Walnutts Antiques is now on Facebook! Join the conversation!

When I was creating the Walnutts Facebook page, I was struck by the dichotomy of having a business rooted deeply in the past, and combining it with a technology that is consistently reliant on the future.

And I wondered: What is the place of antiques in social media?

Antiques tell stories of people’s lives. They give us clues into the daily goings-on of someone who lived 100 years before our time. They provide unique insight into historical moments, and give us a sense that there is something larger than just our time. With Facebook, one can argue there is a similar effect; it has the potential to communicate a story to a wider audience, to share similar stories, to exchange ideas. Antiques have a place on Facebook just like any other entity: they are reminders of our historical foundations and how that has contributed to our development, today. I hope our readers will join us on our Facebook page and ask all those questions that have been burning in their minds about antiques and collecting! See you there!

Allan Stone was a giant in the art world, and had one of the most diverse and consuming collections of the 20th-century. He discovered and launched the careers of some of Modern Art’s greatest: Willem de Kooning, John Chamberlain, Wayne Thiebaud, to name a few.

After Stone’s death in 2006, his daughter, Olympia, released The Collector, a documentary of personal moments and stories in his life. He talks about his love (obsession, really) with collecting, and Olympia showcases some pretty stunning shots of his mansion in Purchase, NY, filled to the brim with artworks and antiques.

While no two collectors are exactly alike, they all share the same bond: the unrelenting pursuit of beauty. Whether you collect cabinet cards or teeth, each object is somehow beautiful and special. Each inspires curiousity. That is the wonder of collecting, to me. It is not about having *things*, but about filling your world with objects that inspire and excite you.

I highly recommend renting The Collector to share in the wonder that was Stone’s life and collection.

The King Center of Atlanta unveiled a new website of never-seen-before archives of Martin Luther King Jr.’s speeches and correspondence. It is a beautifully designed site, featuring a treasure trove of historical American documents.

Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

In early portrait photography, children would have to sit for quite some time before the full process of each shot could be complete. To keep them calm and comfortable, the child’s mother would be cloaked in fabric and sit with the child on her lap, serving as the backdrop for her child’s portrait. Due to traditional methods of matting and framing, the end piece would crop the mother’s figure completely out of the frame, making her look as nothing more than a draped piece of cloth.

However, as the photographs are uncovered and the mothers “discovered,” there is this eerie, almost ghost-like effect to the photographs. An entire Flickr community has been set up to track the instances of hidden mothers in old tintypes and cabinets. Some are humorous, but some are down-right (unintentionally) disconcerting:

Sources: Retronaut, Boing Boing, Accidental Mysteries, The Hidden Mother Group on Flickr

Eve Kahn, resident Antiques columnist for The New York Times, reflects on the 6 most intriguing auctions of 2011.

Personally, I haven’t yet finished my own list of resolutions, but perhaps I’ll find something inspiration in Woody Guthrie‘s from 1942 (though, most likely not):

Walnutts FAQ’s is a series of common questions… and their answers.

Q. Fairly frequently, I see you post about “laid” paper. What is that?

A. All paper made before about 1800 was “laid paper.” The name comes from a ribbed texture imparted to the sheet by the manufacturing process. In the 19th century, its use diminished as it was largely supplanted by “wove paper.”

In pre-mechanical papermaking (from the 12th century into the 1800s), the laid pattern was produced by the wire sieve in the rectangular mold used to produce single sheets of paper. A worker would dip the mold into a vat containing diluted linen pulp, then lift it out, tilt it to spread the pulp evenly over the sieve, and, as the water drained out between the wires, shake the mold to lock the fibers together. In the process, the pattern of the wires in the sieve was imparted to the sheet of paper. Any authentic paper document or manuscript dated before 1800 will be executed on “laid paper” – when held up to a light source, a pattern of crosshatch lines will be visible within the structure of the paper sheet.

Now, to me, they were synonymous. The only difference I believed to exist was that “vintage” had a friendlier tone to it. I wouldn’t mind if someone came up to me and said, “I love that purse you’re carrying! It’s so vintage!” I would mind however if they said, “It’s so… antique.” So, to begin this journey, I first looked up the definition of each.

Definition:

1. Of or relating to a vintage.

2. Characterized by excellence, maturity, and enduring appeal; classic.

3. Old or outmoded.

4.

a. Of the best: played songs that were vintage Cole Porter.

b. Of the most distinctive: ”Fatalism has coexisted with vintage American overconfidence” (Thomas Oliphant).

[Middle English, from Anglo-Norman, alteration (influenced by viniter, vintner) of Old French vendange, from Latin vndmia : vnum, grapes + dmere, to take off (d, de- + emere, to obtain; see em- in Indo-European roots).]

VS.

antique [an-teek]

Hmm. You can understand my confusion. Next, I took to the Internet. A quick Google search brought up a very lively discussion, on a multitude of fronts, over the distinctions between “vintage” and “antique.” Thankfully, one of my favorite sites, Apartment Therapy, outlined the differences rather nicely:

What is antique?
According to Merriam Webster, an antique is “a relic or object of ancient times” or “a work of art, piece of furniture, or decorative object made at an earlier period and according to various customs laws at least 100 years ago.” Ruby Lane, an online marketplace of independent antique and collectible shops, offers a similar definition, explaining, “Most authorities consider the actual definition of the term ‘antique’ to mean an age of at least 100 years. If an item is not definitively datable to 100 or more years in age, it should not be directly referred to as an antique.”

What is vintage?
If antiques are things that are 100 years old or older, what are vintage pieces? The defnition of vintage is trickier. According to Merriam Webster, the term vintage relates primarily to wine and is an altered form of the French word vendage, meaning “the grapes picked during a season.” One of its secondary definitions is “a period of origin or manufacture” (e.g., a vintage 1960s Mercedes) or “length of existence: age.” Ruby Lane provides a much more helpful explanation, noting that “an item described as ‘vintage’ should speak of the era in which it was produced. Vintage can mean an item is of a certain period of time, as in “vintage 1950′s” but it can also mean (and probably always should) that the item exhibits the best of a certain quality, or qualities, associated with or belonging to that specific era. In other words, for the term vintage to accurately apply to it, an item should be somewhat representational and recognizable as belonging to the era in which it was made.” Ruby Lane also suggests that ‘vintage’ should not be used in reference to objects less than 20 years old.

Essentially, it not only has to do with age (antique being over 100 years old, vintage for items 20+ years old), but more so has to do with syntactical usage of each term. Now, I do realize that majority of the readers of this site have no difficulty in defining and distinguishing the two. But as someone learning, I feel as though I can better navigate the “world of antiques” and understand categorizations and valuations of objects.

I look forward to continue this learning process as we continue to build and fill up the Walnutts site! The wealth of resources already contained herein have afforded me so many outlets to expand my education.

I am currently reading a wonderful (though fictional) book called The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, and it has piqued my interest in carnival performers and feats of daring. “Circus life” fascinates me; there is something exotic, inspiring, quixotic, and peculiar the lifestyle. Today at Anonymous Works, the blog’s author and curator-of-the-peculiar, Joey posts about Martha E. Wagenfurher, “Maid of the Rapids.” Though not a circus worker, Martha falls into a similar category of performers living on the fringe, who eschew typical means of entertainment and seek to take themselves to unknown limits.

Martha E. Wagenfuhrer hailed from Buffalo, NY. The wife of a professional wrestler, her daring streak helped her devise a plan to be the first woman to ever shoot down Niagara Falls in a barrel. She timed her stunt to be on the exact day, and the exact time, that President William McKinley was to have a very public visit at the Falls on September 6, 1901. She expected it to be a widely publicized event, with loads of press vying to make her instantaneously famous. Unfortunately, fate was not on her side. First, as she arrived at the Falls, her barrel struck the bank and was damaged, delaying her feat. By the time she was ready at around 6pm, according to the New York Times article that followed the next day, the press had fled the raging waterfall’s banks, rushing to cover the assassination of President McKinley, which occurred mere hours after his morning Niagara visit.

In the description of the 1901 cabinet card pictured above, we learn of Martha’s fate:

Martha began her journey on the afternoon of September 6th, but before her barrel could be set afloat it sustained damage when it accidentally rolled down the bank of the river. Martha refused to go ahead with her stunt until the barrel was repaired and later that day, slightly before 6 p.m. Martha was helped inside her barrel.

Unfortunately for Martha her barrel was caught in the Whirlpool Rapids for over an hour. With darkness setting in it became necessary for the Great Gorge Railway Illumination Car to be brought to the Whirlpool so its search light could illuminate the surface of the river. When it was possible to finally retrieve the barrel Martha was found unconscious inside and barely breathing. It took over ten minutes to revive the woman.

She was featured in several publications, such as Cosmopolitan magazine, yet, as with most flash-in-the-pan performers, her story is overshadowed by the events of her time.

Circling around the blogs (such as Miss Moss and Lincoln Taft) are vintage photographs of the University of Miami Women’s Basketball team. A collection of most all team photographs can be found at the University of Miami’s Flickr stream. Miami had the foresight to transfer its photo archives to an online database, so that they can be shared and enjoyed by a mass audience, rather than simply tucked away in dusty old books, sitting in a library’s back room.

I think it’s an interesting and important concept for universities, museums, and other cultural institutions to put their photo archives on sharing sites such as Flickr. It is a means to preserve and retell history, as well as to inspire others to dig up otherwise unknown and unseen remnants of the past.

Plus, just look at those hair bows.