A Matter of Intimacy in the Antique Profession That Goes Beyond The Same Old, Same Old Buy and Sell of Old Stuff

Birch Hollow Photo by Suzanne Currie

 

     While I headed-up the writing staff of the former Herald-Gazette, in Bracebridge, in the 1980's, I was also working on weekends to rebuild my antique business that hadn't survived a full two and a half years before the partnership with my parents folded into itself. I had picked the wrong partners to start with, but I was determined to re-open a second business, and by mid decade, with a new partner in more ways than one, Birch Hollow Antiques was launched. Suzanne and I had a reasonable foundation on which to build a more durable small business, and it had helped that I spent a lot of my free time, several years earlier, trying to rebuild what I had been pretty much forced to sell-off in order to balance the books for that inaugural bid to operate a worthy antique shop. Point is, we put together a much more efficient and money making business, which we began in our first home on Ontario Street, below the high school in Bracebridge. I had a short walk to my newspaper office on Dominion Street, and Suzanne had an even shorter hike to the school where she worked as a family studies teacher.

     What happened during my newspaper tenure did in fact, influence my interests in the antique business and for good reason. While at the paper, I was very heavily involved in feature news writing, especially for our sister publication, The Muskoka Sun, under the direction of Robert Boyer, a well known regional historian and former M.P.P. It wasn't long before I was living and breathing archives work, and very gradually I shifted from news editorship to feature writing for Mr. Boyer to fill his huge weekly paper available from the 24th of May until just after Thanksgiving. In this new venture, I was buried almost daily in the newspaper's substantial collection of old issues dating back well more than a century, plus having access to thousands of bits and pieces of correspondence stored down in the basement archives. I became obsessed very quickly, and in a very few years, and having moved on from the publication to work as a freelance writer, as well as a re-booted antique dealer, I found that my interest in general antiques had diminished significantly. From the near constant pursuit of antique furnishings, oil lamps, old Canadian and American glass, vintage quilts, antiquated clothing, and sporting collectables, I was veering into ephemera which included just about anything printed, inscribed or written otherwise, from letters to journals; and including vintage invoices, old land deeds, wills, and just about anything else of a considerable vintage that was of the constitution of paper and ink. I shocked myself, by paying more for a box of old paper, letters, and assorted correspondence, than the pine boxes and hoosier cupboards I had been trained to hunt and gather by my mentors.

     I couldn't really get too intimately connected to a flat-to-the-wall cupboard, or a dry sink, but gosh, I could become deeply involved reading through hundreds of old letters, some war time correspondence, such that Suzanne and I as a research team, would find ourselves gradually immersing in the life and times of the writers of days past. It wasn't a transition we were worrying about, but it did become more emotion consuming as we acquired more and larger collections of this old paper; often a profoundly compelling paper trail going as far back as the 1850's, involving so much personal record of births, marriages, illnesses, and death, and this included large amounts of memorial cards and actual death notices, including government notices of military deaths from the period of the First World War. We were finding substantial volumes of letters so intimate and revealing, that we had to secure them separately, because of serious concerns about content and its security from the public domain. That was the truly delicate issue, because it was the case, that a majority of the old paper finds came to us from other dealers, and auctions, that had not been vetted for content. This is an important consideration, and here's why.

     I was in a local second hand shop a few years back, and while looking through the old books for sale, I happened to find a handwritten journal of about a hundred or so pages, entered over a number of months and years in the early 1970's. I paid a whopping fifty cents for the journal, in part, because I had found some sensitive entries that I felt should not be in the hands of someone inexperienced with such personal confessions. The journal was used by a student at a post secondary school in Toronto, during a period he was enrolled in an art program. It was obvious to me, the student was unhappy with his life and times, and there wasn't much in the text that was of a positive nature. As I read through the material, as was my right as the new owner of the material, I realized that I had definitely known of the young man, and his art work, some of it in fact, I had purchased from the same shop a few weeks earlier. I liked the content of his art panels. The artist, by the way, had only recently passed away, and before his death, he had actually donated the journal and the panels to the shop. The problem wasn't the art work which was most interesting, but rather the journal which contained an angry statement that the then Prime Minister should be assassinated. That would, of course, have been Prime Minister Trudeau (1970's). I was stunned about this entry because it was not only timely, when it was written, and an event that could have been undertaken, thankfully not, but its relevance to the artist's name, and family, was huge and a heavily weighing responsibility to me, the journal's new owner.

     As Suzanne and I have for many years, worked on a number of intimate biographies of artists and significant others, for small publications and to be donated to national and provincial art archives, and others used in an assortment of regional publications, we know what we're doing with such sensitive editorial bits and bobs. We protect the families who may be implicated by such honest but uncensored letter content, and this includes photographic collections, where there is particularly sensitive images, especially from the war years, as well as other subjects that we refuse to use in our ongoing feature story development, and biographies, and certainly do not offer these materials for sale in our shop or anywhere else. Everyone in our family is aware of the responsibilities of handling sensitive archive materials, which is part and parcel of the ephemera collecting enterprise. And the intimacy it requires at times, puts you in a strange mind-space, because you can easily find yourself imbedded in a family history that seems to welcome this latent intervention. Here is another example.

     In a box of correspondence we received a few years ago, I spent several days reading through ever letter in the collection we purchased. We purchase this large box lots because we are not only interested in getting intimate with the subject matter, but for the social intercourse with other times, and other places, in the history of the region, the province, the country and the world. We have possessed old letters and documents from around the world, and as curious researchers, we have received a most amazing education in social / cultural history we wouldn't have otherwise. In this collection of letters from a daughter to her mother, it is explained in minute detail, how her and her husband were handling the heart problems of their young child. It was a most compelling story as you might imagine, and I found myself looking forward to reading updates from the early 1960's, up to the time of the lad's open heart surgery about five years later in time. The child survived. That was the good news. The bad news. There was not family to take over stewardship of this material. It was not the kind of correspondence that we could sell, and there was content that we were forced to destroy just in case, one day, it was the case our own collection of archives material was left similarly without stewardship.

     The reason we are eager to acquire old paper collections, from wherever we can find such print nostalgia, is the fact we can profit generally from the old documents and invoices of former businesses, that are often thrown together in estate clean-outs. For example, we benefitted quite a few years back from a large box of invoices from a family that travelled extensively on the steamships plying the Muskoka Lakes. The tickets and assorted invoices for freight shipments, are extremely desired by local collectors, and we made a substantial profit from a box of paper that most estate handlers would have simply dumped into the trash as mistakenly judged worthless. We have found, like the theme of the movie "Howard's End," old handwritten wills that were possibly never uncovered prior to the settling of long ago estates, and many letters buried in the old books we also collect, that may have been from a secret love relationship that had not been previously known by respective families. We know this because of the content, which often suggests an "affair" either beginning, ending, or soon to inspire the break-up of one or two marriages. It is our own pledge of honor, to be fair to one and all, and not allow this information, which may never have been known otherwise, to hurt the legacies of parents and grandparents, in the eyes of present tense families; who thought their kin folk weren't the kind to fool around on their husbands and wives.

     Suzanne and I, and even our sons, Andrew and Robert, are sworn to secrecy when it comes to handling sensitive editorial material that comes into our possession. We never put profit ahead of decency, when it comes to what we are willing to sell just to make a profit. We are always interested in acquiring old paper and there are many incredible insights to be gathered in the pursuit of old records, and especially pioneer journals and war correspondence. And we do very much consider ourselves rescuers of such paper heritage, getting much of the highly sensitive material out of circulation, and we think, in some small way, we are protecting folks we never knew, who were just writing honestly about subjects and situations they felt angered or overjoyed to relate.