NORTH SHORE BREEZE 
eee 
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Vol. XII 
AND REMINDER 
} Manchester, Mass., Friday, August 7, 1914 
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No. 32 
When Society Chases the Antiques 
By LIVINGSTON WRIGHT 
ary? real good today!’ exclaimed a stunning girl. “Pick- 
ed up a jewel of a Chippendale table at a third 
what ’twas worth, and had a lovely haggle with another 
chap over a decanter and only overpaid him about a 
tenth!” 
In the above, you have a glimmering of the truth 
about Society and the Antiques. The prevalent notion 
that the purchase of ancient domestic plunder is com- 
mandeered chiefly by swordfaced maidens of fifty and up- 
wards, in gray hair and false teeth is slightly remote from 
the facts. Mr. Antique Dealer will tell you that none can 
make it so hot for him as a bevy of Fashionables out for 
an afternoon of mischief ! 
Know about the subjects? Well rather! They’ll 
distinguish a Chippendale from a Sheraton, and a Hepple- 
white from a Tonier, and a Georgian from a Jacobite, 
and a Louis XIV from the attendant crop of Louis’ with 
a dexterity that fairly startles. 
’Twas but last week that I dropped into a Newbury- 
port shop and found the dried-up little proprietor almost 
shrunk into his tiny skull cap, so profound and absorb- 
ing was his despair. 
“These society girls!”, he lamented; “they'll bring 
me in sorrow to my grave!” And when I pressed for 
details, he gave up as per follows: 
eOver near Topsfield, I recently discovered a pre- 
cious skeleton of a Chippendale bureau. A perfect gem! 
Two of the drawers were absent and the facings of the 
two remaining were in bad shape. 
“Well, 1 got the treasure here to the shop and my 
best expert went at it. 
“He worked long and patiently and when his task 
was finished, there was the finest Chippendale ‘bureau 
I have ever owned! Every care had been used in the 
repairs and in making the new drawers and backings, 
we had carefully ‘treated’ the wood so that it had every 
semblance of having the veritable latter-part-of-the-eigh- 
teenth century condition. 
“Monday of this week, I felt sure I had my $500 
for the bureau, but that same Monday I also found I 
hadn’t got it. 
“About two o’clock, a lot of young women piled out 
of an auto and made for that bureau. They went at 
the article with the scrutiny of a cross-examining attorney 
and turned and twisted and inspected and squinted and 
giggled and grinned; post-mortemed that bureau upside 
down and hindside foremost. They kept me working for 
a solid hour, answering their thousand questions and 
showing that blamed bureau up, down and across. 
“Well, I had the thing sold, was to send it up to a 
sumptuous North Shore establishment and then, what 
happened but one minx whipped out a tiny knife and 
dug into the back of one of the drawers that had had to 
be made new! 
“Although I explained and admitted the exact con- 
dition of the bureau when I discovered it, the fact of 
that imp’s detecting the weak solution of dye in the back 
of those infernal drawers knocked the sale! 
‘Don’t wonder that I weep and wail and gnash my 
molars ?” 
Although this Newburyport patriarch may have been 
run through his Primer rather strenously, it is the So- 
ciety folk who have made it possible for the tremendous 
vogue the antiques business enjoys! To their ability to 
engage experts and do furnishing and decorating cor- 
rectly is due the power of antiques in the land! Be it 
distinctly understood, that when the clever daughter of 
an impoverished Puritan house concocts her Salem gib- 
raltars and offers them from within an artistically-de- 
signed shop at the crossways, ‘tis not the manifold Mid- 
dle Class that encourages her sales! It is the Newport- 
to-Bar-Harbor-and—later, to-Lenox-and-Lakewood dele- 
gation that tosses her the emolument and the “Delicious, 
really!” 
It was inevitable, as human nature wiggle-waggles, 
that this very enthusiasm of Society for the artistic and 
the unique should result in strenuous, systematic plans for 
the bunco. “Oh, we’ve had the most interesting time!” 
exclaims a bud. “George took us down to a street back 
of Boylston and we just sat there in the auto and watched 
them making ’em? ‘What?’, why, those everlasting ‘ser- 
ving trays.’ You know there isn’t an antiques shop this 
side of Jerusalem but what has a bale of those mahogany 
or rosewood or satinwood ‘trays,’ always declared to be 
‘very old and out of some private-estate hordes to which 
we alone had access,’ and all that. Well, George wanted to 
know if we didn’t want to actually see them manufactur- 
ing these ‘very old and choice’ frauds! just too inter- 
esting for anything and you gamble we had a good time! 
We were in the rear of several of those antiques places 
that are eternally ‘selling-out-regardless-of-cost-because- 
the-building-is-to-be-torn-down.’ They all have base- 
ment workshops and we were peeping into the rear win- 
dows of these. We could just see stacks of these ‘very 
old and choice’ trays and the workmen polishing away 
and piling up more.” 
No, indeed, the Newport propaganda for fighting 
the overcharge of butchers and bakers and candlestick- 
makers of trade was not based at all on the arbitrary 
“whim?” of social minions, as the saffron papers of course 
had to assume, but on the practical fact that certain shop- 
keepers insisted upon believing that there was no limit 
to the possibilities of billing the society people. 
Thus, if one could drag from family closets the 
skeleton story of the buncoes of antiques purveyors, he 
would not wonder that the young woman at Newbury- 
port applied the penknife! Indeed, he would almost 
wonder that she did not take a crowbar. 
The quest works some striking transitions, though. 
“T’m Jacobite now,” said a well known North Shore 
summer citizen, the other morning. “Was Georgian, but 
my wife had one of her periodic renovating moods and 
