AUGUSTA — The inside of the Augusta Armory was warm and the seafood chowder popular on Monday, a bright, sunny day of single-digit temperatures.

At the annual New Year’s Day Antiques Show, organizer James Montell, 85, of Gardiner, talked a little about the changes in the shows over the years.

“I seem to be getting new and younger dealers replacing the senior dealers,” he said.

And the customers, well, “they’re buying different types of antiques than we did.”

The main floor had a few empty tables this year, a consequence of several dealers who had taken falls and were unable to attend; another dealer who had a minor motor vehicle accident on the way into the show; and another suffering from a severe case of laryngitis, said James Montell’s daughter, Susan Montell. She was operating a booth that offered large, yellowware mixing bowls.

James Montell has two other antiques shows scheduled for this year at the armory, one in March and one in November.

At one booth, Julia Gagne of Smithfield picked up a blueberry rake to admire it more closely.

Dealer David McLean of Monmouth told her, “It’s $95,” adding, “It has a little brass tag that indicates the maker from Cherryfield, Maine.”

“I’m just looking,” she said.

Other items included 1959, 1960 and 1962 issues of Coniad, the yearbook of Cony High School and a framed poster providing telephone toll rates between Lewiston and elsewhere in Maine. For instance, 3-minute calls to Augusta were 20 cents; to Houlton, $1.05.

McLean also has a number of items in a group shop, Wiscasset Village Antiques, he said.

In the booth next to McLean’s, Stewart Roberts of Augusta offered a 7-foot-long wallpaperer’s table, which had a strip of zinc running along one side as well as a separate, narrow board that functions as a ruler.

Roberts said he was told it was from the 1930s.

“The man I bought it from said it belonged to his dad,” Roberts said. “It’s good for wrapping presents. They’re really handy, I can tell you.”

He also said it folds up neatly. “You’d see me walk out with a 7-foot-long box.”

Kelly Quinn of Pittsfield had an eclectic collection at his booth, everything from a military uniform with accessories, three books in the Tarzan series by Edgar Rice Burroughs, a tiny, fringed, beaded evening bag that could have belonged to a flapper in the 1920s, and an 1858 oilcloth map of Kennebec County.

Quinn said he formerly had Main Street Antiques in Pittsfield and has been doing the shows at the armory since the 1970s, when it began with a dealers’ night on Friday and continued through Saturday and Sunday.

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