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 trouvés. 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.