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Antiques or Collectibles– That is the Question?

Antiques command more attention today than ever before. So widespread is the interest that people regard the fish-shaped amber bottle which held Dr. Fisch's bitters in the early 19th century in the same way they do the hanging lantern at Williamsburg. Nothing that was of personal or household use during the last 300 years is too minor for consideration in the 21st century. Yet hundreds of simple everyday articles that once were indispensable now are left to gather dust or are unrecognized for what they are.

A cup without a handle but with two saucers, a salt crock to hang on a kitchen wall, a cream pitcher in the form of a cow with luster spots over its white pottery body, an amber bottle shaped like a fish, a satiny rose bowl whose glowing color belies its prim roundness--all these were useful and probably treasured possessions in homes 85 to 150 years ago. Today, people raise their eyebrows if someone serves tea a cup without a handle. The salt crock would be considered downright unsanitary. Their value lies in their being antiques. As such, they are as genuine as the brass lantern with beveled glass sides that hangs in the hall of the Governor's Palace, restored to its eighteenth-century splendor, in Williamsburg, Virginia.

According to Webster’s Dictionary, an antique is "a piece of furniture, tableware or the like, made at a much earlier period than the present." It’s not, however, necessarily out-of-date or old-fashioned. A chair that was built soundly from good hardwood around 1820 and is comfortable to sit on is never out-of-date. A 7-inch-high octagonal teapot of blue Staffordshire is monstrous in comparison to contemporary streamlined pots, but it makes as good a pot of tea as it did more than a century ago.

The painted side chair with stencil decoration and rush seat, produced in quantity and sold cheaply during the 1820's by Lambert Hitchcock, is today worth quite a lot. He turned his Connecticut workroom into a factory where he cut and turned the parts, assembled, and then decorated, so that many more chairs were completed in a day than if a workman had concentrated on one from start to finish. The Hitchcock chair now is as undeniably an antique as a mahogany fiddle-back Empire chair or a Chippendale ladder-back made many years earlier by cabinetmakers. So also are a steeple clock of the 1860's, a pressed glass lamp that burned whale oil during the 1840's or a brass student lamp that burned kerosene in the 1880's, and the cut glass wedding presents of the 1890's.

Not a day goes by but that someone glances at some object and fails to recognize it as an antique. For example, how many young women know a sewing bird when they see one, and how to use it? They’re likely to be baffled even when a small velvet pincushion is attached. The sewing bird, usually of metal, is an ornamental clamp to be fastened to a table. It holds fabric in its beak to facilitate hemming, and was a great aid when all sewing was done at home. It's fun to use because the beak is closed by a spring and can be opened by a tail lever.