“业余”古董玩家
It is a tiresome habit of many antique dealers to mark their prices in code. Sometimes it is a straightforward substitution of letters for numerals, so that A equals 1, D equals 4, and so on. More often, the letters are given complicated values that make no sense at all to anyone other than the dealer, and so we find that our chest of drawers is clearly marked“XPT.”
What does that mean? Would he accept XOS in cash for a quick sale? Why can’t the rascal mark his prices in dollars and cents like they do at Bloomingdale’s? What is he playing at?
The game is called“matching the price to the customer.”While you have been looking at the chest of drawers, the dealer has been looking at you, and you’re both considering the same question—how much?—from different points of view. Depending on how you’re dressed, how interested you seem to be in buying, and how interested he is in selling, the price might fluctuate significantly. But you’re not to know that. It is one of the dealer’s little secrets.
Don’t let it worry you, because you can play the game, too. Call the man over, and get a price from him. Whatever figure he mentions, brush it aside. No, no, you say. Give me the trade price. (Normally, quite a lot less.)
The dealer will look at you through narrowed eyes. Are you really another dealer, or just a robber in a well-cut suit? You give him a business card and show him your checkbook, and there it is, printed proof: COOPER ANTIQUES, PERIOD FURNITURE, VIEWING BY APPOINTMENT ONLY.
I know a man who has been doing this for years, and he has now completely refurnished his house at special trade prices, even though he’s no more a dealer than my butcher’s dog is. When I asked him if he thought that this was the kind of sharp practice that an unsporting judge might describe as fraudulent misrepresentation, he just grinned. Didn’t I know? Most antiques bounce back and forth between dealers for years before they find places in private homes. All he was doing, in his own small way, was helping to speed up the turnover of stock, giving the dealers the money to go out and buy more antiques from other dealers. The way he saw it, he was doing the entire business a service.
Even if you’re not prepared to disguise yourself as a gentleman dealer, you must still resist the impulse to pay the asking price. Make an offer, but not before making a few disparaging remarks about rickety legs, dents, scars, and interesting blemishes that have accrued with the passage of centuries. The dealer expects it. In fact, he might be hurt if you didn’t point them out, because he may have spent several days in his workshop putting them on.
The process of aging an object or a piece of furniture overnight—or“distressing”it—is an art in itself, and it is miraculous what a talented distresser can do with rusty nails and pumice stone and a mixture of soot and bees-wax. More miraculous still is how three-legged chairs can suddenly sprout a fourth leg, marquetry with a bad case of acne can regain a smooth complexion, and tables originally constructed for midgets can grow to adult height.
Inevitably, some killjoy will try to belittle these marvels of inventive restoration. We all have at least one acquaintance who is a self-appointed expert and whose mission in life is to tell you that you have bought a fake. Shaking his head at your foolishness, he will point out in great detail what you were too dumb to see for yourself. It’s not a bad piece, he’ll say, but you could hardly call it a genuine antique. But what the hell. Does it matter? If the piece pleases you, if the faking has been done well, who cares? You bought it to live with, not to sell. The antique know-it-all is a pest who should be locked up in the bowels of the Metropolitan Museum to study pre-Columbian bidets.
Occasionally the situation will be reversed and a genuine piece will be treated with as little respect as would a sheet of plywood. I was once in a Manhattan antique shop when a decorator came in with his client. (I knew he was a decorator by the effortless way in which he spent thousands of dollars in the first ten minutes.) He paused in front of a magnificent fifteenth-century oak dining table— absolutely authentic, in wonderful condition, a piece of great rarity. He heard the price without flinching.“We’ll take it,”he said,“but you’ll have to cut two feet off the end so that it will fit in the breakfast alcove.”
The dealer was in shock. I don’t like to see a man wrestle with his conscience, so I didn’t wait to see whether he sold the table or whether his principles got the better of him. Personally, I like antiques to be used rather than worshiped, but I did wonder how the table’s maker would have felt about his work being chopped up and put in a breakfast nook.
