Popping the Antique Cherry

Well it finally happened. Never thought it would. I went antiquing. Well actually I tagged along with Mrs. Net-Wurth and two of her uncles. Now I was told that this antique show...or festival...or what ever the hell you call them was rated among the best in the country. Second only to one on the west coast that's apparently...more antiquy.

If you haven't been to one of these imagine a large piece of open land...perhaps a fair ground. Now imagine that the sprawling beautiful landscape is covered with garbage. There...you're finished. Actually I'm exaggerating a bit. I have no basis for comparison but this looked like a pretty well done antique thing. And I did see some pretty interesting pieces that were probably worth a fair bit of money. But seriously...there were hundreds of thousands of items, maybe it was closer to a million. I really have no way of knowing. If you extracted all the items that were worth real serious value I think you'd probably pull out about 5% of the inventory and then you could just rope off the rest of it and put up a sign, "Landfill - bring out your junk and mark it up 20%"

Some of the interesting items: Apparently Donald Duck is a popular guy at these events. That sonofabitch was EVERWHERE. They had Donald banks, books, figurines, and yes...a 4 foot wood cutout of the fowl tempered sailor. Dead animals is another popular item. Someone apparently told these people that stuffed animal corpses could be valuable antiques. Lamps of all shapes sizes and degrees of tackiness from tasteful desk lamps to one that doubled as a beer keg. Not everything there was junk...there was a gentleman who had tons of old books. His collection was very extensive ranging from a $2 Donald Duck (surprise, surprise) Golden Book for children to a $250 first edition of 'The Gray Ghost' by Seckatary Hawkins.

I must say that all-in-all it wasn't a bad outing. We had a good time seeing the junk and the occasional interesting piece. I may even go back as long as the trips remain infrequent and I'm allowed to buy as least one double-bladed battle ax. Yes, I saw one of those too.