Caveat Emptor

Hey, no experts here... but we have been collecting and looking at junk for over 30 years. So this current eBay listing got our interest. Cool dragons, old lightning bolts and lettering on a trunk full of tattoo artifacts. Sign us up.

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Then, something just didn't feel right. So we checked with other collectors and antique guys who know about old paint and age.Top dealers, collectors in other fields and tattooists who know what they are doing. Not so fast! They all cried. Step back and take another look. The first 'tell' being that clean black line painted over a beat to shit old white hinge in the top left corner. Why is that black line so crisp?

And where's the ink mess? Black Ink spots should be around the holes that were drilled into that folding piece of wood supposedly used for the upright machines to rest in while the guy was tattooing.

Next, stylistically, the outlined wings on the eagle don't trap the paint. Never seen this type of loose line and wobbly paint on a tattoo sign or folk art item before. It's like bad crayon book coloring. Maybe works for wonky modern drawings, but not seen in the 1920's. Logically a tattooist would want to completely fill in outlined areas. Always finish coloring and shading up to the black outline. A sign serves as a portfolio for the tattooists work.

The machines inside are unidentified. One even employs the classic Mud Flap Girl as a cut out frame. This does not seem like the 1920's. If it ever was a machine frame, it was probably made later like in the sixties or seventies.

Then there's this half dollar sized blotch in the green painted lid. So why does the nice dragon painting go right over the dashed out area? Wouldn't the douse on the lid have also taken a chunk out of the dragon? Looks more like new paint over an old box. Same methods as the decorative Electric Tattoo painted box, that at this typing, is still suffering along on eBay. These are both nice looking items. Obviously created by a very skilled artist/craftsman. They probably started out being sold as out as very cool, nice looking decorative items. Problem is, once into the marketplace, they move up the bs ladder until somebody swears they are real. As in "found in my grandfathers dusty old attic" real.

Now the box maybe have been a tattooists box. But the paint probably has been improved, embellished or added on recently. Then you have to wonder, just how did Mr. Tattooist carry this here box? Like a dead goat or a bag of concrete? Where are the attachments for handles or rope straps?

Important note: We are talking about the item, here not the seller. Nobody is blaming the seller. He probably doesn't know. And he made the right move running it by Chuck Eldridge. Who we all know is reputable and would never betray the Paul Rogers Trust.

Problem is that the eventual buyer will someday figure it out. Feel 'took' and likely give up on a cool field of collecting. It's a time bomb waiting to go off. A rather expensive one.

Picture Information courtesy eBay

Treasure Hunt

Are antique shows dead? Not if Frank Gaglio has anything to say about them. A respected dealer and promoter for over 30 years he created BarnStar Productions. He has his work cut out for him.

If you haven't been out to an antique show lately, you might be in for a shock. Long lines are long gone. Times where 200 people would wait for the gates to open like the Great Oklahoma Land Rush are a thing of the past.  The NY Triple Pier Antique Expo is down to one sad pier filled with clothes that look like somebody emptied a Salvation Army. At the last Wilton show in the high school auditorium there were 5 people in line, three thought there was a basketball game.

But wait, in all fairness the booths inside had lots of great merchandise, fairly priced. Like this excellent United Cigar sign from Michael Friedman and Donna Vita. 

Times have changed.  Collector tastes have changed. The pewter, quilt, clock and glassware market is over.

"Let's go to Jason’s and hang out, he just got an antique colonial blunderbuss to die for." Said nobody, ever. 

What do collectors want these days? The interest is certainly there. The most popular shows on TV are American Pickers and Pawn Stars. 

It might help to remember the 40 year rule. You want stuff you grew up seeing, had at one time, or was just out of reach 40 years ago.  Popular culture helps. Early Sony TPSL-2 Walkmans took off as the main character used one in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie. They shot up from roughly $6 to $400 overnight.

Crazy looking, great folk art and colorful fun signs. Think a Tilt-a-Whirl carnival sign as opposed to a Prudential Insurance plaque.

Road Runners, GTO's and muscle cars just keep rising in value. Until the day they don't.  We have all seen the estimates on items from Antiques Roadshow in 1999 compared to 2015. Everything cratered by 50% in valuation.

So here is what Mr. Gaglio has in mind at Rhinebeck . No early buying, just get a ticket and get in. He has completely filled the three huge agricultural buildings with dealers. He is advertising the event in newspapers and buying billboard space. 

New energy. And It sounds really promising.   The treasure hunt is back!

Rhinebeck Antique Show at the Duchess County Fairgrounds, May 23 and 24th.

http://www.barnstar.com/    

No Tattoo Flash at WAS

Are you a man (or woman) of wealth and taste? If so, the Winter Antiques Show at the 67th Armory is a nice place to go. 

Highbrow. Not rat rod, hot rod, industrial artifacts, lowbrow, carnival or 60's underground items here.  Asking about tattoo art would surely get you whisked away by security and sidewalked. This is the big time and the big dollar. 

Weathervanes are probably the closest things to just stuff. We like weathervanes. Picasso said about rooster weathervanes, "...cocks have always been seen but never as well as in American weather vanes."  

Abby Aldrich Rockefeller and her friends started this collecting trend back in the 1940's or sometime. They were probably bored with Chippendale furniture and pewter and wanted something fun to collect. Looked on upon as barnyard junk back then, a horse and rider weathervane sold for over a million a few years ago. Then the market crashed. At many shows we would see the same figures with the same worse-for-wear price tags year after year. 

All the dealers say the market's coming back, but what are they going to say? When asked what to look for in these items, Patrick Bell at Olde Hope Antiques, said the surface of the figure is key. Hopefully it has turned a vertigreed green like the Statue of Liberty. Is it beautiful and weathered from 100 years of the elements? Jeffrey Tillou of Litchfield, CT said no way, the form comes first. The rarity and beauty of the general shape is what is important. Both these guys had great vanes, pleasant to talk with and knowledgeable.

They all believe the market is good for first time or the impulse buyer. They say there will always be die hards filling in gaps in a collection with something like a squirrel vane. This is a very rare shape. Farmers hated the varmints who would wreck havoc on crops. Very few would gold plate and celebrate them by putting them up to swing with breeze above the barn.  

Mr. Bell has one at $180,000. It looks right. He's been dealing for 35 years so it probably is correct. This form has always been suspect though. Somebody found the original carved hardwood form and pounded out a few sheets of copper around it, doused 'em with chemicals and let them cure for a few years in the rain and snow. People try everything from urine to buttermilk. But if you sit and look at any antique for awhile you can kind of tell. Something is not right. Even though you want it to be right. According to the WAS press release "Every object exhibited at the Show is vetted for quality and authenticity." Fakes are tossed out before the public's invited in. Which is good as even Sotheby's can get burned. They sold a squirrel a few years ago that turned out to be a clever fake.

Some pigs in David Schorsch's booth. 

Here's Mr. Tillou holding a Punch cigar store figure. It's really cool.  Back in the day it was hooked up to a steam making apparatus so it would blow a bunch of smoke-steam out of the cigar. It's worth over $100k now. 

This is a great show and should be seen. Even if you don't have tens of thousands to spend.  Here you can go to school to see what's the best of it's kind. Learn what to look for in case something pops up at the local flea market. Grab it, then try and figure out if it's fake or not. 

As in the case of Ms. Rockefeller and her folk art discovery of weathervanes back in the day, it's even more fun is trying to figure out what's next and new in the collecting field.   

And you will be left with the bus fare home.

The Winter Antiques Show runs through Feb. 1 at the Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue at 67th Street; www.winterantiquesshow.com

Fake, We Cry!

A reader sent us this e-Bay listing, http://ebay.to/1tf0Kwt, asking our opinion. Just like on the popular tv shows!

It looks like an itinerant tattoo artist case. These are rare and quite beautiful. Let's look at this one.

The box is indeed quite old. The dry white paint is great, the wood, clasp and hinges are turn of century or older. Unfortunately we don't believe it was ever employed by a tattoo artist. 

The interior shot gives it away.  Where are the partitions to separate drawings from the tattoo machines? There would be partitions to separate the tattoo flash, notebooks and stencils from the business end of tattooing. The inside of the box is just way too clean. Where are all the spilled ink blobs, splatters, drips and circle spots where the bottles would sit, the smudges from black chalk or graphite? We don't see any of the scrapes or nicks from the assorted crap flying around as stuff would when riding the rails, jumping from tramp steamers to port or just traveling from town to town on the carnival circuit.  Working the small town county fairs would rattle the insides of a tattoo artists box. 

Now, let's look at the lettering.  The word "Electric" in script looks like it's borrowed from a 1950's Eletrolux vacuum cleaner. An era at least 50 years newer than the actual box. The eagle is horribly drawn with a fat mutant bird head. It has no relation at all to the way a tattooist would render this traditional symbol.  The wear and distress marks on the lettering are clearly bogus. For example why is it worn somewhat in the center of the lettering and not over the eagle? Why are the wing tips not showing any wear from handling?

Where there is money, fakes will follow and the folk art field is boiling over with reproductions.  Tattoo art is now in the forgers cross hairs especially with high dollar ($28k) auction records like Coleman's Battleship Kate at Skinner's. Which was clearly the real McCoy. 

Looking at other listings from this dealer it turns out he's the same guy who scissored up a full sheet of Oklahoma Bob's tattoo flash into 10 small sheets framed up in a heartless money grab. More items equal more profit goes the thinking here. 

In the spirit of equal time and fairness we tried reaching the "olegolfguy" (eBay moniker) for his view.  His eBay listings are blocked and do not allow any questions.  We'd probably want to lay low also.

My Idea of Fun: 2014 March Pier Show

Great show with lots of interesting stuff in a walk about giant time capsule. The promoters, U.S. Antiques Shows, have hosted an excellent revival of mostly the 1960's era artifacts. Great escape from the stressed and crumbling world outside.

The Good: One stand was completely filled with lighters of all shapes like military tanks, cameras, baseballs, girls in pools, really cool items that crossed over with collectors from die hard Zippo fanatics to kids to the impulse buyer catagory's like baseball collectors and others like an elephant collector. Or owls. "Look, there's a lot of zany collectors out there."  said the proprietor Ira Pilossof. "I love them all."

A lot of "millenials" like ashtrays and lighters, not because they smoke, they don't much anymore, they just inhale those hookah-pipe mist tubes called e-cigs. But they like the total retro "Mad Men" look. A well placed lighter or ashtray will retro-cool a flat faster than Dwell magazine or a James Bond martini shaker.

Ira also sells at the Garage flea market on 26th street every week. But this is his big uptown outing. Booth was packed. In fact the entire show was elbow to elbow.

The Bad: Yep, stuffed bull frogs playing musical instruments.  They actually are kind of interesting in a morbid way but even Mexico said enough and banned this evil taxidermy in the 1950's.

Here was a whole jazz band of the guys nailed down to a board.  "I feel for them."  said the nice lady running the booth.  "I didn't do it." 

The Ugly: The Port of NY charging thirty five dollars to park at a pier on a Saturday.

Stork Club Secrets

My landlord, Mr. Ed, was 99 years old.  As far as anyone could tell, he subsisted entirely on cherry red LifeSavers. Most would fall between his armchair, which smelled like a dumpster, and his khakis where they would adhere in a row of sticky red globs. Children and some unkind adults would point fingers and laugh as he plodded down the street to the local C'Town market.  He seemed to cotton to me as I found it relaxing to sit and drink Rob Roys while listening to his endless tales. One was about procuring an original Van Gogh painted plate at a movie give-away in the 1930's.  It did not look like a Van Gogh.  

The other item he liked to talk about was an ashtray from the Stork Club where he was once a regular.  Mr. Ed figured out the owner's secret sign language as he table hopped around the club.  One evening the owner said he could take an ashtray home with him. This story held more interest for me. I coveted said ashtray. In a moment of weakness, and as I clearly was tenant of the month, Mr. Ed sold it to me for $15. As it turns out Stork Club owner Sherman Billingsley did indeed keep control of the action at the club through a series of hand signals to his help. True story. I wonder now about the Van Gogh plate.

The mystery box

Many of our items at lift trucks have an interesting story to tell, whether it is a “Jesus Saves” sign from a glue-sniffer in a flophouse (See it here), or a shoebox with multiple price listings (See it here) . However, one item we have still remains a complete mystery. This teller box dates to around the 20’s, but its purpose stumps even the LTP experts.

At first it seemed like a standard salesman model. Salesmen would travel around with scale models of fireplaces, bathtubs, etc., so they could show what they where selling (without actually carrying around a fireplace). But, we realized this piece was too large and fragile to be carried around door-to-door. Also bank teller boxes where part of each bank’s design, and not something that could just be replaced easily.

 

The mirror is the real unknown in this item.  It is angled mirror where the teller would usually sit, and it gives the illusion of seeing a large background (since it reflects what’s being seen on the side). Naturally, we though this piece could be part of our carnival collection. We have rigged gambling wheels and milk jugs that are impossible to knock over, so why not something with mirrors? Our friend brought up the old “girl to gorilla” illusion, where a girl would “magically” turn into a gorilla at carnivals. The girl would stand in front of a two-way mirror, and the lights would turn off and illuminate a gorilla behind her (See a video of it here). Obviously gorillas aren’t two inches tall, but it shows how mirrors where commonplace illusions for carnies.

This illusion would most likely have to with money (which is surprising because carnivals are usually so honest). It appears to double whatever money/valuables are put inside the box because of the mirror image. Maybe this was used as a prize/betting box to make the pot seem a lot bigger than it actually was. The teller window could be a novelty guard for the “huge” prize. But, we realized there was nothing on the top to keep grubby hands from stealing, so unless this piece is incomplete we can’t write it off as a carnie trick.

"Doubling" your money

Then we researched to see if banks actually used boxes like these, and found some really interesting results. Before the use of ATMs, a few banks actually used mirrors in remote locations. Separate from the bank, there would be stands where a car could drive up, and speak into a mirror to a teller underground. The teller would use a pulley to get the money to the driver, and this way he would be safe from robberies. Maybe the banks even advertized having “TMs” (teller machine), although you probably couldn’t use it at a bar at 4am.

We also saw one instance of an actual bank using mirrors. Back when actually walking into a bank to get money was popular, one owner saw a unique solution to the rush hours. To have lots of room on the ground floor, a Long Island bank set up its notes department on the 2^nd floor (which was very common). However, during peak hours, the tellers would get overwhelmed with running upstairs all the time. So they had they tellers upstairs, and the customers would speak into an angled mirror to get funds lowered to them.

This still doesn’t explain why there would be a small model of the teller box , we’ve heard of collecting model trains, but model banks? Also the mirror isn’t facing up/down, and doesn’t have pulleys.

Maybe this model was used to practice for an Ocean’s 11-or age appropriate to the 1920’s, a Bonnie and Clyde style robbery? Who knows? If you do, please post your answer to one-up the Lift Trucks experts. We will select the best answer and give the winner a LTP T-shirt.

Smoke? Don’t mind if I do.

Thick glass with graceful slopes and sharp turns…shiny steel with more curves than J-Lo milled to perfection…”Home of more JACKPOTS, Nugget Reno !”…wait what?! No this isn’t another boring piece of car writing, here at Lift Trucks we focus on something a lot more artistic; ash trays. They might not produce the same muster as a 50′s Cadillac, but are probably even more a work of art and history combined. Today, ash trays are on top of ugly trash can, placed far enough away from buildings so the outcast smokers don’t offend the normal people trying to leave. No, instead these ash trays harken back to the days when you could even smoke on a plane; when you had to dress up for this flying event; where there was a fresh meal; and the TSA wasn’t looking at you naked on a computer screen. One of them features a cartoon; a disheveled woman in a skirt asking the Doc, “Meals? Thought you said three males a day!”. This was before The Atkins Diet, when all the doc ordered to be healthy was a steak and pack of cigarettes. These are relics of a dead era. Another, made by Hitachi, is a heavy piece made of solid steel. It looks like a huge engine cylinder and has a polished appeal of an expensive factory machine. Now, these trays hold nothing but our business  cards and a couple of match packs.  Another features a model incinerator, made by Kerner Incinerator Co. (it’s cleverly called “The Kernerator”), complete with working hinges for the ash and fake bricks that make a model chimney. Try finding something like that today; nobody would even bother doing all that work. So stop by today and catch a rare glimpse at advertising history.