Admit it.

You secretly fantasize you’re that unassuming rube on “Antiques Roadshow” who comes in with a pair of 18th-century chairs bought at a garage sale for nothing, and rock star appraiser Leslie Keno informs you they’re worth 80 gazillion dollars.

Maine author Maureen Stanton had a little bit of that in her, too. So when she got the opportunity to go behind the scenes of the antiques world, sniffing around upscale shows and slumming at flea markets with a knowledgeable friend, she jumped at the chance.

Stanton’s old college friend Curt Avery (a pseudonym), an antiques dealer in the Boston area, allowed her to tag along on his travels and taught her the ropes. He schooled her in the differences between fakes and the real McCoy.

She even attended an “Antiques Roadshow” taping.

The result is “Killer Stuff and Tons of Money: Seeking History and Hidden Gems in Flea-Market America” (Penguin Press, $26.95), a fascinating look at Americans’ obsession with collecting stuff and searching the shelves of antiques markets for some kind of jackpot.

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Stanton paints a quirky portrait of Avery, who often has to sneak new finds into his cluttered house to avoid his wife’s anger. She delves into the history of collecting between behind-the-scenes chapters on the famous Brimfield show in Massachusetts. She interviews a forger, and a guy who likes to collect shrunken heads.

Stanton, 51, grew up in Massachusetts and lived in the Midwest for a time, then moved to Maine in 1993 to work for the Natural Resources Council of Maine. But she couldn’t resist her longing to become a writer, so she went to graduate school in Ohio and began a writing career that has brought her the Pushcart Prize and a National Endowment for the Arts Literature Fellowship.

Stanton now splits her time between her home in Georgetown and the University of Missouri, where she teaches creative nonfiction and literary journalism. When she’s not reading or writing, she loves to garden and swim in the ocean. 

Q: Everyone loves that moment on “Antiques Roadshow” when someone finds out the doodad they bought for a dollar at a garage sale is actually worth thousands. But it doesn’t always work like that, does it?

A: No. In some ways it seems like the ideal or dream that we don’t want to let go of. But I went on the set of “Antiques Roadshow,” and on TV you see maybe 15 to 18 vignettes per show — what you don’t see are about 4,000 other objects that come through the door during that day of taping that are not worth showing. Some of them are OK and they go through the Feedback Booth, but the chances of getting something terrific, that’s worth money, that’s historically valuable and important is about 1 percent.

And I’ve seen that in trailing Curt Avery. I’ve seen how difficult it is to find things. Not even great things that are worth so much, but even things to make a little profit on, in order to just bring a weekly income in. 

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Q: You met a lot of dealers while researching this book. Do you find it’s the money that motivates them — the idea of turning a quick profit — or do they all have some kind of love for old things?

A: I have to say that probably 99 percent came into this because they were collectors or they loved particular objects. It’s just not an easy way to make a living, and so you have to have a passion, and you have to have a love for history and antiques and the objects they collect.

At the very top end, Leigh and Leslie Keno and top dealers in the country are making good money, but they also have a love for the objects.

In the middle range, where most antiques dealers exist, so many of them do it as part of retirement to bring extra income in, or they have a spouse who has a very good job and they can dabble in this, or they do it in summers because they teach, or they do it on weekends.

Not a lot of people are doing it full-time and making a really decent living. It’s a lot of work to do that because it’s a very steep learning curve. If you’re running a gift shop, you can just order more supplies when you need them. But if you’re an antique dealer, you have to find the things that you want to sell, and it’s really not easy.

But it’s also an adventure. It’s really outside the confines of the corporate cubicle. You’re on your own and you’re self- employed and you’re traveling often and you’re outside and you’re meeting interesting people.

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And every day there is the possibility that, if you have the knowledge level, you might find the thing that’s really worth something, and I think that sense of possibility is what makes people feel very excited about doing this. 

Q: Occasionally, Avery would show you something to buy that he didn’t really want himself, but he couldn’t stand seeing it go unsold. I’m thinking about that family register that cost $3,000, but he thought it was worth $10,000 to $15,000. When he decided not to buy some of those more valuable items, were you ever tempted to step in and get them yourself?

A: The thing is, you have to have someone you can sell it to. That’s actually part of the challenge as well.

You have to know who the collectors are who are willing to pay that much money, and you’d have to be able to sell it for more than you paid so you’d make a little profit. He doesn’t really deal in ephemera — paper goods and documents and things like that — so I think he didn’t sense that he had someone he could necessarily sell it to.

And for him, laying out $3,000 for something that may not sell for six months or a year takes a chunk of money out of his pocket that he could invest in something that he knows he has a seller for, something he really specializes in.

I do think he was kind of kicking himself because the next morning the price dropped to $2,000 and that other guy got it, and he sold it for $7,000.

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It was a lesson for him to trust himself. 

Q: In the book you write that public interest in antiquing has really fallen off, and I was surprised by that, given the popularity of shows like “Antiques Roadshow” and “American Pickers.” Is it because of the economy, or are people just too distracted by technology these days?

A: Definitely the economy has had a hit, but the antiques trade was really sort of slacking before the economy went down.

Part of it might just be that our parents were interested in antiques, and our generation — the baby boomers and the tail end of it — are more interested in the nostalgic items.

There’s a lot of vintage and 20th-century things that are really popular right now. But the traditional antiques — the 19th-century Staffordshire plates and things like that — are not selling as well.

Some of it, I think, is economics. I had some dealers suggest that the middle class is sort of economically being squeezed out, and so the middle part of the antiques business is what’s suffering.

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The top is doing very well. The very wealthy collectors who might spend $5 million on a weather vane, that end is doing well, and the lower end — the $5 and $10 and $20 things — is doing very well as well.

But the $300 or $400 things, or people that might pay $500 for a piece of Majolica, that’s the sort of market that’s really dropped down. 

Q: Does that mean it’s a good time to buy some of that stuff?

A: It’s a great time to buy antiques. A lot of good antiques are at half price of what you could have gotten them for 10 years ago. And I think they will come back because these are objects that are limited in quantity.

Part of the problem, aside from that, has also been reproductions. This stems from companies that take real authentic antiques, take them over to China or some other developing nation, and have a replica made and import those things. And they do it with everything from wrought iron to cast iron to Majolica to baskets.

They make them exactly like the antiques, and then they can sell them for a fraction of the cost, and it’s called “antiques style.” 

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Q: Do you still troll antique stores and flea markets?

A: I do all the time. It’s really in me, and I guess I didn’t realize that when I started this project. My mother used to pick the dumps and get the good stuff and repair it.

I loved going to flea markets even as a teenager, and I always haunted thrift stores and junk stores in college.

It’s just part of what I love to do, and now I have a tiny bit of knowledge, so it’s a little more fun because I can actually pick out a few things, and I can tell real from fake in certain categories, when I couldn’t before. But I’m still a novice, even after all the time I’ve spent. 

Staff Writer Meredith Goad can be contacted at 791-6332 or at:

mgoad@pressherald.com

 


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