Prints, Maps and Books
Buying Antique Botanical Prints Without Overpaying
At almost any provincial print fair you will find a box of flower plates marked at 35 pounds each, and a few feet away a single...
Blog, page 4 of 23
Everything we have published, newest first. Buying guides, identification notes, and the arguments we have had with advice that gets repeated without being tested.
Prints, Maps and Books
At almost any provincial print fair you will find a box of flower plates marked at 35 pounds each, and a few feet away a single...
Silver and Metalwork
A pair of candlesticks turns up at a country sale, catalogued simply as "Sheffield plate, c.1800".
Ceramics and Porcelain
At a country sale last year I watched two oyster plates go under the hammer twenty minutes apart.
Care and Preservation
Turn over almost any oak stool made before 1850 and you will find a scatter of tiny round holes, each one about the width of a...
Prints, Maps and Books
Take the backing board off a print framed in the 1950s and you will often find the same thing: a brown line running exactly...
Games
Games of chance built around numbers are among the oldest pastimes we have records of, and they have left a long trail of...