A dealer friend of mine had all these old broken, wooden parts chairs he was going to burn when a lady driving by spotted one, stopped and said she just had to have it. His curiosity caused him to ask what she was going to do with it. "Well, plant flowers in it silly, isn't it obvious?" was her response. Well Dutch didn't fall off the potato wagon yesterday and he began digging all those chairs out of the trash pile, knocking the seats out and planting flowers in them. He tells me it's the hottest selling item he has. And at every auction, it's always old Dutch who buys all the broken chairs no one else wants.
The old adage "beauty is in the eye of the beholder" was never more applicable than it is to the antique and collectible trade. It never ceases to amaze me what others find appealing and I've noticed that others are not so enamored with my special treasures as I am. I usually don't hold this against them because I've learned that there is no accounting for personal taste.
Fortunately this is the saving grace of the industry -- there are also thousands of others just as intrigued with old inkwells and pens as I am. In fact, some are intrigued to the point that I've sold quite a few for some very heft profits.
After you have been doing this a while you will come to the point where every old item that inadvertently passes your way gets an inquisitive, some would say strange, scrutiny. Those stricken with this disease are all around you right now. You just didn't know what the problem was that they have. They're the ones who you'll see staring at an object for minutes and sometimes hours oblivious to their surrounding, and who sometimes loose all sense of time and space. Occasionally you'll see them led around by the hand of a caring friend or maybe yelled at by an exasperated spouse. You'll know them though because you'll become one of them. It's like that. You don't get into the business, it gets into you. But you'll get used to the finger pointing and the children laughing at you in the market place when you deposit all those checks from those in the more advanced stages of the disease
I said all that to say this: don't throw anything away and don't let anyone around you throw anything away. You see how beneficial the business already is? You've just done your part for recycling. Al Gore would be so proud.
