Return of Yesterday's Artifacts

The clever ones call it "instant nostalgia," but others insist that it's just junk. The quest for the artifacts of yesteryear, which has been indulged in by many Americans for years, has now reached epidemic proportions. Behold! A hot-air grate, raised on a walnut stand, becomes "sculpture." A chamber pot leaves its place under the bed and appears--lo!--as a soup tureen. Fortunate is the man who inherits a 1912 Corona typewriter or an Atwater-Kent radio in plywood Gothic style. They are also lucky who have--squirreled away somewhere--cast-iron toys, lead molds, bubble-gum machines, wind-up phonographs, toy steam engines, pieces of farm machinery, embossed advertisements--in fact, any of the detritus of industrialism. It is wanted.

Antique stores now are full of the stuff. The U.S. Congress has ruled that an antique is something that dates back to at least 100 years. But with copiers and satellites, computers and jets compressing into minutes tasks that once took days, venerability has also accelerated. Manhattan Antique Dealer Sandy Burr holds an elegant wooden object, an art student's model of a woman's hand. "It has some age to it," he says. "Maybe 15 or 20 years."

"People are just getting nuts about things," says Ruth Boyd, a dealer in Portland, Me. Nudged by demand, a fantastic avalanche of bear traps, Ball mason jars, Prince Albert tobacco tins, grocery scales and mustache cups is pouring onto dealers' shelves. The rust and dust of their long exile in cellars and attics are as carefully preserved as the patina on a Louis XV fauteuil. Green glass electric insulators, the kind still visible high on telephone poles in parts of the country, are selling briskly at about $2.50 apiece from Poland, Me., to San Francisco; they are used inside homes as candlesticks, paperweights, objets trouves. The boom has even reached old barbed wire. "There must have been a thousand manufacturers," says Antique Dealer Bob Smith in Chicago. "Each twisted the barbed wire in a different way as a trademark. People buy it to mount, like pictures, or for divider screens."

"It's a joke, really," says San Francisco Dealer Dorothy Dubovsky. There is nothing funny, though, about the price of some of these minor treasures. It is virtually impossible to buy a genuine brass spittoon because all but a few are already ensconced in places of honor in private homes. The porcelain heads used by phrenologists 70 years ago ($350) and the brightly colored enamel coffee pots of the 1890s ($75) are so scarce that manufacturers are now busily and cheaply reproducing them. Fancy china Jim Beam bourbon bottles, cranked out in limited quantities in the 1950s and early '60s as gift items, now fetch as much as $500 each--empty.

What Fun! Why do people buy such garbage? Part of the answer--a very small part--lies in the manic joy of collecting anything at all. A musician in St. Louis proudly told his favorite antique dealer, Norma Kappesser, that his collection of old vacuum cleaners is just about complete, so he is moving on --to washing machines. Then there are investors who hope to see some artifacts go up in value. Occasionally they score: a bottle made in 1876 by H. Hiram Ricker & Sons showing Moses striking the rock cost $100 in 1935; it is now priced at $1,200. But most of the objects are too numerous and too ugly to appreciate. "Besides," says Manhattan Dealer Richard Camp, "when the price becomes prohibitive, the fun is gone."

And what fun! If the late Dadaist Marcel Duchamp could present a bicycle wheel in 1913 as "readymade" art, then a housewife in 1969 can surely set up a cast-iron penny peanut dispenser as pop art. "Why not?" asks Tom Geismar, a graphics designer in New York. "A lot of these old objects are better made, brighter and more charming than what is being sold as real art." Moreover, objects made between 1890 and 1929 tend to be lush with curves and swollen with ornamentation. Grotesque by severe Bauhaus standards, these same objects nicely complement Bauhaus architecture, softening the visual impact of stark walls, hard angles and bleak floors.

It takes a good eye, however, to use such antiques either as art or decor. Bereft of function, many objects--the iron seat off a 1933 plow, a mortuary table with an ominous groove running down its middle, a 1911 drugstore display rack for prophylactics--look pretentious or preposterous and will not provoke conversation so much as stop it dead in its tracks. A six-foot Coca-Cola bottle is at best a "camp" item. On the other hand, a silent-film poster that announces "Hazing the Honeymooners, A Unique Comedy Full of Laughter" may really spell out nostalgia.

Meek Rebellion. Sentiment lies at the true heart of the urge to buy old objects. Unearthing these artifacts, even in an antique store, can be as personal as a poem. They are relics of a slower, more peaceful world, and each comes replete with a history. A railroad lantern with colored lenses is enough to send great locomotives chuffing down the tracks of the imagination. A monumental bronze cash register gets its burnish from human hands and, to some people, is therefore worthy of respect. If that seems absurd, it is a gentle absurdity in these hard-edged times.

In a sense, the soaring popularity of yesterday's hardware is also a meek rebellion against today's slick throwaway products. "Life has become so sterile," says Dorothy Sckovelev, an insurance researcher in San Francisco. "Everything seems to be made on a 144-on-the-line cooky cutter." Indeed, what is the charm of a Water-Pic? Where is the personality of Kleenex, plastic glasses, transistor radios? "I often wonder what people will collect that is being made today," says Norma Kappesser. "I'm stumped." Artist John Phillips of CosCob, Conn., is ready with one answer: 'There are some printed electronic circuits that look very much like the works of Paul Klee," he says. "Maybe even a little better."

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