirs. In the center is a stunning miniature diorama of the battle, also in a glass case. Meticulously constructed by an obvious freak who made my childhood imagination look like an empty cereal box, both Mary and I concluded it would be “fun to make”, her words. It was also fun to view from all four sides but I kept being distracted by a higher calling; the trashy souvenirs.
My taste is not as good as yours, nor are my sensibilities. Having spent forty years buying and selling the material oblivion of our various civilizations on earth, usually found at the back of YOUR garage and bought for nothing except shrewd Yankee diction by ME... I really don’t have much patience for ...YOUR taste. The faux-pas of “The Alamo”… for many… would be this seeming disparity of intermingling charming historic site, grounds and artifact with... trashy souvenirs. Not for me. I looked at the display case housing a large blue historical Staffordshire “Texan Campaign” soup tureen. Why... I’d just sold a bigger and better platter to one of the “knowledgeable” at the trade fair. My glazed euphoria turned to the opportunity of …trashy souvenirs. Let the others dwell on historic object of virtue. I wanted a snowdome.
I reviewed everything, from one end to the other. Then I made a long purchasing mud run down the counter being serviced by a Texan College girl. She has taste and sensibilities so my selection of the most, most, trashy, trashy were... foul… until it cut-in that I was buying consistently. At that point I became a preferred client an she shooed other trivial sales away while attending to my “big” sale. The moment of the collapse of the Alamo came at the end of the counter when I requested a price and to inspect one of four ceramic tea pots “hand painted” in the shape of... The.
They weren’t priced. They weren’t on the computer sheet. I was the first person to inquire about them… in this century. The matronly lady in charge didn’t know. The ancient, in-house, aging duff, souvenir expert reviewed the crisis. They, as we say in the trade, “flipped” a price. I bought. They rearrange the remaining three specimens. They boxed mine. They muttered about the teapot, the price, then adjusted the arrangement again. Remember; I had already sold a better piece of historic Texan “china”. It was “antique”. For me to acquire this obvious rarity in the shape of The Alamo is all in a days work. They have three left (?).
Then we departed. I looked back at the structure. Looking forward, we watched a school bus disgorge a load of screaming children. “Good thing we got here early.” said my daughter. We crossed the street and walked down it, past the Woolworth’s. Half way down a street barker in Western wear extolled the “special effects” inside their ...store. A large cannon outside this store went off as we walked by. It scared the entrails out of my daughter and wife. My daughter started to cry. A few steps later… during this crisis… a gigantic dinosaur loomed in motion and growled from behind its window display. All of my daughter's systems broke down and we scurried out of danger, managing to calm her down on a tranquil street corner above the Riverwalk. “Never” go there again, I was instructed. We didn’t, for the rest of the day.
I had to go be a rare book dealer. I was more pleased with my teapot. I was greeted by the knowledgeable who wanted to know... “what” I “had”. Rare Western History, unlike rare Western Books, does not take up much space so I had “it” slung over my shoulder. A few commercial moments later, I no longer had “it” and had “a check”. That took up even less space. For the rest of the trade fair I “talked shop” with various “knowledgeable” and numerous not so knowledgeable whom I ...suffered. I read a guide to San Antonio, looked up places on my map and held a round table with any... “client”.
Back at the “museum - gift shop” I had discovered a display by the staff offering a folding cardboard mock-up of The Alamo filled with blue and brown plastic soldiers (the brown are the “Americans”) and a metal cannon that is also a pencil sharpener. It was so... accurate and… my daughter was so... that I purchase two “sets”; one for her and one for the cousin, a male. This required purchasing three separate productions to complete the each package. The cannon pencil sharpener came in its own box. The cardboard fort was a “for the Museum store” only production. The soldiers included “accurate” historic representation of Crockett, Bowie, Travis and the lone Mexican General, Santa Anna. My daughter began playing with hers in the hotel room as I departed for the show.
Since I had sold all but eight tid-bits of my travel stock of Western Americana, my booth (I prefer “stall”) was a little sparse for display. To counter this I purchased a TEXAS MONTHLY and a quart of seltzer that, along with “my card”, I filled out my display. As this residue would not entertain many for long, I spent my time in other floor trader’s more amply stoked booths. The “knowledgeable” to whom I sold the platter provided a clear view of my stall so I resided there. He entertained numerous “prominent collectors” of, principally, “Tex-iana”. At one point he offered one a fine and truly rare Texas map. The collector discussed the nuisance of framed display in his office. The Alamo WAS on the map, I observed. Sales pitches and superlatives were offered by the “Knowledgeable”. The collector’s wife appeared burdened with large, full shopping bags, collected from the surrounding stores. The “deal”, to no ones surprise, fell through. “I’ll get a call in a couple of days.” said my "knowledgeable" friend.
We both watched a women pick up the MONTHLY over in my booth. “I bought my daughter a plastic mock-up of the Alamo.” I said. “The cannon is a pencil sharpener”.
“Your incredible.” he replied. I’d already told him about the tureen but... not my teapot.
“Look, when you were that age you would have peed your pants for that set and today you sell fat Texas Boys fat Texas maps”.
“I like to think I’ve made progress.” he said, but this was annotated by a look indicating I had successfully stormed the walls of his inner Alamo and ... eviscerated him alive. He HAD once... once owned a... metal cannon. His was not a pencil sharper. But now he’s too “knowledgeable” for that.
When I sell these... people; these wandering souls, my treasure, my tid-bits of Davy’s (et al) souls of American History, I must relinquish my hold on the object but I never give up MY wandering soul of acquisition. The Alamo and Davy have always alluded my search for history; I have never found a “rare book” about Crockett, except once.
Decades ago, when my wife and I were just married, my brother was on leave from a military college. Although out of uniform, his behavior continued per schooling. He suggested we, as a group, “4-wheel” into a remote hilltop farm in remote rural Maine to see if “there was anything left in it”. Anything left meant anything we, as antiques dealers, could discover and sell amongst the residue of this abandoned farm. Our odds were good that it “had something” for it was extremely remote and one had to be very much in the know TO know it existed. We were very much in the know because we knew why the farm was way out there in the first place.
Back when rural was wild and civilization was less accommodating to family crisis, a retarded child was not offered community support, particularly in rural Maine. Space was plentiful and it was not uncommon for a family to resolve the situation by constructing a very rural home for this retarded child. There, it could not hurt anyone and still live out existence in a direct ratio with space and time. The family would support this “farm” for the decades of life. Then abandon it, for, it was truly remote. In fact, it would be unlikely that one would even know about such secluded farms unless... one was an insider. In our case, my grandfather’s role in both birth and death of this child allowed us a historic overview of the farm. We had already purchased “the estate” years ago. Markets change and trash becomes treasure. Another visit to a farm frequented only by hunters and porcupines would not be amiss.
In we went. We got stuck half way in, a feature of 4-wheeling that is a must. My brother liked this the best but tagged along as we walked the last miles in crisp November air. The farm lay desolate. We wandered each building and gathered a small mound of detritus that was... “salable”. For those who prefer decorative arts, I was smitten with the Country Queen Anne drop-leaf table, lacking leaves and having its legs cut off at the knees to become a plant stand on the front porch. This artifact had been further embellished by the chewing of porcupines. Today, I am confident it is displayed as an “exceptional” coffee table, “totally original”, which... it is. May I observe that these “second homes” in rural Maine were never furnished “new”. They always brought all the “old” things there, so... for the antique buff, they are an unmatched source. In many cases, particularly if the family supporting the farm was from the Victorian agrarian aristocracy, they used these farms as a giant attic.
As I stood in this home’s attic, I looked down at a torn pamphlet. It was torn nearly in half. “GO AHEAD. DAVY CROCKETT’S ALMANACK OF WILD SPORTS IN THE WEST AND LIFE IN THE BACKWOODS CIRCULATED IN ALL THE STATES OF THE UNION 1836”, this embellished with a woodcut of Crockett crossing a river on stilts, carry gun and having a steamboat in the background. I bent down, picked it up, folded it and put it in my pocket. It lay in my various mounds for numerous years. I looked at in sentimentally many times. It always made me recall the crisp November walk. I don’t become sentimental with material oblivion for... I’m a dealer.
Periodically someone would want to purchase this... artifact. I would offer it for ten dollars and they would “pass”. I discerned it was a... “rare book”; number 39 on the Grolier Club’s ONE HUNDRED INFLUENTIAL AMERICAN BOOKS. I would look at Davy every now and then. He would look back. He was Davy, I was a dealer. Eventually two “knowledgeable” from Vermont were “buying a load” one afternoon and asked about Davy. “A dollar” I said and away he went. We had finished our affair; our love for each other, for the moment, but we would meet again. My ageing and desperate antiquarian soul has always wandered with such love affairs on material earth.
Back at the trade fair, I left the booth of the “knowledgeable” and returned to mine. I, as one now may denote, hold my hallowed ground rather well in these circles for I have a certain background expertise that they... lack. A few visits to a retard’s abandon farm in abandoned Maine and... they’ll get the idea, won’t they. When the fair ended, I packed up my residue and TEXAS MONTHLY then left. I wouldn’t read the magazine until I was on the plane. When I did I was very surprised to find the Alamo mock-up reviewed for a full page as very “authentic” as plastic soldiers go. And I mean a full page, including color illustrations.
I discovered upon return to the hotel that… my daughter was unwilling to leave the exploding cannon and growling dinosaur alone. We had to make repeated visits to be distant voyeurs of these atrocities. At each visit, we would position ourselves on a safe street corner and peer at the removed forces in action. The dinosaur never ate any children. The cannon never killed any bystanders. My daughter remained fearful of approach. I, on each visit, got to peek at the Alamo.
When we first went in the door on our visit and dashed from the first room to the opposite side of the main room, I was stunned as I observed promptly that... The Alamo had been vacuumed. I notice these things because I am always in very old building that HAVE NEVER BEEN VACUUMED. I said “The Alamo has been vacuumed” to no one in particular. It is immaculately vacuumed, a better job than I'VE ever done to anything. Every crack, every crevasse, every bit of coonskin cap fur has been sucked away. This, as the restoration goes, is a most impressive feature of ...human filth and its arbitration by other humans. The Alamo is always being arbitrated by humans.
During the trade fair, in the hotel room, my wife had said “They want to take the Alamo away from the Daughters. There’s an article about it in the paper. Do you want to read it?”.
“No.” I replied for I was not listening and was too busy planning how to squeeze the last dollar out of some last piece of Western History. I vaguely understood the issue. The Daughters of the Republic of Texas own the Alamo. THEY vacuum it. They let YOU in, sans hat. Various armies, either State or National “park” forces feel that a better job could be done, this defined in trivial points that fail to reach my lay interest. These forces want the small resistance band to surrender the property. They are in arbitration at ...The Alamo. The situation is historically correct. There is a siege at the Alamo, 185 humans are surrounded by superincumbent humans, at least 25,000 in number. The padlock on the display case of Davy’s rifle has been unlocked. The ancient cannon barrels have been positioned to point at the door. A cache has been dug to hide the gift shop stock. It, the coming battle, will be very bloody. No one will survive and in the end, the bodies will be burned at the deserted Post Office.
We could not get my daughter away from the Dinosaur and cannon. On the last evening, at dusk, we made our final visit. I insisted we take higher ground for observation, flanking the usual street corner for a centralize vista within the Plaza, directly opposite the two evils and, for my benefit, having the front lit Alamo to our rear. We stood holding my daughter’s hands. The Dinosaur reared, growled, menaced the passing crowds with it tiny hands, over and over. “I’m not afraid anymore because Dinosaurs are extinct” appraised my daughter. The cannon discharged with inconclusive results, apparently killing no one. A few were startled. My daughter remained unwilling to approach either. I turned to gather my last vista. The cannon smoke whist across the plaza. A Texas lawman checked the locked door. Couples took photographs of each other. The flash from their cameras reflected on Travis’ brass line. The reflection from this crossed the faces peering over the top rim of the Alamo. Women’s faces, many wearing bandannas around their heads. Wet bandannas soaked in water to keep off the grime of musket fire. They waved a small, hand sewn flag I did not recognize, its symbol undefined by history... yet. The arbitration would become a bloody battle on hallowed ground with eviscerated bodies burning afterward. Perhaps they’ll make a snowdome of it.
We returned home, to Maine. I was on the telephone acquiring more Western History at a nominal price. My daughter and a friend were in the other room playing with the mock-up Alamo. Occasional growling, loud and sustained came from their play. I could not see the battle. Eventually this growling defied my complacency and I peeked in. The blue Mexican army was intermingled with the brown “Americans” on the edges of the Alamo interior. Across a vista stood the pencil sharpener cannon and a large plastic dinosaur. Periodically this dinosaur would rush the fortification and devour a blue or brown human. The remaining army would drive him back until they, in turn, were driven back by the cannon. It was devastatingly accurate. This siege continues. It is in its eleventh day as I write.

Anything You Want

2010-01-22T04:41:00.001-08:00

Baxter, a local picker, came into the yard last week; early afternoon and a day before the snow storm, with… five pick-up truck loads… he'd purchased from a long closed up colonial cape. I collected his story of the purchase during the delivery of the truck loads to our warehouse. He wouldn't let me go to the house until after the final load the following morning. Baxter is always coming around and first appeared in this blog with his pickle bottle find. Since then he's come around trying to find Mrs. Abbott's' chair but that's another story. I have tried to capture Baxter's purchase story just the way Baxter …spoke it… to me.

“I’M IN THERE NOW BY CRACKEY! I said.
Actually I just said it to myself and made no noise. And very slowly pushed the first interior door forward.
Crackey by DAM-mit I been watch’en THIS ONE TEN YEARS plus. Lucky that’s all.
I was coming out of one of the stores when this old bag caught me and wanted to know where “HE WAS” and pointed at the usually always open Old Books For Sale store next to the store I just popped out of with the “I JUST SOLD THAT” check in hand. I was leaving; going back to the sea of ANTIQUARIAN HUNT.
“Don’t know.” I said noting the no sign on the door saying WHEN I’LL BE BACK that he usually does. Crackey. So I said it was real unusual for him to NOT be open and to be closed NOW without a SIGN.
“Do you think he went to lunch?”
“Could have. But he usually leaves a sign”.
Bingo came next for one of the girls from another store down the street come out and lit up and started gesturing me so I went down leaving the old bag in front of the used book store. I add that by now I had found out she’d come to sell her books. Down the street I got bingo because the girl says “You know his mother just died”.
“Died?”
“About an hour ago. He was almost crying when he told me”
I turned back up the street to the old bag and said “I FOUND OUT WHERE HE IS! He’s gotta a good excuse.”
“BETTER BE!”
“His mother died.”
“Mother died?”
“Really. About an hour ago”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“That is a good excuse”.
“Devine intervention”.

So then we talked a minute and I looked at the books in her trunk and told her I didn’t want the books and she wanted some money so I hooked her to talking her house and I knew where the house was and I knew the neighborhood and suddenly had that mental light bulb that BELOW HER was THAT PLACE. So I said that. And she said yes. DID SHE OWN THAT. Yes. Want to let me in THERE?
“SURE”.
That simple after all these years. Of course I never could figure out how to get into there since it was abandoned with no clear access and hung on a ledge above the water with no dock. I had the NEVER FIGURED YOU’D OWN THAT since her “home” was uphill by a near acre. But she DID own it. So we went there. In tandem, parking at her “HOME” and me expressly clear that NO I DON’T WANT TO GO IN THERE (her home) since it looked like “NO HOPE” for a rare antique in neglect in there ever since I’d been eyeing it (her actual house) TEN YEARS AGO. Or longer.
And there was no trail down the hill. NOTHING. Just a slopping over grown acre with some rusted remnants and a distant back door, a roof line of an 18th century center chimney cape UNTOUCHED and the cold Prussian blue of the river above that. Two windows though; 12 over 8 with the wavy old panes. “Original.” I said to myself. And early. Suddenly here I was going down to it, ALL BY MYSELF, after all those years with the “LET ME KNOW IF YOU see ANYTHING YOU WANT”. I dropped the case of the “see” from her “SEE” squawk for I was using the words “GET IT NOW”.
Can’t mess around when you hit the beach on D-Day and I’m going into that home. House? Home. Dead in the water it be for the past sixty-eighty-one hundred twenty years? “Yep” but still a home and the back door; the original back door, opened in without a fuss. Opened right in like it should for they never open out and into the fresh deep snow like they make’em now. “Ho, ho” and on to a dirt floor headed straight for the next door with a wood shed pile to my right. That’s in the dark for the one window is nearly covered. I stop and scan. I see wood pile with pile-on on top; old boards/boxes/bags/rope/wire/clutter affirming the SOMETHING-GOOD-IN-THERE look. Onward.
The next door is where I opened (this vignette) and BY CRACKEY I’m in there. Door opens in again and RIGHT up front the late morning light truly CASCADES in the two front windows to show me:

The plain wide pine floor.
The wainscot walls and piled up against it cram (noun).
The side window covered over with pile up.
The chairs and tables pushed back to the wall under the pack.
The traps, rope, boxes, buckets, floats, wire and heavy cotton duck
Gray from the mildew and salt,.
Mounded on top of the this & that,
All routed by a clear trail up the inner wall
To the front
There it turns left to the front door.

That’s all fisher/lobster/clammer gear; the piled on top. No problem for it ain’t in active use and be old enough to sell. Also there’s only enough for a one/two man endeavor; a small rig. AND:
My eye has moved on to THE TABLE just enough forward in the stack. JUST enough forward to have been paint-can-rest-on-it while “I PAINT” the floats and any other of the gear. THAT left about fourteen white enamel rings in the right fore corner on the top of a (not quite) knock out Hepplewhite taper leg bread board end totally original old red TAP TABLE.
I step to that and “good height” and skip my eyes around and don’t see any more cash cows so up to the front with a “look out the window at the river” glance and then to the front entry with front door closed but not locked and I open THAT inward and:
So suddenly that the light blinds me, the river breeze kicks me, the cold snaps me and the vista halts me. I am standing right out on the door sill with no more steps down and a ten footsteps to the ledge edge where the MIGHTY KENNEBECK FLOWS. The dock is gone. But did this place have river access or WHAT!

Blink, blink my eyes and then close the door and blink, blink again turning to find the anticipated boxed stairs up to the UP and so UP to a door again opening in and there I find dark turning dim with four panes of glass away at each end, the brick of the exposed center chimney to my front and a scattering of piled crud down both sides of the close quarters, unfinished “upstairs” and “UNDER THE EVES” of this “gotta be 1760’s” HOME. The rafters are pole logs with the bark still on ‘em. “Probably cut right here”. In 1750. The crud “LOOKS GOOD ENOUGH”. There’s a single small rope bed partially apart; a “hired man’s bed”. There a 1840’s one drawer stand. And crud. “GOOD ENOUGH” and back down stairs.
Into the adjoining front room. That door is partially open. More fishing stuff. Not too much and just piled around and two cheap 1880s oak pieces of furniture. Probably been more of that but “carried off” (stolen) “over the years”. Them takers rarely take the early stuff for it "don’t look antique”. Back through this room to the door at it’s rear. I don’t pay any attention to the giant fireplace; the original kitchen, nor the widows shedding shaded light. A wood stove pipe hole had been cut into the over mantle. The 18th century woodwork is natural finish; never painted. “JUST GREAT” but not likely something I’m gonna try and get. There’s an 1840’s drop-leaf table next to the door.
I open that back on to me; see the step, am on dirt again and into another dim room with one window but whitewashed. Sparse, neat and tended this room shows only wall shelves with a here and there on ‘em and not much else except the AURA of I having just stepped into the UNTOUCHED “milk room” or “buttery of old and I stop to take that in. A door to the right was once a window. That door is open. Beyond it an old ONE HOLE outhouse. It leans back; pulling, as a whole building, away from the main home. “Butted on” (literally) about Civil War. The bright light from the pulled-away crack obscures my view of the one-hole interior.
I leave. I go all the way around and back out the woodshed door. Total time elapsed has gotta be ten and no more than fifteen minutes since I left the TRUCK CAB. Up the hill, sun bringing the warm on my back. KNOCK on the door. Lady comes. I stand at the door:
“TWO fifty; TWO HUNDRED FIFTY DOLLARS for IT.” I take out the wade of money from my front jacket pocket and hold it out. “What I want down there: There’s wood and crap and fishing stuff. Clammers used it. THE FIREWOOD TOO! I want that. TWO FIFTY for what I WANT.”[1]
“Two hundred and fifty dollars. For in there?”
“Probably four truck loads. Maybe five with the firewood.”
“You’ll pay two hundred fifty for it?”
“Yes. Cash. Now and get it out. Probably can’t get it ALL today but most of it.”
She looks at me; my face. Then the wad of money. “It’s yours. Anything you want.”[2][3]

[1] Baxter's commentary on this purchase offering: "I could put a whole damn page about what’s going on here but do I need to? Keep it simple and FAST. No words like “HEPPLEWHITE” but lots of words like “FIRE WOOD” and “CRUD”. NO TIME SPENT dolling up what you see; SEE IT, MOVE ON, SEE MORE, ACT. Act means say concisely what you’ll pay based on one’s gut of how little be a “configure”, (while your moving onward) that one will the “has to pay” (can get away with LOW), show ‘em the damn cash and LEAP. Leap like a man. Or say home and watch TV if you ain’t got the right stuff; fear landing in the river and “LOOSING IT ALL”.
[2] The table? He got it out in the first load. Carried it up the hill on the second trip, by plan. Put it up-side-down in the back, piled the first load on top of it.
[3] In all five loads; four that afternoon, one to "get the firewood" the next morning with an extra “go back with you” go over the whole place to be sure nothing is left. Baxter is right in not "bringing you there" until he has finished for "anything can happen at any time" to "screw the deal".

The Dead Doll

2010-01-18T04:03:00.001-08:00

When I was very young, I would go with my mother to a very rural Maine home, between a road and railroad track. It was a very small house, painted barn red. Inside, we would accompany a large man around this home. I would hold my mother’s hand. I always held her hand. We would go from room to room and my mother would look at the things in each room. For example, she would look at the glass lamp on the table beside the sofa in the living room. Herbert, the man’s name, would say something like “Twenty-five”. My mother might continue by looking at the table that the lamp was placed on. Herbert would then say something like “Forty”. These comments my mother answered with sayings like “It’s very nice.” or “Wonderful.” or... “I’ll buy that”. This latter we would accomplish promptly by paying cash and taking the various objects outside to our car. After touring the entire home, we would drive away with the things we bought. We would take them to, for example, New York and my mother would sell them. She would do this in the same manner as our purchase, sometimes selling from OUR living room, next to OUR sofa. When I was young, we had people walk around our home and buy “things”, though I don’t recall any children holding their hand.
At Herbert’s, I was never allowed to touch anything, ever. I never did. Herbert lived with his mother. She always sat in the corner of the living room and made noises that one comes to associate with very old people. I never went near her, ever.
My mother died. So did Herbert’s. Mine did not die before I had followed in her footsteps at a very early age and become “one of them”; an antique dealer. I was old enough to drive by myself before she died. Before her death, we were dealers together. I continued to go to the little home between the road and the railroad after she died. A decade had passed so the road went sixty-five and the railroad went seventy. The little red home between them shook from these speeds. Herbert, who now lived alone, guarded its contents from this shuddering.
I got to know Herbert very well. I was more meticulous than my mother; I priced everything he found. He didn’t mind, he was a dealer. We would joke about the stuff, the deals, the people, the trade, the train crashing by as we loaded a pair of Windsor armchairs “untouched”. Herbert was very adept as a Maine picker, “in a home”. A picker is the soul who goes to the private home and buys the “things” that become “rare antiques”, usually a half mile later. I am a picker too. My mother taught me how to be one. She learned from my grandmother. Herbert learned from his mother, the one who made the noises.
Herbert’s house, the red house, was very rural so had no electricity and no plumbing. He didn’t care. “THEY” had bought it for a “place” in the summer. It is between Gilead, Maine and the New Hampshire line. Its red and still there, with everything still thundering by. Herbert had relatives who hated him and the house. They wouldn’t stay there because they “had to shit in the outhouse”, his words. They would drop by to wish he would die so they could do whatever with his dead-man’s assets. We would joke about this and look at the outhouse. It listed backward, the result of the thundering traffic. Herbert and his mother had bought the poorly situated home for “the stencils”; Mose Eaton stencils, upon the walls, a “New England Decorative Art”. We always looked at those too, but not as hard as the other “things” he’d “found”.
I would “buy” and leave and then come again and “buy” some more. He would “find” more, pulling into desperate Maine farmer’s yards and dickering the old crows “out” of their “things”. A table, a lamp, a brass something. Some “china” or “glass”. Always the “china”. Herbert liked the “china”. I bought the “china”. Other dealers, older and jealous of my negotiations with Herbert would suggest that I could buy from him because “he wants to get into your pants”. I spent a lot of time with Herbert and china and I never sensed any of that. Eventually I did so much “summer” business with Herbert, he suggested I start coming “to the coast” in the other seasons and “buy” from his “house”. Since his mother had died, he’d “decided to sell” “some things”. I got directions immediately.
By the time I had these directions my Father had died and my mother was so sick from cancer that she could no longer “hit the road”. When I would return “home”, (a variable as my parents declined and died) I would show her what “I got” “that day”. A day was often a week for I was older and ... “on my own”. Being on my own as an antique dealer was very exciting and profitable. I could “go anywhere” “I want”.
Before everyone died and I still held my mother’s hand, I learned a great deal about how to “buy and sell” “things”. There’s a certain etiquette, often affected, in “handling” antiques and rare books. It’s a dealerly mannerism. These physical actions extend to similar and directly related verbal mannerisms. The two merge to form a perfect whole that experienced dealers engage with relish AND consider a signal to remove all boundaries of the “normal people” and head into a sort of deep space of “being a dealer”. One’s gestures (physical and verbal) very promptly convey to the experienced dealer just “how long” one has “been in the trade”. This is probably the most important thing I learned while holding my mother’s hand. It was very difficult to understand WHAT a piece of furniture was but... it is unforgettable to be beside someone who somehow negotiates an old women who looks like a witch to allow my mother to take everything off the top of a table, put those things on the floor, turn this table upside down, stare at it while the witch stares too and then quietly utter a number that was in fact an amount of money. Further, to then have my hand released and no attention thereafter paid to me, see a large mound of money pulled from a crevasse of my mother’s clothe, see the eyes of the witch watch that operation precisely, see the designated number be turned from that money and this money pass to the witch and watch this money disappear into the black crevasse of her clothes left a violent image in the mind of my youth. This was a “real”. The only further thing I’ve ever learned about this “real” is that there is, much to my perpetual surprise, a very large percentage of people who “don’t know” “about this”.
All that latter discovery ever does is make the hand holding era of my life more vibrant. It is only now, fifty years later, that I understand the magic of my position. My mother, with proper dealer etiquette, did not care that I was privy to these transactions, but I understand THAT very well too (she wished I was NOT there but only because to have a kid with you is... a pain in the ass).
When I held the warm hand I knew it was warm because that was the only thing that was warm. Everything else was dark, dirty and cold. The more dark, dirty and cold it was the ...more my mother bought. And the warmer the hand was. I was disinclined to release the hand on the earliest travels with my mother. Later, as my experience grew to a familiar association with the dark & dirty, I would dare to let go. This was, cautiously, because I had seen something ...I was interested in. It was a vague off in the dark & dirty but... I had to see “it”. No one ever stopped me. After the preliminaries of my independent movements in these dark & dirties, I became a sort of bird dog for my mother, moving ahead and to the side in the darkness flushing out ...game. My mother would chatter away with a witch or warlock, as is the proper dealerly way. These people were always witches and warlocks. My mother seem to prefer the oldest, darkest and dirtiest dwelling spaces and, as any young person knows, that where witches live. Right?
So I perpetually found myself holding the warm hand of my mother in a very haunted space. I didn’t realize that these spaces were the home of the haunted until I was old enough to be instructed that literature has found these spaces to be where the blood... runs cold. My blood was always warm. My mother’s blood always seemed to be hot. Now I understand it was hot because SHE was HOT. Any dealer’s blood is hot when doing what we were doing.
The ceilings of the spaces were always either very low... or very... very high. The higher they were, the darker it was up there and the paint was always pealing. Today, when I “visit” a “restored” Victorian mansion, I always notice that the ceiling is “perfect”. This does nothing for me except make me long for a very distant past when I would look up from the warm hand of my mother to see the scaling darkness way above me. Below the exfoliation of the ceiling my eye always found giant dark heavy “drapes”. They didn’t look like “drapes” to me. Nor would they to you. They looked like something that would smother me before I could “ever” get disentangled from “it”. Everyone always called them “drapes” though; “the drapes” to be exact. I avoided them for they were “creepy”.
Beyond the ceiling and drapes, carefully denoted by me attached to the warm hand, was the rest of the space and this was generally an extensive series of rooms on two or three floors that had words like “the parlor”, “the sitting room” “the front stairs”, “the guest room”, “to the maid’s” and... “to the attic”. Each of these spaces had “things” in them and we would always dwell on these things. It is important to remind a lay reader that a picker rarely make one visit to these old homes. For myself and with my mother, we would often visit them “every year” until, of course, the people “died” and the home was “cleaned out”, preferable by “us”. The parlor would have a table under (as far as I was concerned) the drapes. And a sofa no one dared sit on. The paintings on the walls were always very large and of Jesus or a ship. My mother never tried to buy Jesus but always tried to buy ships. Holding onto the warm hand I always grew excited when I was released because we bought “a ship”. I like paintings of ships too.
A bedroom always had a dresser. The drawers in the dresser often had “some of mother’s things”. Sometimes we could buy some of these things. I always noticed that my mother could always recall something particularly interesting in one of these drawer that we had NOT been “able to buy” and that she always managed to mention that specific item each time we were “there”. Often, I recall, she’d mention the item twice on the visit. The first mention of it was before we went into the house. Usually it was a “Maybe we can get the little miniature (painted portrait preferably in it’s original frame) today.” sort of utterance that only makes fundamental sense to me in hindsight. These utterances were a verbalization to herself but I learned quite a bit from them.
Did you ever hold on to the warm hand of your mother while she purchased old “things” from a witch in a haunted house? I doubt it. I wish I could meet people who did this but, I never do. Actually, every now and then, I meet someone who seems to have done something like this but... . But either the house was too clean and not haunted or... they didn’t “know” “what they were doing”.
This last is an unpleasant problem. My mother didn’t know what she was doing for during this era of interest in decorative arts the trickle of information proving good from bad was decidedly hearsay. Today we actually know to much. The too much that we now know makes those who “seem to have done something like this” really look perfection.
Today, “knowledge” of decorative arts (and rare books for that matter) defines and defies my visits to Herbert and haunted houses. “It is” and “is worth” are specific forms of expertise I garner daily from my clients. Like a ruler slapped by a teacher on my knuckles I am suppose to winch with pain and return to a trail of ordered commerce? No thank you. Shouldn’t one be ashamed if it was true that all of these “things” that my mother “found” while I held her hand were only “yours” in a collection because ...you bought them? Have you ever found “something good” that was qualified by a giant darkness around it that had to have something else in it? Have you ever had the moment between the silent direction of attention toward that darkness and one’s advancement into that black where the only sound is the rattling breath of the witch behind you?
It is not only the breathing that one hears. It is also the shuffling of the shoes on the floor. One cannot see the witch’s feet but one hears them move in the same shoes she’s worn for fifty years... or longer. They ...slid, sort of. A subtle clomp comes to the ear too for they are too loose on her feet and... she would rather not be wearing them anyway.
How do I know that she would rather not wear them? Because she takes them off when we go up the attic stairs. At the top of these stairs she pushes the rat trap away with these feet. The feet are encased in stockings. They are not the stockings a women buys today. They are stocking so thick that they hide her skin and the swelling of her lower leg above the ankle. They hang in wrinkles on these ankles for they are “pinned-up” as opposed to attached to a garter belt, that forsaken decades ago. The dead in the trap is “new”. It is a rat but not an urban rat. It is a wood rat, “coming in” for “the winter”. Her toes move the full trap toward the top of the stairs while her eyes inspect the bait on the other traps. I am inspecting the rest of the dark space while she tends the traps. My mother’s hand is warm, perhaps hot.
Trunks, boxes, chairs and barrels. The one window beyond these whistles with both light and wind. The glass rattles, particularly the oldest panes that my expertise now denotes quickly for they are aquamarine in color and swirl to create a distortion of the village street outside. The leaves from the trees outside patter against the house while the branches that release them rake the exterior wall of the attic.
Before this scratching sound my mother and I push forward in the dim light. The barrels seem to interest my mother more then the trunks. I notice that the lids to these trunks are not secured and in a few incidence a dark (black) cloth extrudes from the incompletely closed lid. Today I recognize these symbols as indicating the ...trunks... “have been gone through” meaning searched for treasure by far more recently then the day they were “put there”. My mother knew what she was doing.
The barrels are not lined along the wall, but scattered amongst the desolated debris. There is a path to the rattling window and it’s offer of light “to see”. My mother’s hand releases me and me eyes are even with the top of a barrel. It is full to this top with “things” wrapped in old newspaper. My mother picks up a package of this paper, carefully (I now understand) selecting a larger one to side step the nuisance of merely unwrapping an old drinking glass.
Even then I already knew that the barrels had only glass and china in them. They always have only glass and china in them when they are full of things wrapped in old newspaper ...in an attic. Further, I’d seen plenty of barrels just like them at Herbert’s. Herbert and his mother bought this sort of barrel for years in addition to filling their own barrels. He would never let us “go through” his barrels but he would occasionally remove a decisively selected package from a barrel far off in the little red house, unwrap it and... sell the ceramic treasure the package contained ...to us. I knew that the barrel my mother reached into had only glass and china in it but I knew it was... old glass and china.
My mother’s interest was in... very old... glass and china. Evidently she did not find that for she demanded more then a polite share of information from the witch as to “where these were from” referring to all the barrels. The witch told how her mother had packed them “up” when she was a little girl. My mother unwrapped a second package from a second barrel. This she re-wrapped with rather rapid motions and without raising it above the top of the barrel. Her far hand pushed this package down into the barrel and seemed to cover it while her near hand fluttered for mine. I gave it to her. The talk continued. The barrels came from the witch’s house; not this house, but the house where she “grew up”. My mother seem to know about this house and was contented with that information. She seemed to be looking at all of the barrels now and turning them in her mind. Barrels in attic, particularly full barrels, were difficult for my mother to move “out”. I knew this because I had been released from her hold at other haunted houses while she had to move a barrel “out”. Here there were more then one barrel.
At a number that was not concise to my hearing my mother bought the barrels. I didn’t hear the number and I didn’t see the exchange that turned that number into money. Nor did I hear the conversation that allowed my mother to “get” a “hired man”; a “Mr. McMullen” “if he isn’t drunk”. Mr. McMullen lived with his family above the drug store up the street. If he wasn’t drunk. “Johnny” always needed money and people like my mother and the witch always used Johnny for doing things like moving barrels full of old glass and china out of attics and always paid him “a little bit”. They always called him Mr. McMullen to each other but always “Johnny” to Johnny. Mr. McMullen was very nice to me if he wasn’t drunk. I never was allowed to say anything to Mr. McMullen if he was drunk. Sometimes we would see Mr. McMullen and my mother would say that he was drunk. Most of the time that was when he was lying down on a bench in the shade next to the fountain in the park by the Inn. To me it looked like he was just asleep but my mother always said he was drunk.
The reason I didn’t hear what my mother and the witch were saying was because I had been released again and this time I had noticed something that interested me sitting on top of a box up next to the window. It was a violin case, I was sure. The reason I was sure was because a girl in my class at school had suddenly started bringing a case that was the same shape as this one to school once a week and, after an appropriate period of mystery, had shown its contents to a small group of us who demand to know “what was in that”. My family was not very musical and I had never even seen, let alone touched, a “musical instrument”. So, when the girl laid the case on her desk and flipped the latches open, lifted the lid and revealed what was obviously a precious and fragile object shining as glazed wood and held firmly within this black box, it left a desperate appreciation for musical instruments with me. Beyond that classroom experience I had never had the opportunity to further this initial and single exposure to the mysterious “musical instrument”. Here appeared my first chance.
I proceeded up the trail to the window and the violin case resting on top of the box. It had to be a violin case because it was black and the same shape as the girl’s at school. Past that, it was different. This case was made of old wood. Her case was shiny black plastic rimmed with silver colored metal. This case was covered with dust. Her case was polished to a shiny mirror black. This case was closed by tiny brass hooks. Her case had big silver buckles. Still, it had to be a violin. My mother and the witch approached. I heard my mother saying something that included the word violin.
Before my hand dared, the witch’s hand extended to the brass hooks and they fell open. The same twisted fingers pushed the lid upward. I could see nothing else but this hand and its roots we call fingers. Then I saw something that is still undefined to me as either horror or love. Before my eyes appeared a red clothed doll wedged within the opening violin case. As the lid rose my heart rose too. My hand closed on the empty air where it had reached for my mother’s hand. This air was cold. The window rattled. The light from the window shifted. The doll was dead.
“This was my mother’s.” I heard the witch saying directly above me. I was motionless in a confusion of horror and awe. Either the doll was dead or... it was a dead person? I stammered in my mind while my eyes recorded the details. A white porcelain head with an even whiter face topped the red cloth figurine. Pink rouge touched the cold white porcelain cheeks. Real blond hair puffed above this ghost face in a disordered profusion that included bows tied from red ribbon. One eye was open, staring at the roof above me. The other eye was closed. “I won’t sell this.” I heard the witch continue to my mother. My mother said something but I didn’t hear it.
The witch’s hand and the fingers reappeared before me. They crossed the doll’s face and closed the open eye. Then they vanished. The eye stayed closed for an instant then popped back open, to stare at the roof again. I didn’t dare move. The witch’s hand came back across the face. This time it opened the closed eye and disappeared again. That eye held open for a long moment. It’s view was not parallel with it’s partner; it drifted to toward the nose. Then it snapped shut. I didn’t dare move.
My eye of horror moved down the figurine to see that the red was a dress beneath a red cloth. These, pulled and creased away from their original placements by decades of voyeurs who opened and closed the coffin, were further confused by holes and chewing from moths. Surrounding the red were equally distorted bundles of cloth, evidently once the doll’s other clothing; bundles of blues, blacks, white and more reds. Overall, the doll was hideously clean and perfect. No dirt ever penetrated the box and the only distortions were due to the folds of the cloth, the pressed fluffs of the hair and her ...eyes.
I felt myself leave my body, dizzy and light. I felt cold then I felt hot. The lid closed and the witch’s hand touched each brass hook. The coffin was closed and locked. The dead doll was gone. I felt my hand in my mother’s hand. I felt hot and then cold. The window rattled next to me. I looked at it. I looked back onto the violin case. The doll was gone. The lid of the case had finger prints in the dust on it’s top. The top of the case was black. I wanted the doll. I hated the doll. I loved the doll. I was scared to death of the doll. I looked at my mother. She was paying no attention to me and was saying something to the witch about getting Mr. McMullen. She released my hand and they walked away. I looked down at the black lid and then followed them. At head of the stairs I saw the dead rat in the trap. I looked back toward the window and could see the silhouette of the violin case resting on top of the box. Then my mother made me go down the stairs and ...we left.
We walked up the street to the drug store and the up the outside staircase attached to the side of the building. My mother knocked on the door at the top and was greeted by Mrs. McMullen who went off shouting for Mr. McMullen that “MRS. FREEMAN HAS WORK FOR YOU!”. A brief conference took place at the door and while Mr. McMullen got ready my mother handed Mrs. McMullen some money. Mr. McMullen was very cheerful and spoke pleasantly to me but I didn’t care to notice this for I was still trying my horror and knew that I was going back to it.
We went to the attic with the witch and while the three adults talked about the barrels I walked directly to the violin case. I didn’t dare touch it. I wanted to open it. I mean; I thought I wanted to open it. I knew that the doll was inside, that she was dressed in red, that one eye was open and that one eye was closed. I was sure of this. Yet I wanted to be sure of this. Somehow.
Mr. McMullen started to move a barrel and the witch cackled about removing the rat before he removed the barrels. My mother went past Mr. McMullen to another barrel. NOW was my chance.
The latches fell open, the lid lifted. The doll was still dead. One eye was open. One eye was closed. She was dressed in red. Her blond hair was tied with red bows and these were pressed upon her white porcelain face. The window rattled, light shifted and Mr. McMullen responded to a command from my mother that he “knew about that one too”. I closed the lid. I latched the hooks. I looked at top of the case. My finger prints were in the dust on it’s top. I touched the top again. I was sure the doll was inside, dressed in red, with one eye open and one eye closed. The open eye must be staring at the lid of the case I reasoned. Then I had to leave.
I didn’t even get a chance to stare back at the widow and the case this time. My mother hurried me down the stairs and we waited outside while Mr. McMullen brought out the barrels. There were six barrels. None of them would fit in our car but my mother had already arranged for Mr. McMullen to get his friend to deliver them in his truck. This man’s name was Carol. I though Carol was a girl’s name but this man was called that. My mother took Mr. McMullen aside and gave him some money. When she did this she said some sharp words to him that I now know were to the effect of not to spend the money on drink until after he’d delivered the barrels. This sort of arrangement with men such as Mr. McMullen is why, after my mother was dead, so many of these sort men continue to tell me what a fine woman she was; how they loved her; “a fine woman”.
While I stood in the yard, I stared at the house. It was a very big house. My eyes wandered up the front of the house. Each floor had four windows that faced me. The first floor had only three windows because the forth was the front door. Then I noticed that way at the top of the house was one window in the very center, just below the roof. THAT was the window in the attic. And BEHIND that window was the ...violin case. And IN the violin case was the doll, dressed in red, with one eye open and one eye closed. I stood staring at the window until my mother made me leave. I think I learned everything there is to learn about life while I stood there that day. I’ll never be sure of this and... I never saw the doll again.
When the barrels were in my Grandmother’s barn we; my Grandmother, Mother and I, took each piece of old glass and china out and unwrapped it. Understandably, the stuff was good. My mother took the package she hidden out first. It was a soft paste (“old paste”) pitcher in a gaudy floral pattern that they called either “King” or “Queen’s” “rose”. I don’t know what it was nor care but I do know now that it was big enough to be what they called it; a “cider pitcher” and the most people would “keep it”. We sold it.
My Grandmother announced that this “must be from the Harris Place”, evidently the original home of the mother of the witch. My mother and grandmother discussed this relationship, that home and how the witch had never married so & so but had inherited the house she lived in from him and that all of the “things” from her mother’s house had been moved there “from the farm” “when it sold”.
There were several tables full of dirty china in the barn before my Grandmother told how the witch’s mother had a sister who was killed when she was young. How a horse ran away with the buggy. How she fell from the buggy and died. My Grandmother said that the witch’s mother never got over the death of her sister. She told how at the sister’s funeral, the witch’s mother had taken the sister’s doll and made a dress just like the one the sister was dressed in for her burial. “It was a red dress and she made one for the doll just like it. Then she put the doll in a violin case and carried it in a wagon at the funeral, just like her sister’s coffin. The family had the doll forever; in the violin case. I saw it once; many years ago.
“We saw that doll today. She still has it. She won’t sell it.” I heard my mother say. Then she looked toward me to see if this talk had any effect on me. I didn’t respond in any way. Later that evening, when I was alone in my bed, I pondered the doll, the violin case and how the doll had one eye open and one eye closed. I stared at the ceiling of my room in my grandmother’s house. I did this with one eye open and one eye closed. I noticed the paint on the ceiling was peeling.

Ice House Ephemera

2010-01-14T07:07:00.001-08:00

Everybody likes to find something for nothing. Dealers are particularly fond of “making a hit”; the generic expression for finding “something great” well, WELL below it’s “true value”. A good “hit” makes a great day, week, month or, most pleasingly, one’s “YEAR”. We were not the ones who discovered this “hit” but we are close enough to it that we will, I am confident, share in it’s final distribution in the market. Sit back a read about a good day’s pay!
Intrude upon two young men whose circumstances do not include “going on to school” nor entering the “job market” with anything other than to “keep on doing what we were already doing anyway” for... rural Maine offers little “opportunity”. Odd-jobbing is a resource for the young and un-employed. Often this entry level position develops into a permanent position. One of these two has “a truck” while both have “girl friends” they “want to marry” “if I get some money” “You know?”. They live in & share an “apartment” that... you wouldn’t live in... ever. Behind this building is a shed they “can use too”.
To do this “holding steady” of week to week, the two combined friendship and circumstance to, as they say: “Do anything”. Caucusing with them includes a tale of shoveling mounds rotting baby diapers up from an access road to a future “waterfront development” using snow shovels. “We pretty much ended up showering together during that because it was so bad we almost got into a fight about who’d shower first”.
Not all opportunities are so foul.
The two do a great many “site demolition” jobs for local contractors and carpenters. This work involves taking down and removing what exists at a site so as to “clear it” for the new construction by these professionals who are “won’t do that work”. “Renovation” is the term the “boss” applies to these smaller commercial or private home jobs. These young men are the “demo team”.
From this calling, they have acquired the shrewd sense to “be sure” and “take anything” they can “sell”. Lumber, hardware and architectural fixtures dominate their acquisitions but they have learned to gather “everything” that’s being thrown out that looks “like there’s a chance”. “GOOD BOYS!” and it follows that my first contact with them began at the next step up from their private… bottom of the food chain… of antiquities and bibliognostes[1].
One step above them and a near neighbor to their parked truck, apartment and “shed” in Topsham (Maine), one may find a considerably older man who is “retired”.
He retired from Bath Iron Works (“BIW”) “early” because they were going to fire him if he didn’t “accept” a “package”. This shrewd Yankee deduced his options by himself and left his fellows only to be “proved me right” by they ...being fired “the next day”. In any case, he turned to new work by opening a “recycling business”. No, no; this is not one of those environmentally sanctioned and true penny corporations seeking to remove “that” from ... YOU “forever”. It is the very opposite whereby he has a magnetic sign that he may put on the side of his truck at his desecration and, preferably, arrive at the home of a forlorn and recent widow who wants to get the former material opulence of her “dead-ee” “OUT” “now”. THIS is recycling for... the antiquarian and ...BIBLIOGNOSTE will find him worth showing up at… to “check on”.
I do. You don’t. That’s why I was there first to hear a “You’ve REALLY gotta SEE THIS!”. Smoking cigarettes from a habitual nervous frenzy at the front door to his little sheds (a coupling of odd buildings forming an enclosed passageway around the rear of his very modest home) he told me that “they” (for he is sure to visit the two young men EVERYDAY) “really found something this time”. The squawking of his grandchildren, (foisted upon him and “Mother” [his wife] by a child that deserted him, her and these children...) and “Mother” squawking back at them... interfered with descriptive discourse. Furthering this was the normal for me but I presume UNUSUAL for you... state of bibliosophy where this man’s illiteracy (he CAN’T read) greatly complicated the detail of “what” he was talking about except to establish that there was a very large amount of printed something discovered the day before by the two young men.
“What is it?”
“The shed is full and they are taking the rest to his mother’s garage.”
“What is it?”
“It’s a lot; all old papers.”
“Is it books?”
“No. Papers. All old ones.”
“What are they?” (a hopeless question for HE CAN’T READ).
“I don’t know but you’ll want them.”
“Where is it?” I asked intending to locate the SOURCE but I was returned to:
“Mostly in the shed so far. I’ll take you over there. They said I could.”
“Is it for sale.”
“No.” This last was a fatal utterance but I went anyway.
At the padlocked shed, a structure without foundation dating from about 1870 and having no attention taken of it’s appearance for a least fifty years, my recycle-er pulled back one door to show, mounded in cubical cascades, blocks of, well... “old paper” piled to the roof line. “Wow!” was more fair then the dealerly “Huh.” I should have uttered while I was informed that “most of it” is at the mother’s garage. “There’s still some more coming too.” I touched several blocks. I pulled a few apart to prove to myself that they truly were what I saw; cubes of tightly packed old paper. It IS crispy white printed pages of old paper stacked imprint upon imprint to form, after evidently being pressed together and remaining that way for one hundred and fifty years... these curious blocks of biblio-gold that one may pick up as if they were, for comparison, a cubical block of Styrofoam. They are dry, stable and oddly light. This “WHAT THE?” has a wonderful explanation.
Up the river (Kennebec) from Topsham but before one reaches Augusta, one passes through older villages whose current decline is founded on the deceased 19th Century agrarian aristocracy. “Abandoned” is the term I used for this pervasive New England village breed. Once glory (and money) brought “great” “farms” to the landscape. These have... “declined”. Some are abandoned. SOME are being “restored”.
The “new” Maine finds us supplied with white collar commuters who “buy a place”, “fix it up” and “work in Portland”. The Yuppie dollar has taken “old places” and made them “beautiful” “again”. Money, money, money flows toward these places where no one ventures to “live” until it’s “ready”. “Ready” means that even in Maine one may find a flourish of interior decorating “firms” who, well, get these places “ready”. Before accurate reproductions of high Victorian wallpaper grace a “parlor” or TWO, “work” is done... by carpenters and contractors. BEFORE this “work” is done, “demo work” is done.
Alone on an abandoned farm with strict instructions to “take all that down” and “get all that” “out of here”, one soon finds two young men with one old “truck”; FOR WEEKS turning to... months. As the old goes out... and the new spaces come in... the giddy “new people” perpetually commend everyone down the food chain while issuing gilded commands to “Get that out too.”, et al. It is a big moment for “recycle-ers”, antiquarians, and bibliophiles: One never knows what they’ll “get rid of”.
Well: They got rid of something this time! On the 1840’s property are several buildings including a barn. To “make that into a studio” was the “architect’s idea”. GOT IT? If you don’t, it means taking a giant old structure that has only had cows and hay in it “forever” and “finishing it” using LOTS of MONEY so that “an artist” may work and live in it. This ain’t the FIRST time this has been done. Our demo team was called to “strip” the barn; removed the interior constructions (cow stalls, etc.) and “expose the frame” for “renovation”.
“KISS MY ASS” is what most people think about “doing” “this work” so our team was alone “in there” for weeks. ONE of the “problems” in the barn was a two storied construction that, looking down into it from the upper (second) floor of the barn, showed a giant 12 foot by 12 foot by 24 foot high square “hole” enclosed by “thick” walls with “doors” to the “outside”. This was centered on the north side of the barn; the dark, cold space evidently very carefully selected. What was this enclosed hole? An ice house[2].
It was empty: An empty space traveling two stories up from a field granite floor and two foot stone foundation. One entered from outside and one could, as the blocks of ice were stored ever higher, “get in” from doors further up the enclosure. “Huh.” and “Neat” summarized the interest.
“It goes.” were the orders. A floor has been put in NOW and one would never know such a curiosity was ever in this “old barn”. Our team knew “no problem” when they saw it and… that these walls, inclusive of the 8 inch finished & matched with beautiful 19th Century patina and a minimal of nail holes... “lumber” that made up the walls to this room: “It goes? - No problem.”. They knew this old lumber would enhance their pay check if they took extra time and removed the boards very carefully.
“GET IT OUT”
“All of it?”
“ALL OF IT!”
“OK: No problem.”
Starting at the top, the boards came off easily. They carried them to the large front door on the first floor to be “removed from the site”. The walls were 12 inches thick with the near one inch planking preserving an interior space of approximately ten inches. These ten inch spaces ran vertically for the twelve feet of each floor and were enclosed by “studs” that were in fact, ten inch wide rough cut two inch thick boards (“rough pine two by tens”). These, too, were desirable once they “GET IT OUT” - “YES SIR”. It was “odd” “over built” construction, although clean and easy to remove and of traditionally little surprise to discover in the lumber rich state of Maine. Starting at the top of the second floor and working downward, “The work” progressed rapidly until... they struck gold.
Gold appeared about four feet down within the upper floor walls. As the plank removal reached this level, our team discovered that the formerly empty space in these thick walls was “full” of “paper”. From there on down; to the bottom foundation wall, each space (between the studs) was “packed solid” with “old paper”. Just like that; vertical shafts of nearly twenty feet each packed full of old paper. NEAT, even, stacked, DRY columns of old paper, side by side on three walls. The outer barn wall had nothing in it. The joke on that is that the original builders figured (?) “How they gonna know?” because “How they gonna get over there to see it?”. This is the group opinion as to why that wall was empty. The other three were not.
This was “no problem”. All they did was take off a couple of boards and then lift out “chunks” of “old paper”. They put the blocks in the truck and got it ...out of there. Since “most of it is dated from the 1800’s”, they figured it was “good” and they could “sell it”. So they started putting it in the shed behind the apartment. Then into the mother’s garage. “There really is a lot of it!” I was told.
There really IS a lot of it and it took ME micro seconds to begin a calculation as to “just what and how much” “there is”. I didn’t SAY anything, nor have I as I write. ALL I said was “How much you want for that?”
“Well, ah: We don’t know.”
“I’m interested”.
“Yeah, well, ah: We think it’s worth a lot.”
“It is.”
“Yeah, but, ah: HOW MUCH?”
“As much as you want to sell it for.”
There rests the commercial aspects to this moment. There have been some nuances added to it and I suspect... that as the string pulling puppeteers of the old book trade endeavor to fit their ASSES through the door of the... shed..., we’s ah gonna see some fine “opinions” about “what it is” and “how much its worth” “offered” before it’s a “done deal”.
Well, lay bibliolestes[3], you’s ah gonna run a gauntlet including your checkbook and the “reach bottom” of your formerly highly valued perfected “skills” before you’s ah gonna break into the clear PAST ME cause if these two kid’s and their illiterate agent don’t have enough fingers to do the calculations, I’s ah promise that I’S will give you ah goud-un. And I ain’t ah gonna use no DAMN bibliographies like you “I gotta look it up” zombies.
Current conditions rest as follows: After having a series of regional experts “look at it”, the team decided to relocate the lot so as to better protect it from “everything”. This has been done. Several experts have helped the wagon circling impulse by being very, ah, “pushy” “with us”. Thank you for doing this and I do believe it’ll be real hard for just “anyone” to see this whole lot now. I am letting nature take it course and… it is… for the marketing team has selected by themselves a portfolio of a core sample of what THEY feel is “good” to “SHOW”. They have “figured out” how many “things” “there are”; “22,000”. That’s a lot of finger counts for these new bibliophiles. They have, throughout this, told me of and... even shown me “things we found”. They have begrudgingly agreed not to throw out “ANYTHING AT ALL” although at first contact one will quickly deduce that they feel “some of it is no good”. Behind all of their marketing calculations is the resplendent verbal notification that “We really are able to figure this out; we’re learning fast”. This last, for the student of bibliographic studies, includes the antidote assessment that “TOO BAD this stuff doesn’t include the Civil WAR; then we’d REALLY have something”.
The discovery does not included the Civil War for the most recent date of ANY of the paper is 1856. The earliest date? It is, TO DATE, a 1742 Boston theological pamphlet (“about God”). Is there a lot of “18th Century” and “Colonial” “material”? No. How do I know? I have had plenty of time to review the chunks and purvey my thoughts. The paper that packed the shafts was gathered rapidly and locally at the time the walls were built, PROBABLY as the walls “went up”. Above the farm was the publishing house of central Maine (the Augusta area) while below one garnered “toward Portland” imprints. It appears that “What ever you got” was, randomly, pushed down into the shafts. BLOCKS of newspapers “saved”, religious dogma “un-circulated” and the delightful “household ephemera” “not collated” were... SHOVED into place forming layer cakes of BIBLIO “IT’S A GAS TO LOOK AT!” “stuff”. Leaf by leaf may be easily lifted to “get to” the “next one”. All and any printing that would fit seems to have gone down the shafts so, for example, one may find “a stack” of a broadside for a church supper “on the Kennebec This Sunday!”. Or the lone, lost and scrappy hand bill imprinted “Boston, 1801”. Which of these is “better” and how are the curators of this collection doing at inventorying their acquisition? As I said; I am letting nature take a natural course. It is.
While the reader may churn in one’s chair and the ephemerist may palpitate, sweat and then ...feel faint; any sort of dizzy spell will not get you past the more professional check writing teams I’s already am sure have “got on this”. Good luck; visit our store when your in the area but, please... DON’T tell me what you “think” about it or... what I “should do” especially ... if I “get it”.

[1] Bibliognostes: "One knowing in title pages, colophons, editions, dates and place printed, printers and all the minutiae of …rare books".
[2]: “ICE”, from the riv-ah, cut in the win-ta, was “an industry” “along the ...riv-ah”. Here found was an ice house BIGGER then usual but surely not “big enough” to be an “Ice Factory”. “Sold some, prob-blie” was the logical use.
[3] Bibliolestes: "a book-robber or plunderer".

Snow Bound ("Privacy of storm" - Emerson).

2010-01-03T09:06:00.001-08:00

The snow began falling Thursday. I plowed. Friday it continued, but turned wet. I plowed. Saturday it continued and, as with the two previous days, the snowfall amount greatly exceed the amount forecast. I plowed again. At four in the afternoon, the predicted "turn-back" began with the now consolidated storm moving inland and west from the ocean. By dark they'd stopped plowing the roads, the winds were steady at 16 mph with forty mph gusts and the "white stuff" was coming sideways at a "white out" "inches an hour". We were snowbound.
I was by Whittier's farm early last month and snapped the image just before his homestead "got two" (December inches). Whittier's homestead today is identical to the woodcut on the title page of the 1866 "early enough" edition… I read… again… these past evenings. It wasn't the only thing I read but it was the most appropriate.
Today, Sunday, Jan. 3, I woke up at 2:30 AM, noted the house was still warn and the electric power still on. I got up, as I usually do, came downstairs and noted the internet was on. It had been on and off the whole day before. I stirred the "wood against the chimney back" then a "knotty forestick laid apart, and filled between with curious art. The ragged brush; then, hovering near, we (I) watched the first red blaze appear" (Snow Bound). I looked out the window and confirmed the brief discussion I had with my wife the evening before; that I should bring the snow shovel inside the door instead of leaving it outside beside the door, because it will be… buried. It was. It was still snowing. Blowing. White out.
I went to my coffee and the internet. The local radar showed the last big blast passing over and would be gone by 4 AM. A clear off by 8 AM. Most of today I am "engaged in snow removal activities" excepting this post.
How deep do my drifts need to be to be snow bound? Three feet and deeper they were this morning, coming up over the hood of the truck. I only got stuck once and that was nothing. I put down some cupfuls of sand from the bucket in the cab and I was "out" That's because then… a five to six in the morning, in the dark, the snow was still quite light and puffed away. Now, at eleven, when I walk outside to the woodshed, I hear men already struggling in their cabs for "its above freezing" and the snow "is getting heavier by the second". It no longer "puffs", it… "sticks". That bit of timing I apply again for …I don't like "sticks" on my snow shovel… so will wait until tomorrow morning to shovel the trails to the mail box, bulk head and far shed doors… unless it "gets cold" (below freezing) again today… and that it may well.
After plowing I sat in front of our old kitchen fireplace, ate the oatmeal cookies ("still warm are best") made by my daughter, and finished SNOW BOUND. Early editions and even later printings of the very, very, very first edition - first printing of SNOW BOUND are easily found. For reading, ownership and display, I prefer the earlier editions in their green or rust publisher's cloth with gilt title binding and having the frontis portrait of Whittier under a tissue guard and next to the title page with the …very pleasingly accurate… woodcut of his homestead farm. I always find, with each poke of a read, another line or two that spins for me. In this reading it is the noting of the full moon, "above the eastern wood" that was identical… to my snow bound moon and wood. Above that line, the witch's fire and tea rhyme has always …haunted me. I have always responded to chancing on human figures about an under-tree pasture fire… in a late, late, late fall afternoon… just before dark. It's usually coffee… not tea.
Copies found by poking in… poetry sections… of old New England "used & rare" bookstores will turn up SNOWBOUND in attractively old editions for… sixty… forty… twenty and… even six or two… dollars. The poem, the poet, the poet's homestead and… the physical book… ALL are impeccable classic New England good taste. These days… no one but those guarding the secret treasures of northern New England know about any of this…snow bound… so it is …justly there for the taking. The poem appeals if one truly likes "the old ways" of New England. It identifies deeper if one has actually lived those old way… and still does ("raised that way"). It should be snowing hard when read and the book is best displayed properly to anticipate "getting it down from that shelf" …when they "stop plowing the roads".

The Codman Place. Part Seven

2009-12-28T05:01:00.000-08:00

We took the loads across town to “the barn” and this was a considerably shorter drive except when we had to “swing around by” the “gas & go” on the way back. At the barn my mother and grandmother made us unload at the front this time and they’d start sorting right there and dividing the stuff up into the barn and their cars. These were parked out front. They didn’t sort the way that they did across the river. Here they pretty much took everything out of the trunks and boxes and took all of that except a few things back into the barn. Those few things went in the cars. The empty trunks and boxes were piled off to one side outside the barn door… except for certain selected trunks and boxes that they said were “too good”. I got pretty good at knowing a “too good” one for not only did it look the “real old” when we carried it out of the attic but most of the time my grandmother would say “put that one over here” when we unloaded it. “Over here” was back inside the barn door by a little room she kept locked. It was open most of the day but it was locked when we left that night.
And night it was. Ant never said a word about it but it was getting dark before we locked up the house and …finished taking all the boxes and trunks outside the barn over to the barn across the river like my grandmother told us to. Ant always seemed to know what we were doing and when we left the barn for the last load across the river he said he’d bring me back and “It was a good day: Went real well” and how it was good to “get that behind us”. My grandmother told him we’d “work it out tomorrow” and… that was that for when we finished the last load he just dropped me off without “stepping in” like he usually did. It was dark then and the lights were on in my grandmother’s dining room. She made me get undressed in the shed as usual and made me “YOUR SO DIRTY” take a shower right away. When I went through the dining room I saw they had the table all covered with old papers that I guessed they’d fetched out of the trunks. My mother and grandmother were looking at ‘em; piling them up and trying to read different parts of them. Both of them had their glasses on and were stooped in-under the light above the dining table, holding the old papers. There was no problem knowing they were real old papers; anyone could see that.
The next morning was where it really came true to me (and it has been true to me ever since over all these years) about how… when one “breaks up an estate” one sort of “lives” “the family” for a while. Once they had all those papers… which were from the Bateman family just like they’d figured, my mother and grandmother pretty much didn’t shut up about that family for the next three month’s. Everything was “Bateman” this or that. And all the other names too like “Pricilla”, “Anna”, “Comfort” or “Willie”, “Enoch” or… “Briney”. The last “drowned at sea” they always said. On and on they’d go about who was that, whose that was, why this was and then is that, who that this was why and the “this should be” “therefore”. It was just a little strange then but NOW it is such a normal thing that I really relish it. What happens is you have so much of a “family” in an “intact estate” that their whole timeline eloquence just spills out on to everything. This is furthered by there being no regulation or guide lines about the “processing” or examination of the estate; it’s the “let’er rip” method. This makes professional archivist cringe but HELL I never see them in no “house” “clean ‘en out”. And that’s the gap I’ve yet to see… rectified.
But my grandmother and mother knew how to rectify an “old place”. They just rolled in it. I now know that any dealer worth a salt shaker rolls in it… to the best of their abilities too. Pretty much “anything” that “is” part of what ever is determined to be the “core” of the estate is “squirreled off” to be “looked at” “later”. And this “later” can be, for example, twenty years. What’s left is the “dog barf” with a few “select additions”. The core contents then is “worked on” VERY carefully for …decades… for…. by “piecing it out” “slowly” one can “live off of it” “for years”[1]. Also… and going back to those papers on the dining room table that night… there is a certain internalized voyeurism explored by many dealers when “handling” “an estate” that takes years to “finish researching”. This is especially true if the estate has “something going on” as for example here when there is a “clutch” of “Revolutionary War” “stuff”. But in these days that was all “new” to me. And Ant; he didn’t ever really “get it” but, ah… he always said how he “didn’t school” “much” and how, when he worked with my grandmother she’d always “prove him” how much it “cost him”. Then he’d tell me about how to stay in school and how he remembered how my uncle “went to college” and “how smart” “your mother is”. And all.
Now… that day in the attic… I, right off, took the house shaped box with the War of 1812 woodcuts pasted to it and …demanded to keep it. My grandmother didn’t fight that but… she did look through all the papers inside the box and… only took a few out … but said “not to loose any” of the rest she left. I didn’t. I’d take those out one by one for years and…well; stare at them and then… carefully put them back. The were mostly mid and second half of the 19th century color lithographed advertising cards and pamphlets, some almanacs and a bunch of little tiny cards with people’s names on them.

Chapter Four.

After that attic clean out… there was not much to do… one would suppose… especially if you were twelve years old doing what other people told you to do. “LOOKS CLEAN TO ME!” was my assessment and… I stood by to “help Richard” and all TOO but …no one had seen him… AND
Was I ever wrong. Today, thirty plus years later I know how to WAIT for just this moment in an “S-state” (S-state) for back then I’d be just LIKE ANYONE would be: “IT’S EMPTY”.
AND IT AIN’T. Not even a long ways there to be an “empty” by my grandmother’s standards.
But she got “the keys”. That was because Richard and the …anyone else… decided by themselves TOO that …the Codman Place… “was empty” NOW. So… in his words, my grandmother… “could HAVE anything” “else” “she wanted”. That friggen bitch “wanted” TRUCK LOADS “out of there” “still”. And she got ‘em… for free.
There was one exception to this moment of conveyance of “the keys”. Richard DID appear after, evidently having been well aware all along what we’d been doing (I guess he’d “come in” after we left in the evening) and we ALL did a “walk through” the main house together and the …shed, the little building by the shed and the barn… . And… all stood around just inside the barn door pointing to the this and that’s and “off to the side” and… more pointing and NO ONE GOING a God damn STEP into that barn… and… “Huh.”. I said that to myself because the more I stood there saying nothing and listening the more I could “still see” “stuff” that “I knew” my grandmother was “gonna take”. So: “Huh.”
But that isn’t what happened right then because… . Well… WHEN we “walked through the basement of the house it was pretty damn empty to everyone’s eyes except that genuine World War II helmet of Richards… which he took down from it’s nail and carried along with him without making ANY comment and no else saying anything and the only person I seemed to think see all that was ME and since that was that then …that was that. Right?
While we were just inside the barn “talking” Richard would roll that helmet around in his hands just about in my face so… let’s just say I …knew where that helmet was and figured I knew where it was going. That shrine to his brother had all been moved out piecemeal I’d come to understand and … at the new house it hadn’t been “allowed” “inside”. Richard had stacked it all up in the trunks and boxes in about half of what was once a harness room inside the barn[2]. Remember them friggen “harness rooms” when you stare at the outside of an old barn. This is the second time in just this story where one sees their current incarnation. The first time is that “room” that my grandmother locked up everyday at HER barn. If one combines the two uses one will note that… in most cases… those rooms, being sealed up, dry, modestly well lit by natural lighting and… “clean”… are …preferred treasure trove storage vessels by… many a Mainer who’s “GOT A BARN”, got “something good” and “needs a place to put it” “that’s safe”. Pay particular attention to ‘em if… they are “locked”. I figure the helmet was going to be the “hung up” “in there”.
Just about the last moment of this seemingly innocuous and idle chit-chat that included that “HAVE ANYTHING YOU WANT” enunciation that I now know how to wait for like a clenched clawed rapier of … hawk sitting in a tree top watching the chicken pen door at dawn… Richard turn his gawk suddenly down on me and handed UP the helmet on to the top of my head saying “HOW” I “SURE EARNED IT” and I “WAS A BETTER HOME FOR IT” then his head and it would “GIVE” me “SOMETHING TO REMEMBER THE HARD WORK WITH”.
Remember the hard work with? This was work? Ant was smiling. I was …blinded by the helmet being down over my eye’s. My mother was doing the “SAY THANK YOU” crap. AND…from then on it was my helmet and I had that steel bucket with it’s camouflaged covering and “liner” around for the next decade of my life… until…after the Vietnam War protests were over and all… and it became… obsolete to my life and…well…: I assume I “sold it” along the way then. AND I DON’T wish I had it back but at the time I was as happy as a… WHAT DO YOU CALL a twelve year old kid whose filled his room(S! for I got … “more space” out of ‘em for MY stuff too) full of “authentic” relics of one’s own DISTINGUISHED selection process that PROVED that “the stuff they keep” “ain’t” “as good” as “WHAT I KEEP”: “WANT TO SEE A REAL WORLD WAR II HELMET? I got it from a guy who drove a TANK!”. Got it?
So that aced me for the rest of that day and wasn’t until the next day …at dawn… when Ant and I were in the yard of the “Codman Place” with my grandmother that “we” found out just “HOW MUCH” “was left” “to go”. It was raining… real hard. “We’ll start in the barn.” said my grandmother.
I thought we’d “done the barn” pretty good. The “upstairs” was empty to my eye. The downstairs had all been the “gone through” and Richard had got all his “tools” “out”. There WAS this big terminal moraine of “trash” to be “thrown out” that my grandmother had made us make down one whole side of the center of the barn next to the stalls[3] and… it WAS TRUE that here and there… in the harness rooms and stalls and the wood shed and the back pens and… well… all the “over there” too… there, after all… “is” “quite a bit”.
“Huh”.
That was, again, uttered to myself because my grandmother had already told Ant to “take” “all that (trash)” “to the barn (across the river). All that? In the rain? We DID, all day long and … it’s true… that it probably DID look like we were taking it to “the dump” because THAT WAS the way one DID GO to go to the dump and… as it was …raining… we didn’t “see” “anyone” the whole day. Except for Evelyn at the Gas & Go who said “AREN’T YOU FINISHED YET” to Ant who said how my grandmother was “making sure” it was “clean”.
“Clean”: That… “S-state” was CLEAN like you’d be CLEAN if … my grandmother bare-assed you and … soaped you and… wire brushed you… and… tossed you’s the stark naked right out in YOUR OWN front yard. IT TOOK FIVE MORE DAYS to “get it” “clean”.
By the time… I’d finished carrying the… old floor boards, formerly THE floor of one of the first floor rooms during …the 1820’s…, down from the attic floor where… they’d been laid on top of the actual attic floor… and no one would have ever noticed ‘em except my grandmother… and out to the truck… to… “driv ’em cross the riv-ah”, stacked ‘em in that barn and…: Ant claimed he knew they “were there” but I see’d ‘im slid his foot on them dust covered boards when my grandmother first started to talk about their impending exodus and then… look off across the empty attic to denote just how far over they did go… . WE was PRETTY WELL DONE THEN. But that was the five days later. The first day was that rainy day with the “trash”. AND…as I recall…; the intention of this story was to relate as to how I found my first “rare book” that I knew was a rare book when I found it. SOME time it’s been since I mentioned that! THAT’S because I’s ah had to “background” you so’s you’s can appreciate HOW a little crap like me COULD find a rare book.
WE took that “trash” “out”. It then became an awareness to me that… considerably more than I’d… considered… “was left” “in the barn”. TRUCK LOAD after TRUCK load was left in there but one would ah never know’d it for… it was not only “dark” in there but I guess the word that is best deployed is that is was “compressed”. NOT TO BE SEEN in the now “open” interior of the “old barn” was, particularly on the first floor, THIRD FLOOR and the odd little fourth floor that was only across the “way back” of the barn… a startling amount of “stuff” “there”. My grandmother knew damn well it was there. She also knew that MOST of it came from that Bateman estate “from down to”[4] Brooksville. “STUFF THERE” it were… WAY UP IN THE BACK… in boxes (19th century wooden boxes) that be the “full of” … the “old stuff” from, evidently THAT old house. These had been moved to the Codman Place… about… maybe… the 1920’s but… it became evident, had in most cases actually been “packed” in the MID 19th century and moved “here” “unopened”. But I was too stupid then to comprehend this and the merit of this. My grandmother was not.
ALL of this residue went directly to the cross-town barn and… the whirlwind of my mother and grandmother laid them boxes empty and stacked up JUST about as fast as we brought them in there. “AND EVERYTHING ELSE” too.
This last was “SHE’S NUTS” level removal. Ant said that. This is because she had him in under one of the stair cases in the barn with a crow bar ripping off a board to “get at” “the stuff” in-under that stair. He’d “never seen that” he admitted, particularly as it…; “the stuff”, was “obviously good” once exposed. Pieces, bits, scraps, sections and every damn stick, board end, metal scraps and… for a bibliognoste… “ALL PAPER” “was taken” “out” and … “saved”.
It was during this phase that I acquired my rare book. In general, the requirement was, once a space was perceived to be empty, to “go over it again” (and again) paying particular attention to the darkest, most “in-under” areas, loose boards, possible “space behind that” hiding places, dusty corners…, old little piles of hay and any …pile that could not be clearly answered as to “What’s under it?”, ALL the “old firewood” piles…, the stall and pen corners, floors, ceilings…., ALL beams and beam “tops”, “crotches”, ALL window frames… and… on & on & on until FINALLY my grandmother, HERSELF, stopped “finding” “more”.
What happened was … that there really was “stuff” all over in the dust and dirt of the floors. And I was going along up there with the flashlight and there was this flat square that looked like a board. It was all covered with dust and had been stepped on and bent a little it looked like “nothing” but… “I was suppose to” “get it” so… I picked it up and even though completely dirty I saw is was “a book” right away and I opened it up and shined the flashlight on the first page and
SAW the date of “1795” with a printed “picture” of a United States eagle in a circle… and… I KNEW THIS was “good”. It was, to be precise, a small bound folio; bound in first half of the nineteenth century half calf and orange marbled paper covered boards with the “KENNEBECK (sic) INTELLIGENCER” on the spine in gilt…, retaining “a run” of this… the first newspaper published in Augusta, Maine… beginning with …the first (Nov. 14, 1795) issue and continuing through September 1800 when it “stopped”[5]. It was dirty on the outside, clean on the inside, bent, bowed, big for a book, sort of thick and … “MINE”. The date and that eagle did it. The rest “was nothing” except of course it was an “OLD NEWSPAPER” (“DATED FROM THE EIGHTEEN HUNDREDS SEE!”).
I didn’t have any problem passing that through the “artifacts found today” inspection committee who looked at it in the cab of Ant’s truck where I put it. They said it was “nice”. And nothing else. Ever. So I had it. For years. In my room. And I KNEW it was good… all the way through high school. I’d occasionally look at it, show it to some kid and “try” “to read it”. I’ve never been able to “READ” an old newspaper; I’m too superficial to bother to understand what the people were writing about. BUT with that date and that eagle… IT WAS MINE. Then one day after I’d graduated from high school and was either “going” or “was going” “to college”… this… and I remember this clearly but only sort of spot clearly… this… MAN came to “the house”.
And this man…; he went on & on with everyone about everything and… in that on & on was “any old PRINTS?”. Well: I had an “old prints” that I’d “saved up” from “getting in” to places. And… one of them old prints of which this man singled out just like YOU pick the largest piece of CAKE for yourself… was of … a building in Portland that … I’d found and “kept” because it was a certificate for …making the best “Hooked Rug” at some “exhibition” there… in the 1830’s (?). So I showed it to him. And he followed me along with it to see the “ANYTHING MORE?” in one of my rooms. And… he, once in there, seen that folio and went all over it real calm like… along with the real calm too about that print. He was orally the on & on the whole time AND being “with” “a museum” “in “PHILADELPHIA” too… . Then he’d said the “like to buy those” and the “HOW MUCH” and I drew the old bow string WAY BACK in my mind of highest number possible and… he said “OK” right away, paid cash and was GONE… with them two selections from my stocks… forever.

The End.

[1] : I’m still “finding” “stuff” I “bought out” of “estates” a quarter of a century ago. That stuff “looks pretty good” too.
[2] : It was “still there” twenty years later when I “bought it” after he died but… I denoted… “some dealer” had “gone through it sometime” in the interim score of years.
[3] : You’s got the balls to be’en a dealer? Let’s just find out. Would YOU be the one… during a “clean out” to… “the THROW out” something “obviously good” knowing that YOU BE the one to actually THROW OUT the “throw out” by simply and eventually going to throw out that “throw out” WHERE YOU WANT IT… thrown out? HUH? TRY IT and see how you do: Take an “IT’S GOOD” and, along with a considerable more choice selections (like a big ole 19th century oil on canvas with a ship on it but having a slash hole the size of your forearm across that “in the original frame” canvas to it too) and… bury it… in the “throw out” “pile” and “wait” “until the end” and… do the “I threw it out”. My grandmother; she taught me that and it works… and… you’s just wading along in the clean out and them; “the principals”, off times will come up with the “something” they “found” and “want to know” if “it’s good” or should be the “thrown out”. YOU just the “throw it out” to ‘em know’en fool’s ass well it be “good” and… into and DEEP UNDER that pile it go until it’s “gonna throw that trash out today” TRUCK LOADS “don’t worry it’s all going to the dump” YOURS “for free”. Let’s just find out if you’s ah got them “the BALLS” to “be’en a dealer” with all them “fine & rare” “decorative arts” (and… “old books”).
[4] : If you’s practice “from down to” and the “include it” in your familiar utterances more frequently then you’s do now… (“Where YOU been?” “I’s from down to the bathroom”… “from down to the computer room”, “from down to the shed” or “from down to the… ATM machine”…), you’s be the “get along” to the understanding it’s meaning and correct use.
[5] : It “stopped” because Peter Edes, the editor & publisher, started a “new” newspaper; the “KENNEBEC GAZETTE”, “Vol. 1, No. 1”… then. I found a… “complete run”… thus …but I didn’t and… never did know this.

The Codman Place. Part Six

2009-12-27T03:53:00.000-08:00

They “owned it” and were to the “getting it out”. They knew how to “not show” “interest” so “go-ud” that THEY KNEW to sit it back and… wait. JESUS didn’t I learn that from a table talk like that. The crux of the whole was “the attic” where … “old Henry’s” WIFE’S “family things” “be”… except for “THOSE TRUNKS IN THE BACK OF THE BARN”… . This …block of merchandise… in that space… was denoted as the core of the estate. NOT a friggen NOISE to anyone was uttered about that attic for… A DAMN WEEK. It was understood that old Henry’s wife “was a Bakeman” from “down Brooksville”. That’s way UP the coast by Castine. “Anna” or “Susanna” or “Christina” or well… if your twelve and Maine genealogy is the topic at “dinner”… you’s bored so… I didn’t ever catch it all. ANYWAY… that family was “hers” so that was “their family things” all up in the attic. I did consolidate as to how that family was “fought in the Revolution” but… no one seemed to know much about the “battles” I hallucinated they were “in”. In actual fact I know now that the …big battle they “FOUGHT” was with their Tory neighbors who kept trying to loot their home and mill. But that don’t mean anything to this story except to note that their side “won” so… that a lot of “Bakeman things” remained “together”. And they were up in that attic. And my grandmother & mother knew this.
So what they did is never go near that attic for a week. Never mentioned it. Never said a word about it. It was always “clean out” that, “move this”, “take that today”, “get as much of” in a specified… either “room” “area” or… “floor”. The last was toward the “end”. One would think that an “end” means an “END” and that means “WE ARE DONE” and ..we don’t “do this” “anymore”. It doesn’t. I learned this. It is a false end; a created “end” constructed… by my grandmother and… for years, a tactical directive employed with stunning success by… me.
What it means… is that the “estate” in the “home” of the former owners is “DONE” in THEIR notion of what “DONE” is to THEM. And… they, therefore, “don’t need to come” “anymore”. The wife really never came anymore ever. But Richard did for the first week and a little longer. The little longer was crucial but after that… he was pretty much what he said: “MOVED OUT”. After the first three days of hard hauling out of the barn; principally from the second floor for Richard hadn’t “got his tools” “ready”. AND in fact… there weren’t all that much ON that first floor “except in the back rooms” that my grandmother cared about anyway… : We were “directed” to “work” “in the house”. THEN my grandmother would show up every day first thing in the morning and give us very specific direction of what and WHERE to move that what in… direct collaboration with… Richard. She’d also “come by” after “dinner” each day to “check”. In the main house pretty much “everything” was going to some place. “THAT” goes “WITH THAT” to “THEIR HOUSE” but “TAKE ALL THAT TO THE BARN”. Got it? It went right by me but… since the work was easier and cleaner then the barn I rode right along and … Ant spent a whole lot of time packing “it” on the truck “so it won’t get scratched” kind of stuff. We used these old quilts from the barn that my grandmother said “USE THOSE” to us. Funny how when those got to the barn across the river she wouldn’t let us take ‘em back and we had to “GET SOME MORE. OUT OF THE HOUSE IF YOU HAVE TO”.

Chapter Three

“WHY IS IT… THAT when people move out of a house they will not let anyone SEE what they are moving?” came to my ears as an odd query from a woman with a man in a pick-up truck that stopped so as to block Ant’s truck that we had just finished loading. Ant said again that “It weren’t his business what he” “moved”. The woman persisted. The man in the truck said nothing. The truck block our passage. I stood behind Ant, at the front of our truck. Richard was not at the house. We had just locked the house.
“We’ve got to be off” said Ant to the woman. She looked back to the truck again. Ant had intercepted her when she had stepped out the passenger side of her truck. He said “Oh shit” and walked right out to her. Once out of her truck cab she had walked down the little driveway and then walked down even faster when she saw that Ant was going to reach her before she reached our truck. They’d talked briefly and each of them had gestured toward Ant’s truck several times. After a few of these gestures I’d gotten out and just stood between Ant and the truck. I heard Ant say “You can follow me all you want.”. He came back to the truck giving me a rather hard “Get in”.
Then he launched into a paragraph of linked profanities that, while he watched the pick-up follow us out across the river in his side mirror, made it clear to me he knew who the people were, that they were antique dealers, that he did not like them, that this was trouble for everyone and that… when we got to the barn he sure hoped my grandmother was there because “she’d put her head up her ass”.
My grandmother was there and …according to Ant… that’s what she did. I didn’t see that because I was at the back of the barn with Ant unloading and my grandmother and mother “took ‘em on” way up outside of the front of the barn. Ant stopped up there and honked his horn when we arrived. The other pick-up had pulled right in behind us and when my grandmother saw that she came right up. Ant spoke to her something using no profanities from the truck and she said she’d “take care of it” and to “go unload”. My grandmother talked for a little while outside the barn with the woman who’d gotten out of her truck when we stopped and tried to walk down into the barn. She never made it. My grandmother held her off and my mother stood just back enough to block her again if she flanked my grandmother. “Don’t she TWIST!” is what Ant said to me while we worked. I didn’t see any twisting but that was probably because I was unloading while Ant spent most of his time watching. When the lady left, Ant went right up and talked with both my mother and grandmother for a little bit. When he came back I was all un-loaded except for the big stuff. We unloaded that and drove back for another load. Ant said the lady “won’t be back” and how she’d “met her match” with my grandmother. We stopped at the “gas & go” on the way back and not only did Ant buy me an ice cream bar but he even told fat Evelyn all about my grandmother and what he called “That fuck’en bitch”. My vocabulary was getting bigger everyday I worked with Ant.
Back at the house we’d come to a point where I was suppose to “work with Richard” in the shrine. But since he hadn’t shown up like he was suppose to, Ant had said we’d “strip the basement” and that’s what we’d been doing. I knew now how we took “everything” so we’d already taken three truck loads out there through a wooden doorway that lead down into it from the outside. Throughout the taking everything I had my eye on that helmet. Ant saw this and, as the space became “empty” he said to me quietly that “we’d better not” take “that”. In fact he actually said we’d better not even touch it. So we didn’t and after the fourth load that was all that was left down there. It hung there, on it’s nail, from the ceiling, at the base of the stairs. I didn’t like leaving that there but what could I do.
The next morning my grandmother came down to the house and looked it all over as usual. Ant went around with her but they made me “take everything” out of this little shed by the barn and put it into the truck. That pretty much filled the truck. Then my grandmother said a “Well” and then that I “should stay here” for when “Richard showed up” and Ant to take that truck load to the barn and come back. We, I then gathered, were supposed to meet Richard this morning. But he didn’t show up.
While Ant was gone we went upstairs and “walked through”. While we did this my grandmother would find little things still[1] and make me “Put that in the car.” so I was running up and down and in and out the whole time. When I came back upstairs for the “five hundredth time” my grandmother weren’t there but… the attic door was open. So up I went. I knew for sure she hadn’t even been up here since that first day. When I came up she didn’t say anything or touch anything and just walked up and down the isle peering in at the dark boxes and trunks. Then we both heard a truck and, even though I could tell it was Ant’s truck, my grandmother said “Maybe this is Richard”.
It wasn’t but we went all the way down and outside before Ant was turned around. Ant said “HE AIN’T HERE YET?” and my grandmother affirmed that. In hindsight its clear this absents phased neither of ‘em but at the time I thought they both might get… well, “mad”. They didn’t. My grandmother said to Ant that we’d “just been in the attic” and she “guess” we “should do that today”: “Get it all out. As fast as you can.” Ant seemed to understand that. He also seemed to understand that her telling him to “take it all” to the “regular” barn; the second barn, was nothing unusual although I’d “never done that” “this way”. She also said to “be ready” “to move it from there”. “To where?” is what I asked myself but I didn’t dare say anything out loud.
From there on the rest of the day was “BOOM”. That day was sort of cool and cloudy but I still remember the sweat we got going up and down those stairs. And that wasn’t the end. Ant didn’t ever say anything but I noticed that all that day we seemed to “go at it” at a faster clip then usual. It started out with one load being normal. Then, with the second load, we seemed a little faster. By dinner time, my mother had these sandwiches at the barn and they talked about “working right through” “today” which we did. Ant never said a word to complain and we still did get the “ice tea” in the afternoon but we didn’t talk with Evelyn hardly at all.
We started at the top of the stairs and went down one side to one end of the attic, then back up the whole other side and then finished up from the other side of the stair top. This last section was eased off by us “taking something” from it to “fill out” a load on each trip. I was usually sent back up to “just get anything” “about that big” “you can carry” and, well, I “just grabbed”.

(To Be Continued)

[1] : Unbelievable this then but today it is my most regular habit. Pieces of wood, metal and glass whatever’s; bits & parts, “slivers”, “that is that”, “iota”, “any paper” and the always proud “DIDN’T EVEN SEE THAT” “discovery” of something actually whole and “good”. She took every damn thing there was and was repeatedly searching out more and more… AND MORE. NOT a nook, cranny, beam top, dark spot, hole, crack, “back in under the shelf”, “Here: shine the flashlight in there”, “check between the (blank)”, “look behind and up-under” a (blank), “see if anything is just below” the (blank)” or “go get a hammer and pull that out” actually nailed down “something”… escaped. And I learned to do this too. And you should TOO.

The Codman Place. Part Five

2009-12-26T07:08:00.000-08:00

Chapter Two

My Grandmother, who kept telling everyone what to do whenever anyone of us stood still for even a second in her sight (this quality seemed to be especially in use on me), kept right on me about what to “move” when “Richard leaves”. The problem with that was, as near as I could tell during… the first three days… that I “cleaned out” “the barn”… not only did he not leave but he DIDN’T DO ANYTHING EITHER. Anthony (“Ant”), who was driving the loads for my grandmother said that was all he ever did anyway. He had a bad side to Richard the whole time we moved together. He said he was a “lazy piss” and I remember that to this day because that kind of talk was just being introduced to me and: I remember also how Ant explained “You know how when you piss’en over the bank of the river but your look’en OFF over the river and not where your piss’en” as to how THAT was a “lazy piss”. I don’t think I’ve ever pissed over the bank of a river ever again without thinking about Ant saying that to me. I’d never thought about it till then but he was right about that kind of piss. I still don’t know if he was right about Richard. It seemed to me that Richard, especially at first, was watch’en everything I moved like a hawk. Just because he didn’t help us didn’t mean he wasn’t doing something even though Ant was right that he wasn’t doing “ANYTHING” to help us.
I would ride with Ant to this barn across the river that my grandmother knew the people and had ‘em give her an “OK”[1] to use …what proved to be a pretty sharp hiding hole for her plunder. That barn had a big ole front door that we would drive in. We had a whole left side all the way down that was empty to “drop” our loads in. We were instructed to drive all the way down to the end at the start and “drop” as “FAR BACK” as we could and “pack it in tight”. Ant seemed to know what my grandmother wanted because he was always very careful to be sure that everything was stacked right up tight even though it seemed to me there was enough space to play football in that barn. We had that side for only a month (this being the end of June) for that space, a ground floor, was for “the late hay” that the owners “cut & sold out” “in the winter”. So… what ever went in had to go “out” pretty quick. My grandmother understood this but didn’t seem to mind packing it in there. I learned right quick why.
She made us leave this one stall at the very end open. It was about one truck load in size. She and my mother would drive one of their cars down to the far end ahead of where we were “dropping”. They; my mother and grandmother, would spend most of the day back there in that barn. They would come to the house only in the morning and right after lunch. There they’d look around a little bit and tell us what to do and then leave. The rest of the day they’d be at the back of the barn “sorting”. What they did was to “go through” everything and take out what they “want” and put that in their cars and… take it over to ANOTHER barn that my grandmother stored stuff in for years. IF what they “want” was too big, they make us move it out into the center and then, after they had a “few things”, make us truck it over to that barn. It was like clockwork. As the stuff was sorted it was re-packed starting at that empty stall. When we first came in with a new load we’d have to place what my grandmother wanted moved inside the barn before we’d unload. I know now what they were doing. Those two knew what to do.
They were taking so much out “blind” (without ever having “looked” at it), they couldn’t tell what they got. So they’d sort it as fast as they could in the barn; out of sight of anyone, take the “good stuff” out and …back fill with “the rest”. Don’t think that the rest was “no good” cause it was GOOD. In fact it was… as I now know… pretty well choreographically re-packed to please the eye of ANY antiquarian AND also had a “remember that” IF Richard and his wife… “come over to see” “all of it”… WHICH THEY DID. Meanwhile all that the “anyone would take” “stuff” was, ah… “gone”. It’s sort of the same as changing cars after a bank robbery ain’t it.
Anyway, I was still learning that but Ant; he understood that but he was especially OK about it after my grandmother gave him this old shotgun he “found”. He wouldn’t shut up about that and kept it right behind the seat of the truck the whole time we worked and was always talking about “how” “if Richard knew”. Well… even I KNEW that the gun weren’t that good THEN but Ant was sure fetched with it. He just loved it and he still had it hidden in his house the last time I saw him which is probably twenty years ago. He was always afraid Richard was gonna see it and remember it and we used to laugh about that and how Richard never even knew that gun was in the barn.
WHEN Richard and his wife came over… it was twice. The first time they came over “to see”. That went pretty good for when they the “to see” everyone just stood around and said how “like so much junk” all that stacked up stuff looked like. The next time they came over because they “thought” they “wanted” a “picture” they’d “were sure” they’d seen “in the shed” of the “house” (the Codman Place) to “KEEP” as a “MEMORY”. Well… my grandmother didn’t know what they were talking about even when they tried to describe the little box it was in that “folded closed” and how it had Old Henry’s father out in front they thought and how it was about “this big” and they held a book sideways to show that size. So she told them to come over and look through the stuff if they wanted. They did that and after about two hours they gave up and said how much old junk there was that no one would ever believe a house that “small” could ever have “held all that”. They got all dirty too and they didn’t like that but they still hawked on about that picture and wanted my grandmother to bring it over “when she found it”. Well… every old photo my grandmother “found” that she thought had “the house” in it she brought to show ‘em but it was never the right one. A lot of times it wasn’t even the Codman place in the photograph but my grandmother showed ‘em anyway and they kept telling her how those “AREN’T THE HOUSE EVEN”. After awhile they give up the issue and, in the end, didn’t even take the photograph of Old Henry with his first car out in front of the barn that they’d said they “Want that too” at first.
NOW I know TOO well my grandmother was gonna be “THE GOD DAMNED” if they were gonna “go after” “that dag” for she knew a full well what that was[2] and… any damn fool would NOW but then… those were still “neat” “old” “photographs”… commercially anyway… BUT: HELL and high water did not scare my grandmother off of ANY antique in ANY old house and… I can pretty much say I learned that good too. So there and… well… don’t YOU come as to “what happened to that” caused I’ll “What?” and the “I don’t” and, ah… THIS STORY …for you… is about “buy’en” an old place “out” and if you ain’t a better at it after read’en this then you’s missed whole lot ah point that I DIDN’T MISS when I was just young snap. What that means is …you can see why we trucked all that to that barn across the river and back?
Back inside the Codman place is where the real action took place only one would never know even if you stood there the whole time and …even asked “What are you doing?” over and over. On that first morning I was upstairs in the barn with a bunch of cardboard boxes and newspaper before Richard knew what had happened. Once we were both up there the old “What do we need THAT for?” came out right about the boxes because… most everything up there was already in boxes and… those boxes were bigger, made wood and covered with barn, ah… “soiling”. We both looked around in the dark at the mounds and Richard started to say something about “getting a light”. My grandmother shut him off like a light on that with “YOU DON’T NEED A LIGHT: PUT IT OUT IN THE YARD TILL THE TRUCK COMES”.
We did that. It was only about ten minutes so… well.. we were only bringing the second box down; it was a trunk, when Ant… backed right up to the barn and… weren’t he the dynamo when he was “pay him good”. He took charge and since he knew Richard like the peas in a pod (and also “had grown up with your uncle” to me) AND… knew nothing about “antiques and that old stuff”… he’d say… but I think he knew a little more than he let on… I was suddenly going up and down that barn stairs like a popcorn vendor at the ballpark… while he and Richard “shot shit” by the truck and…: Well… when I “free that up” by his instruction, we would ALL “move it out” right into that truck. I was getting the dirtiest but I will say that Ant come right along in that regard while …Richard managed to avoid even bending over. Right quick therefore we had a “full load” and… we drove off in that truck to… that barn across the river where “Your grandmother IS”.
And she stayed there. Till “dinner”. Just “how smart is she” (according to Ant) began to manifest. ANT was in charge of removing the “stuff” from the “place”. ANT! And he had no idea what he was doing! And I was “helping him”. And I HAD NO IDEA WHAT I WAS DOING. We were suppose to “clean it out”. That’s what we did except for all the time we spent joking about Richard doing nothing. That’s what HE did: Nothing. And we never even saw the wife because… she spent her whole time over at the NEW house.
At “dinner” Ant went off in the truck somewhere that I never asked but he was always right back in forty-five minutes… with a clean set of his green clothes on. He wasn’t suppose to smoke “around you” but he got rid of that …law… right away by telling me to “never-ever smoke” (I never have) and smoking the whole everything up (at the barn door with Richard and all the time in the truck as we drove) EXCEPT for the last minute before we came in front of my grandmother. Not that she didn’t know or care; she’d bid her peace on the subject so it was up to Ant to flank her. Some “flank” huh. He improved that by… managing to always swing by “the gas & go” store about three or four times a day where he was pretty well known and well; “get a soda” but toward the end of the day Ant switched from “coffee” to “ICE TEA” he called it. “ALL those WOMEN drink ICE TEA so give me one of THEM TOO!” he’d say in the store and Evelyn; the big ole woman at the counter would laugh and hand up a big bag of what I figured out was a …quart bottle of beer… that he’d “refresh” throughout the afternoons. Noth’en wrong with that.
But at …that first dinner… I didn’t say much. I listened to a conversation between my grandmother and mother that ’id curl a whole receipt pad of an antique dealer right up into a “big mother ole” bank deposit. It was “you understand already” “in context” chatter but… it divided heaven & earth in that “Codman Place” up into “minor antique problems”.

(To Be Continued)

[1] : I’m pretty sure that had a little bundle of money in that “OK” too because the people were always really friendly to Ant and me even when we were there in the early morning dark and had to park outside and leave the truck lights on to see. They liked Ant a real lot because he was always asking about their daughter who he called “That’s the PRETTY pumpkin!”. She was younger than me and was always hiding in the barn while we worked. Emily was her name: “LITTLE Emi” to differentiate from her grandmother who lived there too.
[2] : A half plate daguerreotype showing the front of the Codman house with a man in a long wagon with a banner that read “Buchanan” tied along the side of the wagon enclosed in a homemade wooden box that could be hung up so the lid folded downward when it was open but could be closed up too.

The Codman Place. Part Four

2009-12-24T05:08:00.000-08:00

This was serious territory. No one …had been in that space. My grandmother knew this. Actually; she didn’t know it: SHE COULD SMELL IT. In hindsight I now understand that her sense of smell didn’t need to be too keen for …relativistic-ally… HOW was an antiquarian gonna get “up there”. They’d ah have to go (“talk their way”) through the downstairs, wangle into the upstairs and then PUSH ON to the attic. The logistics of this maneuvering without… little bundles of money with rubber bands around them… being dropped every few feet… did not seem… something one of the hammer-head door pickers could “pull off”. And they hadn’t.
We moved back to the storage room above the kitchen. My grandmother presumptively opened the attic stair door …without asking… right away. (This is a tactical action worth remembering for I have used it meeting no resistance for years. The promptness and grace of execution extended to an “OBVIOUSLY we’re going THERE” demeanor binds it’s success ratio.) A short, dark and enclosed with… lush Maine 19th Century pumpkin pine[1]… staircase shot straight up to a dim light above. Again, in line, we all bumped up this stairs. I followed my mother who went first. At the top of the stairs was a small open area but this quickly closed down as rows of boxes and trunks formed long double lines back under the eves of each side of the …room. It was neat. It was, as attics go, clean. There was just light enough from the small windows at each end, to see “everything” in one extended gaze. My mother promptly walked down the center isle between the lines of boxes and trunks. ALL of these appeared to be FULL. This is unusual.
I knew everything was full because I walked behind my mother and she reached toward any container she thought might be empty only to find, with a slight tug, that it was full. These rectangular cubes of dark antiquarian color stood like silent monoliths equally spaced from each other as if to form… in their own pattern… a Stonehenge or antiquarian chevet… ! Even with my weakness as youth I recall precisely my captivation with the precision of this standing formation AND it’s hallowed ground of “OLD”. Further, and unappreciated by me at this time, but denote in private by my seniors, was that as these aged containers stood, it was very evident that what was “up here” had been “up here” “a long time”. AND… excepting a very few cardboard boxes at the head of the stairs… nothing had been put up here in “a very long time”. Even the “head of the stair” items held urgent fascination. My grandmother had already picked up a odd house shaped pine box; in the shape of a reliquary, that was covered with decoupage paper engravings of American military heroes from the War of 1812. I can offer this precise a description of this object because I… kept it in my room for the …next decade. At the time… she simply sat it back down without comment.
By the time my mother and I had returned from the far end of the attic, my grandmother had come back from the near half. My mother went up that way but I was held back by that reliquary passing up from the darkness into the light for a moment and then, much to my urgent dismay, BACK into darkness before I could requisition a moment with it. My eyes had seen “soldiers” and… at the slight noise I began to make next to my grandmother, a jab on my side shut that sound off. I learned the hard way to “shut-up”.
When my mother returned from her quick walk up the isle, almost NO conversation followed. A mutter from my grandmother about “no furniture” and “dirty enough” clattered into my mother’s “old clothes” and “much of it” being “to far gone”. This last was touched with the “new roof?” phrasing that I have seen deployed by other skilled pickers. A “back-off from the subject” or false trail of chatter is formed by offering the “When did you… PUT ON… a new roof” even though it may be pathetically evident that NO new roof was EVER put “on”. This verbal suggestion of proper property management plays off a homeowner’s persistent phobia of “needs a new roof” and that means… spending “a lot” of money and… well… that DOES change the subject AWAY from “the stuff” …most of the time. Here it worked like a golf ball being putted in from the very edge of a hole for… NO “new roof” had been “sell the house” WITHOUT ONE “we decided”. Clunk went the ball into that hole and… down stairs we all went; all the way DOWN TO THE KITCHEN.
How is that for smooth? Them two had just looked at a “LOADED” attic and … managed to not only NOT look at anything but had NOT discussed it in any but the most vague terms with the owners. AND already LEFT without these principals making the slightest effort to suggest in anyway that… the stuff “IS SOMETHING” and they… should look at it if they plan to make an offer on it? OH is this a wicked skill perfected! And few can do it with the slither of a snake shedding it’s skin that my grandmother would do it. HER snake skin IS PROBABLY STILL on the floor of that attic where she shed it with SUCH grace that… she glistened with a glow of monetary intent when the whole group of us caucused about the kitchen table.
Using the motions of placing the rubber banded bundles of money on the “These are one hundred dollars and those are five hundred dollars… each” kitchen table she, inclusive of “RE-ADD that won’t you please” to my mother of the …little slip of paper and then… bending over it again herself after placing it in plain view before all… . “I don’t have enough in my purse here won’t you get the LITTLE RED BAG out of my glove compartment” to me and I did that like the “good boy” I received when I returned.
I had missed a final number? I had, I supposed for Richard had hundreds of dollars in his hand and his wife was counting her handful of money and saying “This is right”.
“NOW AS WE GO ALONG,” said my grandmother “You must tell me WHEN those rooms are READY and we will make up for what ELSE you decide (note the deployment of the two words) you DON’T WANT but that is as near as I think we can figure it today from what you have settled”. (Note the affirmation of the contents…to be understood… to be resolved and… therefore… no further need to “view” it. The specific and intentional shift is to presume “all” is “sold” except what THEY “else” “decide” and …must bring up as “themselves”.) “I will go and get (her man) and why don’t you get your car while…” and she paused… “I DO think there IS some paper and boxes in the back of my car so IF you would start to pack in the UPSTAIRS of the barn. MIND Richard for he will TELL YOU what is HIS.” She said all this in the round to the room, then to my mother, then to me and then… to Richard. He nodded his approval of the directives. His wife had reached to him for the bundles of money but he had put her aside with one hand and the folds had been put into two side pockets with his far hand. The wife still held on to the last bundles and said to no one in particular the she “had seven hundred here”.

(To Be Continued)

[1] : The warmth of this wood; a wide, smooth, mellowed to a full, often times dimensional in it’s appearance, surface, enclosed in …centuries of protective darkness (as here found) WITHOUT the chance for repeated regular surface abrasion is not “a wood” encountered outside of or… far from… it’s original setting. One may be “shown” “authentic New England pine paneling”, etc., but… outside of it’s original and… preferably forever undisturbed (by, for example. “being painted”) placement… it rapidly looses it’s unique grip on the eye. Here, as in many other “first contacts”, I, as an antiquarian, am enveloped within the elegant and…. desperately difficult to actually find these days… only true way to fully enjoy “why” “people” “relish” this “wood”. More off then not MOST PEOPLE cannot understand what I am mentioning here because THEY HAVE NEVER, ever, BEEN NEAR such an “original setting” so “think I’m crazy”.

The Codman Place. Part Three.

2009-12-23T05:10:00.001-08:00

Up there, my grandmother had not been idle. The whole “walk through” process had been accompanied by a petit yet consistent action on her part. She had, without moving around a whole lot, been carefully making little tiny pencil marks on different spots of a tiny little card of white paper she carried with her. I might as well spill the beans on this right here for… IF you have ever wondered how someone like me can go strolling through a home with a barn and come out the other side with, after a very few minutes of figuring… a state exactly “how much” “I WILL PAY” “FOR ALL OF IT” “RIGHT NOW”… this little tiny iota of paper be the magical secret.
That paper means nothing to anyone if it is… “lost” or “looked at”. All an eye sees is tiny little pencil dotting here and there about the little slip. But them dumb dots mean money. The little slip has delegated regions on it to designate rooms and spaces (“The Barn”) and, within that designated be the further extended designated “how much” generally touched out in “hundreds”, “fifty”, “twenty” and even the “tens” and “fives”. “Huh.” and so clear is that coding-out that in the hands of the creator it become THE PRIMARY reference for “how much” “for that” THROUGHOUT the ENTIRE “estate purchase”. What I am stating is the YES I CAN buy the entire contents of a whole Federal home and it attached buildings AND the barn by poking at an index card with a pencil and DON’T you DARE back-up about it for I’s ah taught plenty of ‘em how to do it and they DO do it and they DO say “HOW THAT WORKS!” and the thank me too… so I don’t got to the no poop from you about it because…
I learned this from my grandmother in …places just like this one here… and she did it like you close your car door so I saw it over and over and then did the big ole break myself and have road them slips of paper my whole life without a single comment from you.[1]
So the pencil was hitting the paper and my mother by no solicitation needed was doing the old “this one has a cracked handle”, “it’s signed Kellogg”, “there are TWO of them; a pair” and the always helpful “I think that there are more quilts in the bottom drawers too” kind …well… it was hard for someone to stop those two once they started to go through “your stuff” so, along with an absolutely astonishingly well maintained superficial and trite to all subjects banter kept up… that would ALONE numb a hake… the maelstrom passed from room to room, space to space… and object to object. With lighting speed.
When I came back up from the basement and mumbled off the “dutifully I report” of “two cases of six shelves of fruit jars” and “barrels behind a small room of boxes with a cupboard and that’s full too” eloquent discourse that divide land and sea of the whole dark, dank basement into a …couple of pencil dots… WE were already to “go upstairs. “Richard. Can we?” said my grandmother.
If there was going to be a heroic moment within this estate transaction, this was it. The words floated through the air of a suddenly quiet kitchen but that silent moment ended within that moment when… Richard said it was “OK ‘suppose anyway. To look”. The door from the basement stairs was at one end of the kitchen while a counter positioned staircase up to the second floor was entered, through a matching door at the other end of the kitchen. Up we all went… bump, bump, bump and bump up the enclosed stairs.
The rooms on the second floor formed a matching U shape around the front door (“formal”) staircase at the front of the building; the same as the downstairs. Coming in from the rear, we all very easily denoted that the Parson Job Shrine had had difficulty remaining intact over the years. Two bedrooms had been… long ago… excised to house the children. This included the bathroom. This left the larger room above the kitchen and the front room at the front left corner “untouched”. The room above the kitchen did not survive the untouched designation for it was a throughway for both of the children AND …the entry to the …attic. It was quite evident to anyone including me that it was … full of old stuff …piled with … kid stuff, their stuff, more stuff, stuff-stuff and a whole lot of other stuff. It was the old stuff that I saw my mother poking into while my grandmother said “My my” to the two principal’s vague “We are going to be cleaning this out” defensive program that …proved that…even THEY knew that they …ain’t done anything in this space but “off load” for the past ten years.
The Children’s rooms where …actually pretty standard to “estate contents” specimens. They were … not too full… of the vestiges and tailings of the… emerging personalities of the former occupants who had now abandoned them but… “They will probably want to take a lot of their things”. These “things” were… very precisely clarified by my grandmother to specifically not include the “furniture” that was… very evident to be… original to the rooms and this was confirmed with a “They would have already taken that old stuff if they wanted it I suppose”. A few penciled dots and it was back to the big room above the kitchen and more of my mother’s poking merged with a “help me lift that” to me. Richard had offered no resistance or …assistance. One room remained to be “seen”.
“In the front room” came as part of a testing sentence from my grandmother and, oddly, Richard said nothing but lead the way to a door in the abutting bedroom that, although locked, had the key in the door. He unlocked it, opened the door inward and we entered a… dim room that although extremely neat and sparsely furnished, was also openly evident to …have not been entered in the “God knows how long” time frame.
It was also “the shrine” or… what was left of it. It was Parson Job’s bedroom by fact. His personal life and interests to the time of his departure to “the war” inclusive of the set of 1938-1942 wall calendars, was suspended in their place… throughout the dim …space. The original arrangement of the furniture lay… beneath and behind… more …mostly trunks… of his things that, evidently had (and never, ever, verbally denoted to have ever had) been moved into the room as the rest of Parson’s territory was taken over by… outside forces. A time capsule in a rather compressed and encapsulated form was before us all. The shadows of light that did creep past the… once by a female’s hand… lace type curtains (ca. 1920’s)… shown only upon sun browned to bleached brown to bleached to a yellow dark green onward to… dark browns, dark greens… on to blacks and even… dark blues that formed the block like shapes of “these are old” neatly arranged in the room. My grandmother was not making penciled dots and my mother was not touching anything. Richard was not speaking and his wife was standing just outside the door.
I, like the infatuated a dumb ass that I still am to this day, had already crossed the room and was staring at a military uniform that hung against the far wall in the dark spot between two windows. This, as everyone took notice of my singular action… broke an ice that had formed without me noticing it.. My grandmother took an option of wording risk and filled in the silence for Richard by stating to my back that the uniform was “Parson’s” but neutralized that defiantly by adding… that she “could remember when he wore it in the parade”. That worked. Not that anyone said anything but I did turn around while blushing up at “being caught” to see Richard cast an affirmative look to my grandmother and shift his weight. She reciprocated by purging the situation of the phobic goblins by venturing that “I am sure Richard, that you want to keep as much of this as you can so why don’t we just wait on this room until after you have decided what you want to do. She turned her head to say to… the back of my head that had …gone back to deducting if the uniform belong to a general or not “Why don’t you help Richard move these things.”
“Give me a hand? He COULD give me a hand” came from Richard. I turned toward him on that utterance by couldn’t quite see his face for the door back lighted him and the large, sagging, felt red, white and blue “V” banner tacked to the wall not only equalized this contrast on his other side but, ah… absorbed my attention. Therefore, I accepted my lot without comment for, well… I couldn’t loose the “chance” to “touch that stuff”.
A shrine is a shrine… but it ain’t worth a dime… to an antiquarian if… it don’t have “good stuff” “in it”. The shrine, to my grandmother, was a “no problem”. IF Parson Job had… moved the 18th Century two piece maple “secretary” with that bubbled glass pane and raised paneled top…up the stairs and …: Well, it would probably have been in better condition; had all the old (and original) “hardware” (handles) on the drawers, not have had the chunk of molding knocked off and preserved in the bottom drawer and… been a …dangerously near to an “impossible” “thing” “to buy” …instead of being …totally oblivious to the owners… that “it” could be “anything” in their eyes with which… my grandmother … “clean as a whistle”… that one… right “out of there”; the DOWN STAIR’S front room. A mixed blessing therefore and “I’ll take it”. The shrine was… without comment… declared an “over” by my grandmother meaning… she don’t care WHAT they keep or sell in that room and …ON TO THE ATTIC.

(To Be Continued)

[1] How do I “appraise” a …room full of books? Look at the spine ends; that conveys the general quality (and type) of tome in the room. Count the books on one shelf (to your self, please). Count the number of shelves. Multiply the two to get the number of books. Look at the spine ends again (to access in a MOST GENERAL WAY the “content” and “subjects” of the “old books”) and configure how much you’d LIKE to pay per book. Multiply that number by the number of books. That give you the “I WILL PAY THIS MUCH” number …without… ever… touching a book. This price may be …fluctuated… to accommodate the “what I have to pay” per book “to get’em”… even over the telephone at an airport in another state IF it is necessary.

The Codman Place. Part Two

2009-12-22T03:25:00.001-08:00

The party of two in the …Codman Place… lived together as husband and wife for “since the war” of… twenty years. They were in their early forties, had two grown children who had “left home” to “works in the mill” and “married the *** boy”. This last had also appended “going to have a baby” within the past month. They had lived in this building that the husband had inherited from his father (“old Henry”), with his brother, “before the war”. The death of the wife’s mother allowed the opportunity for the couple to “move” “into” the mother’s home. This home was a bigger, prettier, in a better neighborhood, total paid for and ready to go including fully furnished… home… “for free” that… by conjecture, would be “impossible” for “any woman” to “resist”. In fact it would be hard for a man to resist for… HE got a whole lot of “new space” for “his stuff” AND that space came with a CAR too.
Therefore… after the first half hour of “How DOES she feel?” kind of chatter… a business of business around that kitchen table set in that… began with “We don’t know” “We have been talking about that” “There are things we want but most of it” “We have had several people say something to us” “We are still trying to decide” and “So much of it is just Robert’s (the husband) family’s things”. There, at this moment, unfolded, LITERALLY, money and the topics of money. My grandmother had this perfectly nasty way of taking out whole wads of money from her purse without… without… ANY reason to do so… in front of people in situations like this and, well… just sort of having it out. It had a near magical effect on directing the course of the conversation to “stay on topic” and, usually, drove that conversation deeper and deeper into the topic… of “buying everything”. Down this commercial passage we all went.
This route selection was greatly supported by a … previously private but now public… decision by the woman to “move” “now” into her mother’s house; a something the husband did not really have a problem with. “We are staying there tonight (to never sleep in this old place again)” was stated. Once that roadway was defined the whole topic quickly moved onto “what” and “how much”. Using giant steps so familiar to her, my grandmother walked this couple along this… trail of cash in hand crumbs… on the “we will buy everything now” path by - in actual fact – giant steps of… whole sections of the home. “THE BARN” was cavalierly divided into “the two floors” and the husband’s “tools. He wants those”. The back roomS behind the kitchen were at first singled out but then added to “the basement”. The kitchen was left a single whole to be delegated “later once your settled”. My grandmother knew full well that aside from a single favorite towel and such… it would be left “untouched”. The actual living quarters of the couple presented a problem. This problem was not that they didn’t want to “sell” the “things” in this living quarters. THIS they DID want to do for almost absolutely all of it “was here” when they “moved in” and represented to this couple “nothing” “good” “except the china cabinet; Robert’s mother’s, we want that don’t we Robert”. Robert acknowledged that the cabinet was in the house, was his mother’s and “I guess” for it’s retention was shrewdly qualified by him as “Doesn’t your mother’s have one too? What do you want two for?”. The wife briskly rebutted that she wanted to “keep my dishes in it” and that could have set off a husband & wife glower-at-each-other but my grandmother said “Oh that’s just fine”. This whole; the arbitration of all of the material goods in the living quarters, was not the “presented a problem”.
The problem was that there was a… what we called and still call… “a shrine” in the home. “A shrine” is a location in the home that is set aside for a special purpose. Usually the space is not used very much but absolutely preserved “untouched” due to it’s consecrated designation. They are not unusual in a home. The LEAST obtrusive and most frequently encountered is the “living room” that is… never used… ever… except when, like, someone dies or… briefly before and after “Thanksgiving dinner”. This light breeze of sacrosanct territory spirals up and away with tornado wind violence to much more severe elevations of scared spacing. Over the years I have… “done all kinds”… and dutifully report that the number one type is “the room” that “*** died in” that is “left exactly the way *** left it” (and then they …start to cry) usually with the door closed all the time. In this home; The Codman Place, this hallowed interior spatial declaration took on an advanced scale. I had no idea but… my grandmother knew “all about it”.
“What about Parson Job’s?” my grandmother questioned Richard directly. I had no idea what that was about but I found out. I, at age twelve, was not an expert on American Federal style architecture nor particularly observant of living spaces; either the inside or the outside of them. Today this is another matter for I can spot a Colonial home even if it’s been entirely enclosed within six generation of “modern additions”. But then… I was “numb’er than a hake” on the subject. It did not take me too long to get the gist of the issue.
When we came to the front door… on a porch bordering the side street… I had failed to observe that there were two doors; one in the center of the building and one to the left. We had gone in the latter and this door DID appear to be the “only one used”. And that it was. What the actual state of affairs was… was that the original Federal style home, ca. 1790, had been divided “before the war”; ca. 1938, into two… well…; two “apartments”… sort of. We had come into the bottom or “Richard’s” section of the house. This was accessed through a former window that had been made into the now only active front door on the home. It lead around the first floor of the home with one entering the living room, moving to the back to a dining room then to the right to a kitchen on to a modestly large room that was a bathroom. Through that last one passed out the other end into the bedroom of the couple. At the moment of the “Parson Job” query, I had no idea that this bedroom existed.
Anyway, and to any… trained eye… this left the original front door and the whole upstairs unaccounted for. “Parson Job” accounted for it. “He” was Richard Elijah Codman’s older brother. He was dead. The upstairs was “his” “half” of the house, so divided by the brothers at the time they inherited it from “old Henry”. Each brother had a “place” with their own entrance and… that was that.
When the war began, the brothers, who were “just twenty” meaning Parson was twenty and Richard was eighteen, “joined up”. They were alone in the world yet set & stable with their jobs and their… own home, divided. Foot free and fancy loose… off they went with many more men. Before long they were, together, in a “they drove tanks” armored division that was …sent to “the Pacific” “to fight”. They fought. One day, on an obscure “landing” upon and obscure Pacific island, Parson’s tank “took a direct hit” moments after it cleared the beachhead. Richard, in his tank “saw it he didn’t have a chance” and… that was the end of the two brothers.
Richard took the death hard and, according to my grandmother, was “never the same” meaning a whole psycho bag of stuff today but back then, in small rural Maine village, this was cured by the three words “never the same” added to the other three words “after the war”. Richard “came home” and continued his life by marrying his childhood sweetheart and raising a family… and all… . This last was that… he didn’t ever do a whole lot of anything and, evidently became a shell of his former self “and all” and… showed no ambition, no care or no cause. NOT that he was a negative citizen in anyway… its just that what had happened had changed him and everyone knew it and it was only a “talk about” when he weren’t around. Except for my grandmother.
My grandmother… had “lost a son” “in the war”. The son was a friend of both Richard and Parson; they “grew up together”. He had actually been killed before Parson was. This seemingly small point carried a lot of weight for not only did this tie my grandmother to Richard by similar local adverse experience but… Richard knew… that Parson knew that… her son “had died” …so… a small thread of shared human experience from the past… crossed canyons of time and silence that… “no one knew about”.
This allowed my grandmother the right to make a direct assault on Richard’s beachhead with her tank in an …she knew exactly what she was doing… effort to capture Richard’s most hallowed ground; “Parson’s rooms”. Her tank rolled on to the beach and Richard opened up with light machine gun fire in the form of “HAD NOT DECIDED WHAT TO DO ABOUT THAT”. My grandmother turned her tank to the side and set off down the beach at a rapid rate to, it proved, flank that opposition by… “WHY DON’T WE START IN THE BARN.”
And we did. We did the “walk through”. This is a theatrical presentation by … skilled (?) dealers to… create a sense of “we all understand what we are doing” order out of the …vast wilderness… of “the stuff”, of the people who “own the stuff” and of the them having… no idea… about any of it or how it is going to be “sold” “by them”. UP in the barn, pretty darn quick-quick, “WE” “went”. Boxes, barrels and buggies scattered ah mid… furniture, frames and …old architectural features… lead to pottery, paintings and …old prints of Jesus AND “PORTLAND” (Maine). This last I recall as if it was TODAY but… I said nothing at the time and never got close to it for… my grandmother… scooted that sucker way out of my reach so early on in the “estate” that… it were not but till the early 1980’s that I …got to lay my hands on it.
Before we could know what was to be done we were back in the house again and “doing” those two “back rooms” forming “the L” off the rear of the home and… I was “GO DOWN IN THE BASEMENT AND TELL ME” with Richard coming along and each of us holding a flashlight. This was the first time we were alone together. I, it was understood by training, was to “fan out” and scan the whole space in considerable detail so as to be able to accurately report “how full” it “is” and “with what”. This last was beyond my technical antiquarian strengths for I “didn’t know” a whole lot of “what it is” but THAT was calculatingly accommodated by my grandmother for… what did she care “what” was down there as long as she knew “how MUCH” was for… “We can sell it”[1].
As I said… Richard and I were alone. I shined my light around and… he shined his. I run off to the far corners shining my light in them. He shined his light on me. I’d come back and go out the other way. He didn’t try to stop me and I, as taught, did this all without stopping. Of course, then, as things were going along TOO slick and smooth… I DID “seen something” I understood but didn’t stop but… at the end couldn’t resist so DID stop and… shined my flashlight up on a … World War II helmet hanging from the ceiling… just off the bottom of the stairs… about three feet from Richard. He saw me. I shined my light and his light followed it. It was quiet a moment. Then his hand went up and reached the helmet down. “That was mine” he said and he handed it to me. “I wore that in the war.” He said. I probably said something that was some sort of 1960’s kid kind of word to mean “cool” like “jeeze” and rolled it around on my hand and… well… it went right up on to my head before anyone could stop anything and… Richard actually laughed cause it was what we both called “too big”. And then he put it on his head and it was the… “still fits”. And then we hung it back up and went the back up to the kitchen and… that micro minute was over.

[1] : One must understand the “IT WORKS!” premise that if one does not attract attention to a room full of old stuff as being a …room full of old stuff… that is “good”, it will often times be sold right along with the whole as being “nothing”. My grandmother’s perpetual agility of NOT attracting attention to an ENTIRE SPACE FULL of “good stuff” is something I learned and still practice. Here, by classic example AND by sending a kid “to see”, she reduces the contents of a well known to be bountiful space in an old home (“THE BASEMENT”) to being a “nothing” unless, of course, the owners start to expansively elaborate as to how “the old pewter cupboard is down there” which… it often is. Usually they don’t and go right along figuring “anything” “down there” is “no good” and “you can have if you want.” for otherwise THEY will “have to clean it out”. A good picker… NEVER… treats a “loaded” space as if it is “anything”. THIS WORKS VERY WELL.

The Codman Place. Part One.

2009-12-21T05:32:00.001-08:00

The first time that I know I found a rare book, it took several years before I knew that I’d found a RARE book. Even then it had to be a considerable distance from me AND a decade later before I understood the true rarity and monetary value of this book. Within (for I still do this) the long haul of the decades of entering old homes, finding rare books and absconding with these treasures, this first “I remember” rare book is not the most valuable rare book I have ever found. In fact, it is barely a “book”. None the less, it remains the first rare book I can remember finding in a old house. By “finding” I mean that not only did I find the book but that WHEN I found it I KNEW it was a “rare book” right then. Before this detection (and after this episode for that matter) I found and continued to find rare books that are only rare to me in grievous hindsight or were separated from me (bought from me for nothing) before I could cognate what I’d found. This singular discovery is, to my recollection, my first discovery of printed Americana that is “very rare”.
My grandmother “looked in” on a elderly woman. She died. She had a “step-down, comb-back Windsor arm (“rocking”) chair (“in the old paint decoration”) that my grandmother fancied and spoke for. When she died, the daughter of the woman told my grandmother to come and “have”(for some amount of “I paid her” money) the “rocking chair Mother always said was for you”. As my grandmother would not move the chair herself, she asked me to accompany her to the home on “the pick-up”. I did these “the pick-up” all the time for her.
We stood in the house and my grandmother chatted with the woman about nothing that I listened to. I stood with my weight on one foot and then the other foot and gaped around a neat and tidy front room of a medium size Victorian home that looked on to a modest side street of the small Maine village. There was, to the antiquarian eye, “nothing” in the house. Or in the barn. I didn’t even care about that too much for the acquisitive skill and intrigue with old things was still a developing concept in my twelve year old vision of the world. I had already been in the barn several times with my grandmother and this particular barn was pin neat, light, airy and even “swept out” with… just the woman’s car parked… just inside it. Additionally, it was not a very big barn as Maine barns go; a “big enough” to have held the buggies, horses and hay of an “in town” 19th century household who “ran” a “millinery store” that “burned down, you remember”.
I didn’t. Where that had been was on a corner of the side street with Main street and now there was a building there that sold things like lawn mowers, chainsaws and… eventually as they appeared in civilization, snowmobiles. These last were very novel to a teenage boy in rural Maine in the 1960’s so… this I remember.
In any case and after too long awhile…we left with the old rocking chair. Later that day, at “supper”, my grandmother told my mother how the woman had inherited the house and was “moving her man” into it. “They are going to sell the Codman place” she said. This form of Maine proclamation is distinctively informative in that it qualifies the site of the (in this case) house to be sold very broadly for such scant words. It defines it as being NOT a place of the seller’s own but being a place related to a name, usually prominent, of a family in the distant past that either actually built the home or lived in it for so long that it became their “place”. It defines it as a singular, stand alone property, distinctly understood to be such by all and to be a prominent stand alone PROPERTY therefore, as differentiated from “house”. This includes even… as in this case… if that house (“home”) has, in due passage of time, “declined” and be somewhat lost in the …usually declined… neighborhood that it’s current point on the timeline finds it. The property remains “the (blank) place” regardless of it’s fall from grace to ALL who “would know”. These “would know” people, to people such as my grandmother, are the only people on earth anyway. The rest of civilization just goes by a … “place”… like this without ever even noticing it is “there”.
The final and unstated block of data that is appended to my grandmother’s scanty eight word utterance is best understood as an antiquarian directive. Roughly expanded into a paragraph it means: “This is an old house. I have known about this old house for years. I want to get inside this old house. The people who own the old house are idiots and would not know an antique if they smashed it up for firewood. This house is one of the oldest houses in the village. God knows what could be in there. These people have lived in there for years ever since they (usually) inherited the place from old (fill in blank with a name such as, in this case Henry) Codman. He died before you were born. He was a queer old fellow who kept up with old Mrs. (fill in equally prominent local family name) after her husband died. She moved a lot of her family’s things into the house at that time. I have wanted to get in there and buy all the good stuff in that house for a very long time and now is the chance for me to do this so everybody get ready because these people are selling this house and they are idiots so we have to do something about this right now before someone else (AND THERE ALWAYS IS SOMEONE ELSE AND NEVER EVER DOUBT OR FORGET THIS) gets in there”.
The initial reported short sentence was followed by my grandmother immediately adding that she had “been invited” to “go down” to the “Codman Place” the “next morning” and… that I “had to come too”. Such a two sentence declaration of antiquarian action was already, to the dawn of my teenage years… ears, a “taken for granted” “I have to help” “give it no further thought” …end of subject for the rest of supper. I said nothing while my mother IMMEDIATELY dropped all other plans to she “will come too”.
“You’d better,” said my grandmother.
By dawn the next morning our home was preparing for the “trip”. This consisted of my mother having packed her car with an inordinate amount of old boxes and newspapers. She did the same with my Grandmother’s car but to a lesser extent so that we three could fit in the car and …the car did not appear to be “full” of “anything”. My grandmother had acted in a more primary capacity. She, as both my mother and I had watched, had brought in the small steel box from the …secret hiding hole in the bottom wall boards at floor level of the old summer kitchen in the shed…, opened it on the kitchen table, selected and counted out from the packages of money in the box several thousand dollars in cash and… carefully re-counted this money and made it into smaller bundles that she wrapped with rubber bands and positioned in different sections of her very average sized pocket book. Then she had replaced the steel box in it’s hiding hole and left the home to “go get” her “man ready” with “his truck”. My grandmother was, along with my mother and I, “loaded for bear” by eight o’clock. Our appointment was at 8:30. “We’ll leave now” was her directive ordered without elucidation. My mother followed my grandmother’s car and she… parked her car “up” (and out of sight) on Main street as instructed by my grandmother. I rode in the backseat with my grandmother and, once my mother parked, she rode “up front”. We arrived ten minutes early. That was OK for the home was the residence of the daughter and she and “her man” were, well, readier then they realized.
There is a nuance here that I have come to take for granted but at the time was of no notice to me. In essence the scene that unfolds is that a party of three are arriving at the home of a party of two intending to buy everything in these two people’s home and… they have no idea this is going to happen. The “loaded for bear” preparation is a formality on one side only and is fully, constantly, and forever concealed from the other side throughout the entire transaction. One, should one not be an antiquarian, would suspect nothing beyond a rural Maine neighborly visit to get a… cup of sugar… between two local families. Therefore the first half an hour of the visit is totally useless to report for it involves a complete glazing over of intent (inclusive of glazing over why I was “with them”) and is truly a stupid pantomime of localized banter scripted by my grandmother to… gather the strengths and weaknesses of all present into an oral fish pond upon which she… suddenly casts her line.
Her line left her rod so fleetingly and silently that it had landed before anyone, especially me… noticed. She was quickly rewarded for her silent singing wrist wand action for …the fish that were… now… in the pond… were hungry. I have learned nowadays (as an older gentleman dealer [am I not…?]) that, ah… two parties may load for bear before they meet. Simply, it is not unusual for the party of the home to be vacated to have discussed by themselves a “what are we going to do” “about all our stuff” laid the facts bare behind the closed door of their kitchen table the night before type of “estate planning” themselves. Here we found a particularly splendid situation for prompt action, an… IN FACT… splendid situation of action that my grandmother had NOT overlooked as being “the” logical circumstances… of her ambush.

(To Be Continued)

Tale of the Kennebec, a Rare Maine Book

2009-12-11T03:23:00.001-08:00

Lurking behind the lurid front wrapper cover graphics, alluded to by only one word on the title page and further hidden from a knowing eye by a “DIME NOVEL” pedigree is a… remarkably scarce and obscure Kennebec River, Maine, 1756 set, Seven Years War (Colonial French and Indian War 1754-1763) “ten cent novel” that is generally unknown to Maine rare book enthusiasts…but should be.
THE DARING BACKWOODSMAN, MUNRO’S TEN CENT NOVELS, No. 67, George Munro & Co., New York, 1865-1866, may be easily traced to Mr. Munro’s partnership and independent break with his former employer/partners, the Beadles, to become, with them. the top producers of the “dime novel” …genre. Genre it be for today, a century after collector attention was first remunerated and 150 years after the publishing style’s innovation, the WHOLE block of dime novels languishes within a… closed door collector-only… advanced collector valuation critique (cash and literary, in that order) with …an occasional scholar discovering “one” “of particular interest” to THEIR… particular interest. We are a close ratio to that here except that the Maine rare book interest reaches well beyond the state border AND… Maine is in very short supply of actual old rare books that touch the subject of Maine and the colonial wars… particularly in a NON-scholarly way. Here we find that critter.
CHEAP writing printed on CHEAP paper making a CHEAP production of a pamphlet “throw away” style book that is called a “novel” but is more accurately a story with a highly stylized frontiersman woodcut on the outer front wrapper and again appearing as a frontis to tempt the ten cent BUYER who will READ… this “trash”. Dismissed as trash… such writing cannot be accepted in… accepted… literary circles and must be read in… secret. This sort of book was read in secret over and over and over again until pamphlet fell apart. Why? Because readers liked the trashy story.
But… that cheap hack writing… when critiqued TODAY will be discovered to be just worded historically correct enough to catch a Maine rare book collector’s attention AND suggest very strongly that the author; “J. Springer” was very familiar and informed in Maine history himself at the 1865 date. Who the author was we do not know. THAT the book has “KENNEBEC” in it’s “THE DARING BACKWOODSMAN. A TALE OF THE KENNEBEC” title grabs the Maine history sleuth’s eye. That single word is very promptly followed by three opening pages setting the scene as… on the river below Fort Halifax and above Fort Western, “in the summer of 1756” with pioneer farmers, fur traders and Norridgewocks Indians AND… having that setting salt & peppered with Maine history words like “Father Rasle. Woolrich, Cushnoc and even “Bishop Burgess” from Gardener.
The story is in the shadow of James Fenimore Cooper and close to the Green Mountain writer D. P. Thompson… and all the better for it. The author wraps his Indian raid - pioneer cabin burning plausibility with name drop style historical fact. JUST enough name drop allusion to create the illusion that “this really happened”. A little check-it-out will find no identical Indian raid there-then BUT it will find numerous there-then at the 1750’s dates with the same number of Indians raiding the same sort of pioneer farms including the details of cabin burning and… even Indian ambushes at the prominent point on the river between the two forts. Although the story is a spun yarn, the spun of that yarn …has it’s history well tended.
The devil is NOT in the detail but just the opposite. The supreme specimen of this type of Americana gone to full glory is the 1830’s DAVY CROCKETT ALMANCS, wherein lurid woodcuts and spun yarn reign supreme and …historical facts must be hunted like kernels of dried Indian corn on a forest floor. THAT rare book is Grolier 100 Americana (#39) and THIS rare books is Maine's own match to it. To Cooper. To Thompson. To the …true portrayal… of Maine’s Seven Years War.
Sappy details that must be noted include: A romance that is… pleasingly… forced to cut to the chase because the book … is not very long. A horse-in-the-Maine-woods usage issue that the author repeatedly addresses. A pioneer hiding hole under the cabin that equals and emulates the hiding secrets used by the other pioneer writers we have named. Abundant boy - man - Indian loyalty, language and fighting …to the death …that includes a single mercy shot to “finish off’ and a pretty descriptive & nasty knife fight. Before the reader knows it the story is over. It is painless to read and is put-a-smile-on… tidy.
The throwaway pamphlet novel… is, again, a MAINE …French and Indian War… historical saga… found in a splendid ephemeral format designed to be read by Maine farm boys in their Maine farm bedroom when “no one knows”. But it does, effortlessly, include Maine historical clarity. Even the woodcut holds to …Maine historical clarity. Look at the backwoodsman's weapon. It’s an early French and Indian War period halberd… the type that makes one quiver to see when shown in historical excavation reports and …similar to museum specimens "found in Maine".
In the photographs I have included I show the two copies we have in stock. The reason for this duplication is to show-off… but not clarify… edition variants. This sort of printed production often has a very varied printing history making it very hard to determine a "true first" edition (first edition, first printing). Conservatively, I cannot say that either of the photographed specimens are "first editions". What I do denote and show in the images is that… one copy (the one WITH the rear wrapper present) is printed in NY, vended by a Boston publisher, has an inner front wrapper advertisement for the very next (#68) dime novel BUT has an "1866" copyright. The second copy is printed in NY and from a NY vendor but with a later #87 very next dime novel (suggesting it's a later printing than our first) BUT has an… "1865" copyright. The two offerings become… the classic rare bookman's enigma of "what is a true first"… with a classic "go figure" answer. One would need to have a dozen copies side by side to try to sort out a "true first" …sappy detail. This first edition detail we deem "sappy" for… a true LAST detail removes all the sappy and leaves just one aspect: Try to find a copy… any copy …of this rare Maine book.

A Shed Door Is Open

2009-12-06T06:39:00.001-08:00

"WHOA! WHOA! Whoa, whoa, whoa! BACK UP! THAT SHED DOOR IS OPEN! ….I ain't ever seen it open in twenty years… BACK UP! … GOOD!" said Lane (Lane Copper) and he got out of the truck.
We were coming down the mountain into an interior Maine village after a house-call-gone-bad …back up the mountain. Lane regularly takes me "on a call". Only about half ever produce purchased antiques. BUT I do get to spend the day riding around in the middle of nowhere with Lane AND do, half of the time, "buy something". Today's call… they "didn't want to sell". We headed home. We'd gone about four miles.
As I got out of the truck Lane was already rapping on the door frame with his fist and yelling into the shed door "HEY ANYONE IN THERE ANYONE HI? IT'S LANE COPPER COMING BY THIS MORNING AND I GOT A FELLA HERE FROM THE COAST BUYING OLD TRUCK TODAY I SEE YOU GOT SOME TO SELL HE'S PAYING CASH!". An older man; an "old duff" (Lane's term) back in the shed started to appear from that interior looking just as blasted as you the reader after having that verbal barrage land upon him. He appeared to be putting away some cans of white house paint. "SELLING ANYTHING? YOU GOT ENOUGH I SEE!" Then "COME UP HERE!" he yelled to me waving his… old & ripped safety orange hunting sweatshirt covered arm… at me even though I WAS "here" and leaning hard on the door frame with the other arm while… the old duff kept coming to that door. "YOUR FULL AS MARTHA WASHINGTON'S ATTIC IN HERE SO LETS DO AH THIN'EN OUT… Jesus… CAN'T EVEN GET IN… DAMN TOOLS. HOW MUCH FOR THOSE?"
"I not selling THOSE" the duff said looking hard at Lane. " I USE THOSE. Do I know you?"
"THAT OLD TROUGH. TWO YEARS AGO. I BOUGHT THAT FROM YOU." shouted Lane.
"Trough?"
"BOUGHT IT CASH SHOW HIM YOUR MONEY!" he says turning to me. I promptly displayed a roll of cash with a rubber band around it… that… JUST HAPPENED to pop off right then… and… the cash dropped to the ground and… started to spread like …blowing leaves. "JESUS!" said Lane and started to grab twenty dollar bills including TWO right down in front of the duff as HE started to bend for them. "SEE HE GOT CASH WE'RE PAYING CASH FOR TRUCK LET'S SEE WHAT YOU WILL SELL HOW ABOUT THAT BASKET TWO DOLLARS CASH!"
"I USE that basket. My SEED basket."
"HOW ABOUT THAT ONE TWO DOLLARS"
"That one's BROKE! See. HOLE in the bottom."
"TWO DOLLARS".
"Two dollars? …You have that one."
"GIVE HIM CASH!"
I did.
"FOUR FOR THAT CHAIR!" pointing to a chair sitting on a bale of hay.
"No. I sit in that.
"UP THERE on the HAY? YOU AH CHICKEN? WELL TWO DOLLARS FOR THAT ONE NO ONE'S SITS IN THAT!"
"I used to… when I was a kid." The old duff said looking at a chair lying on it's side on a woodpile in front of a window. "Two… for that one… ….well … I guess so… take it"
"PAY HIM CASH!" Lane said to me pulling the chair off the woodpile. He set it outside the shed. Another basket fell off of the woodpile when he did this, along with a couple of cardboard boxes. He'd already handed me the first basket and it was on the ground behind me headed toward the truck. "ANOTHER BASKET TWO DOLLARS FOR THAT ONE TOO" Lane shouted. The duff picked up the basket, looked it over and handed it to Lane. I handed the duff two dollars. The duff looked at the, now, six dollars cash in his hand, squared it, folded it, put it in his shirt pocket and… looked up at Lane who immediately said "NOW THOSE WOODEN CRATES ONE DOLLAR EACH FOR AS MANY AS YOU SELL ME". The duff turned to the stack of crates just visible in the dim light back in the shed. We all stepped toward them… inside the shed.
An hour and one hundred and forty-seven dollars "CASH!" later we were …headed back down the mountain again only this time the truck was full. Lane was happy. Happy, HAPPY, happy; "a day's pay". "GIVE ME SUMP-THUN GIVE ME SUMP-THUN GIVE ME SUMP-THUN GIVE ME SUMP-THUN!" he was saying like he always does. I started handing him twenty dollar bills from my shirt pocket… as I drove. "THAT'S NUFF!" he said "You GOTTA MAKE SUMP-THUN DIDN'T DRIVE UP HERE FOR FREE GOOD DAY THOUGH… GOOD DAY YOU KNOW WHAT I'M KEEP'EN DON'T YOU TELL JAMES (James Hutton, the antiques dealer Lane is suppose to work for) YOU KNOW WHAT IT IS I'M KEEP'EN YOU DON'T TELL… YOU'LL GET IT ANYWAY AFTER I DONE LOVE'EN IT JAMES DON'T WANT IT IT'S BROKEN AIN'T IT A COCKER NO ONE ALIVE EVER BEEN IN THAT SHED IF THAT IN THERE NO ONE ALIVE I THE FIRST ONE WATCHED THAT DOOR TWENTY YEAR I TELL YOU NEVER SEEN IT OPEN.
One should be able to deduce that a day with Lane is real antiques hunter's day. He found a decorated redware pie plate in the shed. Early (1820 or earlier), very authentic and having a very old & early chip out of it, he'd grabbed it right up and made me pay the "ONE DOLLAR BROKEN TOO BAD". He will keep that a year or two. Please notice that regardless of what one may feel toward Lane, he not only knows the antiques well but truly loves them.

A New England Pictorial Flask

2009-12-04T07:01:00.000-08:00

When I …purchased "a historical flask" (described in the Old Antiques Store post) using the money from my fruit jar sale and the twenty dollar gift from my grandmother, in the fall of my seventh grade year, I realized the end of a two year trail and held that end in my hand. The trail began in fifth grade when I went, one Saturday morning, to the public library and encountered a newly placed glass display case set up in the lobby housing several antiques on display including a half pint cornucopia & urn American pictorial flask. I was entranced by the display and the case but was smitten with the flask. There was a vague label ("Historical Flask Bottle") with a local man's name as the lender. That's not what smittened me. It was the …thing. It wasn't, to my eye, a "bottle". It was lying flat; turtle shaped, turtle size and turtle colored but made of glass and had a raised decoration on the visible side of a cornucopia. I stared at it and then viewed it from adjusted angles about the case. I did this for weeks. And weeks. I understood the object was "glass" and "old". I was entranced by it. Defining my entrancement in hide sight, it was the "glass", the color of this glass, the raise decoration that had been clearly and cleverly molded onto this once soft glass and that this same glass was now hard and brittle but one could still "feel" the molten elasticity in the molded decoration. Further, the form DID look like the box and painted turtles I found all the time only this was "OLD" "GLASS". I was smitten but, as a fifth grader, "FINDING OUT" about this "THING" was a long research road that ended up with the unsatisfactory position of… "FINDING OUT" the "what this is"… in a big thick book that …only had a tiny little drawing way in the back of it… among similar "flasks" and crummy black & white pictures of other "old flasks"… but not one like this one and … never getting nearer to the actual "IT" than rubbing my nose on the glass case… which disappeared after six months… and… enhancing this research by not mentioning to anyone my smitten entrancement. I don't even know how I found out about "the book" which was (and still is) the basic classic reference to American Historical & Pictorial Flasks: George P. & Helen McKearin, AMERICAN GLASS, Crown, NY, 1941. (One may easily find a copy of this classic reference.)
There was a brief blank period of… no flask in the library - research over. THEN …at the old antique shop… an IDENTICAL FLASK appeared for sale for $65.00. AND I could handle it… all over… without ANY restrictions and even freely talk about it and KEEP ON handling it over & over and KEEP ON talking about it EACH and every time I went there. My learning curve LEAPED forward for the handling and the talking yielded a great deal of true facts about the "thing" and …deep, deep, deepest deep "feel" for the object. I was not only smittened, entranced but INFORMED… very quickly. Then, one day, the fruit jar saga took place and …wham - bang… the flask was in my bedroom.
This bottle, correctly called a cornucopia & urn half pint American pictorial flask in olive green bottle glass, numbered GIII-7 mold pattern by McKearin and made in New England at either a Connecticut or New Hampshire glassworks between 1820 and 1835… still smittens and entrances me to this day.
For others… it does not.
Most of the others are "bottle" or "flask" collectors who consider this flask mold pattern and therefore all of the flasks made in this mold to be… very, very, very, very, VERY common. So common do they commonly consider it's common to be common that the flask, today as I write is a …nothing. Traveling up the cash value scale in the past forty years to a high of about $150., the flask has fallen back to a "findable at" price of my original $65.00 and even… fifty bucks. Most often one finds them "kicking around" in an antiques shop for "$125.00" and …not going anywhere fast. And that's it.
THAT LAST means that outside of the collector community …that is fully jaded… the little flask has no following. None. Except in old New England homes filled with old New England things that have "always been there" and "show good taste". Either one "knows" what it is or… does not. The latter means, in most cases, not even noticing it. To my eye it is STILL "HOW CAN ANYONE not NOTICE IT?". Even as I write this …with a specimen next to me… I ponder "HOW" can anyone NOT be… smittened and entranced.
The brittle molded glass; light, and so elastically formed yet now HARD. The deep dirty but …crispy clear… green color… caused by heating molten glass with firewood in the New England woods. The mold blown decorative process… used in the New England woods second to it's …only… first usage… by the Romans. The -lost forever- NONCHALANCE- make of the single flask, one of thousands of surviving examples… by a glass blower MAN… who puffed one small controlled breath down his blowpipe to form a bubble of molten glass… and his BOY who closed that bubble in an iron mold. Then the MAN raised the raw molded flask from the mold. The BOY attached an iron "pontil rod" to it's bottom (with molten glass) and the MAN snipped the molded glass free from the blowpipe. The BOY "fire polished" this jagged …top lip of the flask by… sticking the flask (top lip first) back into the furnace "for a second" and then "finished" by… breaking the pontil rod off with a pop. The BOY turned to find the MAN ready with another bubble of glass ready for the mold. They did this all day, every day. The finished flasks were peddled and sold by the dozen as "general purpose containers" to …anyone who would by any. They were then filled with anything and just about everything and … sold, used and… NOT thrown out due to their very, very obvious positive art qualities that are best summarized as "I LIKE IT". The abundant and therefore "common" qualities of this cornucopia & urn half pint flask are due to the abundant number made and the …"I like it" preservation of the flask… ever after… in old New England homes.
To discover all of this oneself, hunt one of these… glass turtles… down, buy it, handle it and keep it around. The positive art qualities, the old glass qualities, the legacy qualities and the simple "I like it" will last you the rest of your life and return all of your cash outlay in cultural & art discovery. If one is interested in early New England glass, this is an open door into learning about it. As a single decorative glass object… in the New England home… one sends a knowing message when one displays this …very proper, very subtle and very classic New England pictorial flask.

The Respectable Old Fruit Jar.

2009-11-30T12:28:00.001-08:00

Following on from the last post, my formal relationship with The Old Fruit Jar began with the discovery and sale recorded there. A quarter of a century and 1000 fruit jars later I was standing in the basement of Maine's most prominent antiquarian fruit jar vender's store viewing a DEXTER JAR with the fruit ring around it. "Oh so long ago" thoughts turned into a spur of the moment purchase of that… very fine and prefect… Dexter and two equally fine and perfect FRANKLIN DEXTER FRUIT JARS. These are the jars in the photographs. This fruit jar dealer was not always a fruit jar dealer and way, way, way back I had "bought" (purchased with my own money earned from the paper route and lawn mowing… a single bottle; a very tiny "Major's Cement" bottle, from this same dealer when he was but a… small table of "old bottles" he'd found out by the street in front of his home.
We reminisced this transaction and juxtaposed that with the tidal wave wash away of subsequent transactions that brought each of us to stand as we were then standing. I said "I will make a commemorative shrine" of the three jars in honor of the antiques trail they started me on. Then we discussed the jars, the fruit jar as itself (the object), the fruit jar collector, the state of the collecting interest and collecting market and… did not get misty eye but found real value.
The real value IS that, when overviewed, the old glass fruit jar has several tiers of "respectable". The old fruit jar is available and accessible. This is because the collector boom has long ago stabilized into a at-the-very-top rarity based… moderately small… group of advanced collectors. This small world fights it out over advanced collector rarities. THAT causes old, fine, attractive and charming truly antique fruit jars to sort of "sit there" in the market. The jar type I am noting is NOT the bottom-feeder ATLAS-BALL-LIGHTING-MASON classic yard sale and flea market jar. It's the ladder rungs of collectable above these focusing on the …middle rungs. Perfect, pretty, precious, popular, pleasing, proper and …postulating (putting themselves forward)… these particular old fruit jars be. They also …be available and do not cost very much. For the latter, for example, a DEXTER may be found "pretty and perfect" for $80-$150. The FRANKLINS: $30.-$85. with a $110. for "SUPER CRUDE" one (meaning clear aqua wobbly bubble filled old glass). The LOWER priced jars of this type have the odd market ratio of being found at the best price from the best fruit jar dealers. A chance find of an old odd jar by a general dealer will usually be priced "too much" compared to the price of the same jar in the hands of a …top fruit jar dealer… who is very, very, very, VERY familiar with what I have written. Buying fruit jars that are, to the decorative eye, the seven P's above is a sure bet if bought from a fruit jar pro.
That established, I change the subject to those P's. Simply place one's purchased jar out on display and… DONE. It will be admired. Saying that you don't know anything about it but just liked name (such as "THE QUEEN" or "THE EAGLE", for example) will defer the need to explain ANYTHING about "old glass" …and that IS the obvious positive art quality an old fruit jar purveys. Let the jar do that. Let them handle the jar. Let them unscrew the lid. Let them screw it back on. If it is an odd closure, let the viewer fuss with it to their hearts content. YOU already will have done that and know the necessity satisfaction that comes from this.. round lid on round top… skill builder. All this play will make the guest viewer all the more covetous… after the jar is set back down in it's display space. They won't forget it.
The next time YOU are THERE, THEY will… have one? This is the tiered respect blossoming. The nasty neat message is proclaimed… in clean, clean, clean antique glass. The fussbudget eye catcher is handled by the "closure" (the lid). The "obvious antique" is there and often affirmed by a clear date ("1865"). There is no mess. No large amount of space required. A clear "don't break this" message is included with no actual notice needed. And… above all… the "nice"; old fruit jars are "nice". Not pushy, not arty, not pretentious, not poison, not weird. Nice.
For the curious beyond "nice", there is the Bible of the subject: Douglas M. Leybourne, Jr. "THE COLLECTOR'S GUIDE TO OLD FRUIT JARS RED BOOK" with the latest edition having the highest number after "RED BOOK". One does not need this book nor need the most current edition to "do fruit jars" (just use your art eye). I had #1 when it came out. I use and picture #8. Trust me; the subject is covered. I show two pages listing the Dexter. One should be able to get the idea. Every fruit jar there is… is in the book. And fruit jars quickly become mind boggling in tiny print. But "NEAT!" the book is and will stand alone on one's coffee table suggesting to anyone that …you do "know" fruit jars IN ADDITION to being a book that… all will thumb through… especially if one… displays nearby… a respectable old fruit jar.

The Old Antiques Store

2009-11-21T08:07:00.001-08:00

We drove by the old antiques store last month. We drive by it when we are in that area. The old store is not on the main road but is just a tenth mile off of it. This time we stopped and I took a photograph of it. The store has been abandoned and looked like the photograph for at least twenty years. It has been thirty years this past October since I did business there. It looked less overgrown and abandoned back then but still had the same "old store" appearance.
Today is November 21st, 2009. I last did business at the store in October, 1979. I went to the store for the first time in October of 1966. I was twelve. I went to the store with my soon-to-be Boy Scout assistant scoutmaster. I was a cub scout, soon to be a boy scout and the assistant scoutmaster had interviewed a group of us prior to our joining his boy scout troop. At that interview, my interest in "antiques" had been voiced under "hobbies". This assistant scoutmaster had a strong interest in antiques too. His interest was more than a hobby. Through a continued conversation about my interest, he offered to take me to the store in the photograph and introduce me to the owner-antiques dealer with whom this scoutmaster did considerable business. We drove there after my dinner, in the dark, on an October school night. We ended up spending hours there. I didn't get home until very late but my mother, who "liked" antiques too, never said anything and seem very pleased that I "had a good time" and "liked antiques". That was my first visit.
Following the directions from my assistant scoutmaster I returned to the antiques store very soon, probably that weekend, WITH my mother. SHE liked the antiques she saw there and we spent hours there. Thereafter we would go to this antiques store every few weeks. 1967 began, I turned thirteen, I joined the boy scout troop and the assistant scoutmaster and I continued our antiques interest exchange. He introduced me to more adult men who "liked antiques". Some of these men knew my mother and that she liked antiques. Along with the men, I met adult women who "liked antiques". Before I knew it I was a member of a little circle of adults who liked antiques, went to this store and were always talking with each other. My interest in antiques expanded avidly and rapidly, helpfully nurtured by these adults. Meanwhile my grandmother had always been an antiques dealer.
Antiques to me at age twelve-turned-thirteen was …finding anything old… anywhere… bringing it home to my bedroom… keeping it… finding out what it was… sort of… and generally having all my other friends think I was weird (unless it was an old rusted rifle or sword). My bedroom filled with this "stuff". I was very protective of my "stuff". My mother never bothered me about my "stuff". I constantly arranged and re-arranged my "stuff" to feature my latest find and… I believe… she was impressed with this management. I never thought I ever found something good and have deeply considered this in hindsight. I believe now that I DID occasionally find something sort of "good" and THAT find… was purloined by my mother to become part of HER "stuff". SHE was constantly… finding anything old and bringing it home TOO, but it took me a few years to realize that "she's serious".
All of this changed one day in the spring of 1967. I had been "turned loose" (my mother's words) by my mother at my uncle's farm with his blessing to "go anywhere you want" and "can have any antiques you find". This was not the first time for this "turned loose" there and… it was a farm with six barn size outbuildings way out in the middle of nowhere and having been built in the 1820's. The setting as just described didn't mean much to me THEN for I considered "these old farms" to be "LIKE THAT" and "normal". The compounding of "this changed one day", unknown even to me, was that MY ability to "find antiques" was "growing leaps and bounds". What started as a nine year old's "curiosity" now blossomed into "THAT'S TOO MUCH WE CANNOT FIT IT IN THE CAR!" gathering processes. As my mother said: "Turned loose".
That day off I went and after several hours of rummaging, retrieving, bringing to show my mother and uncle and leaving in a pile next to the car… I was down on all fours creeping around the bottom of a stairs in an out building and …could just see through the stair crack a "bunch" of "old glass" behind that stairs. I crawled in-under and behind the stairs and retrieved three fruit jars and… skipped them over to the pile after showing them off and receiving just about as much interest in them as I had in them… except that I HAD seen the 1865 dates on the lids of the jars.
The fruit jars rode home, went to my bedroom and …languished. In about a week or so I talked with someone about something and somehow gained inkling that "old fruit jars" were "worth money". I resurrected the three jars, washed the three jars and put them on display… in my room. One jar was called "DEXTER" in print on it's front and this was surrounded by an embossed ring of fruit and vegetables. The other two jars were embossed "FRANKLIN DEXTER FRUIT JAR". After another week I went to the antiques store with my mother. There, in conversation, I told the dealer about my fruit jars. I told him about the one embossed "DEXTER". We left, two weeks went by, we went back and… in conversation… the dealer asked if I wanted to sell the fruit jar embossed "DEXTER". "No." "I will pay forty-five dollars for it" he said. My mother's attention was had. MY attention was had. WE agreed to "SELL THE JAR" and "Bring it next weekend". We did. I had forty-five dollars in cash. I still had the other two fruit jars. The dealer didn't want them.
When we were home, later in the school week, my grandmother was visiting and heard the story from my mother. She hunted me down, congratulated me on the sale and asked "What are you going to do with the money?" I knew what I was going to do with it and told her right away that I "know where there is a historical flask I want that costs $65.00 and as soon as I can get another twenty dollars I am going to buy it." My grandmother… and I have never forgotten this… stood looking down at me for a moment and then… saying nothing… opened up her pocket book and gave me a twenty dollar bill.
I bought the flask. I had, until that day, a job as a paper boy delivering newspapers and a job mowing "peoples" lawns. "Peoples" were like my fourth grade teacher and… such. THAT DAY THAT ENDED and I became an "antiques dealer". That was 1967 and I was in seventh grade. I procured my state resale vendors license two years later in 1969 when I was in ninth grade. I have been an antiques dealer… and rare books dealer… ever since I found those fruit jars and sold the one at… the old antiques store.

The Saco River Valley

2009-11-19T05:29:00.001-08:00

For the antiquarian and antiques hunter, the Saco River Valley is a difficult critter. It is easily identified in full length on a map. It may be reached with ease. Once reached though, it vanishes. Oh the valley is there and one is there too; in one's auto and on "The Right Road" and in the right villages with the Saco River always just "over there" and: From the very ocean tip entrance to the river at Biddleford Pool onward, inward and "up" the river to Fryeburg, North Conway and the Presidential Range of the White Mountains is a vast… modernized, commercialized, re-civil engineered and atheistically… tacky… mess… of landscape, towns, third rate shopping centers, residential development and abandoned 20th century nothings that… rarely give a hint of antiquarian anything. "Wading through" this is the best term for what the antiques hunter does. Around each bend is not a colonial cape farm homestead undisturbed but, more likely, a crummy halfway there and half empty… strip mall… plopped down right where "the cellar hole used to be" but appearing to be in a sandy soil nowhere. Side roads, pieces of old road and village centers do not hint of colonial pioneer settlement. It is only at the Fryeburg upper end that the villages begin to be villages and not small gatherings of buildings driven by at fifty-five. Lost heritage… except to the keen and trained eye… is what one finds and sees when touring the "Saco Valley Settlements".
Oddly, the weight of the lost heritage is offset by the weight of the best book on the subject: G. T. Ridlon's SACO VALLEY SETTLEMENTS AND FAMILIES. HISTORICAL, BIOGRAPHICAL, GENEALOGICAL, TRADITIONAL, AND LEGENDARY. Published by the author, Portland, ME, 1895. This bible size doorstop of a tome… 6 ½ pounds and 1250 printed pages… truly gets under the soil and into the river of the heritage of the whole valley AND may also be used a guide book for the colonial settlement of the rest of Maine (to 1790). The photographs of the book I have included with this post make the tome appear manageable. It is not. The bulk of the actual book is further bulked up by the bulk of the contents being a mind boggling weave of family names, dates and places that, unless being pursued for a one-family great, great, great grandfather's French and Indian Wars homestead family heritage… will overwhelm the reader. One will never understand the tome if one …attempts… the tome from a causal genealogical impulse. The best proof of this is that a great deal of the family data is available in modern single family name off prints taken verbatim from the book and published by the, now closed, Tuttle Co., Rutland, Vermont.
I have three copies of the whole giant book; one for sale in the rare book stock, my copy and… my grandmother's copy. She lived in Bethel, north and "up the notch" from Fryeburg. As an antiquarian there, she "HAD TO HAVE A COPY". That is where I first saw "it" or "one". She kept hers out like it was a Bible; flat on the dining room sideboard top often open to a page she was reading or examining …thereby making the appearance as if she was reading a Bible. If one looked at the page she was "on", one would see that it either related to the general history of the settlements up the valley OR the general history of the things (objects), tales or legends of the valley. THAT, as described in the title as "TRADITIONAL, LEGENDARY" is the true user value of the tome. Between and before the genealogical iota IS SCATTERED hither and thither fine antiquarian reading and antiques hunter tidbit. One would not suspect such fine scattered reading and one must "poke into" the book to discover it but once denoted, this scattered reading is found and followed with delight. A "In A Pillow Case to Dry" antidote, a "A Gineral Meetin" chapter, a "Garter-Loom" description and a "Colonial Relics" photographic illustration is what my grandmother "USED" the book for. Today this book is just as useful and… CHARMING… for the antiquarian as it was for my grandmother… and ME when I first "read it"; that is… "read around in it" like I STILL DO. The key word is charm.
Yes, yes we may all find modern expertise, clear color photography and "every fact is correct" assurance in our …a little too good "current material on the subject". THIS TOME is from the oldest era when there was no expertise and, at the 1890's date, antiquarians were "curiosity" collectors and their reference heritage just a little past the "I REMEMBER", "MY GRANDMOTHER" and …the garrets were still full of …"it". Charming for the book captures the charm of THAT view of "antiques" and never anticipates in any way the modern two lane fast lanes of "EXPERT" and "COMMERCE". Nope, old Ridlon just kept gathering hand written notes on any old Saco Valley anything he liked… for a quarter century… and then… paid to have it printed himself. Charming that is too for it leaves us with a singular reference book that DOES scratch the antiquarian's itch in a most pleasing way. It gives the Saco Valley it's heritage as if it is the music of a valley breeze.
There is no reprint of the whole book and it will never be cost effective to make one. Old copies are vended in the $250.-350. dollar range. Most people don't know the book exists and those that do are unaware that it has fine "old school" antiquarian content. The core interest in the book for the past fifty years has been it's rich genealogical lists.

Pequawket or Pequauket or Piggwacket: A Rare Maine Book

2009-11-16T05:48:00.001-08:00

Fryeburg, Maine, at the head of the Saco River Valley. but just below North Conway, New Hampshire, contributes Maine's most told tale of Maine's colonial war's Indian battles. It was the fight between a group of colonial mercenary scalp hunters from Massachusetts and the home village site of the Pequawket Native American tribe. The fight took place in 1725. It was considered inconclusive as to victor at the time with many killed and wounded on both sides. Of greater significance was that both sides were scattered and disordered in their retreat-escape flights, compounding the inconclusive perception. The short version of the long term conclusion was that the Pequawket tribe fled never to return and this battle became a… last battle …clearing the Maine frontier for settlement. This consideration is valid but the Maine settlement was confined to the coast until the 1760's. There is plenty of description of the battle via Google and I am not going to cover that.
What I am presenting in this post is my life long quest to find a Maine rare book about the battle. When the battle was fought, a few straggling survivors first emerged from the northern New England wilderness near Bradford, MA. There, Thomas Symmes first gave and then PUBLISHED (Boston, 1725, in two printings) his sermon "LOVEWELL LAMENTED" recording …the battle of Piggwacket… as narrated by the straggling survivors he interviewed. I add that several other survivors emerged from the wilderness in Maine by going down the Saco River thereby traveling a route that would soon become the classic route we traveled in our Littleton, NH post.
The Fryeburg village site, with it's stunning and abundant interval lands bordering the Saco River, promptly attracted settlers once the "Indian Menace" was confirmed as gone. By 1766 the town site of Fryeburg was parceled out and homesteads constructed. The original log cabin quickly gave way to the classic colonial cap style farm once the mills were built and the logs sawed to boards. I show an early (1860's) stereoview photograph of "Oldest house in Town, the Evans place Fryeburg Me" (in ink on the verso). At the 1766 date there were two Evans, brothers (?); John and David and they owned four or five of the original land parcels. This homestead would have been one of theirs on one of their land parcels. I don't know who or which. Although earliest settlers, there is very little mention of these Evans in the subsequent histories of Fryeburg. Usually that means a literacy problem in the family with little or no "writing down". No matter for the photograph speaks for itself showing a colonial homestead with garret spaces of the type I hunt for and relish. THIS photograph shows EXACTLY the kind of "old house" and "attic" I seek to creep.
With this age (colonial settlement) and this development (numerous homesteads just like this up and down the Saco River as far as the eye can see), Fryeburg quickly elevates in the antiquarian's mind's eye as a destination to "hunt old things". THIS fine quality is further enhanced by prosperity and literacy in the community AT THE TIME (colonial era) and STILL (today). The link pin of Fryeburg literacy is a Maine rare book.
After the original Symmes "Lovewell Lamented" a gap of printings of the narrative of the Piggwacket fight takes place. It is not until 1818 in Portland, Maine that an… obtainable… edition of the Pequawket fight is printed. Pictures of a copy of this edition follow the stereoview images. Notice the "dog eared", worn, "read to death" and hand-sewn-back-together condition of the pamphlet. Please also notice that in the second image of the title page, I have included the imprint (the name and place of the printer usually found at the bottom of the title page as found here). This is a copy I currently own and one of a half dozen I have bought and sold during my forty years as a dealer.
The word "obtainable" is used because… delightfully and astonishingly… Fryeburg, Maine had an early, pre-Maine statehood printer THERE who PRINTED. In fact, in 1799 Elijah Russel printed in Fryeburg his edition of Symmes' narrative as "THE HISTORY OF THE FIGHT OF THE INTREPID JOHN LOVELL… IN FRYEBURG" with a Fryeburg imprint. To review, a man had brought a printing press to Fryeburg, set it up in a farm homestead like the stereoview we show and there occasionally …printed… for profit. WAY out in the Maine woods… Russel printed an edition of Pequawket… in his farm house… in 1799… for his neighbors to buy and read (?). That is what he did. Find a copy?
How many copies does one think he printed? Are there copies known? Do I have or have had one? Russel couldn't have printed many copies. One hundred would have been a lot and costing him money and time. Also, the market for "a book" was skimpy in the Fryeburg area. There are copies known. Williamson, in his 1896 Bibliography of Maine notes THEN that "perfect copies of edition are very rare. No copy is known to exist which contains the title page". THAT last is a line in the Saco River sand and… MERGED with a line-in-sand review of the 1818 read-to-death copy I picture… a "RARE MAINE BOOK" we have. I have looked for a copy all my antiquarian life and have yet to ever "see one" "on the loose". I never go up the Saco River Valley or near Fryeburg without reviewing my life long hunt for this true rare Maine Book. For most of my career my contacts with other "rare Maine book" people about this book is that they "didn't know it exists" until I told them about it. A first edition either printing of Symmes' LAMENT would be worth $15000.. My Portland edition, $250-$400.