Cape May Diaries
29 - Antique or junk?
Many people come to Cape May to shop. For me, shopping is something endured, not enjoyed.
Antique stores cause me the most pain. While Sharon sees them as treasure troves, I see them as glorified junk stores, charging outrageous prices for items most sensible people discard.
While legitimate collectors would never get caught dead plucking such stuff out of other people’s trash cans, most think nothing of the fact that many pieces we see glittering in the window of antique shops came on the market because of the timely or untimely demise of the original owner – who most likely purchased the item new and considered it a personal treasure kept until death.
Market savvy inheritors sell off these commodities to wholesalers, though many survivors of the deceased are too grieved to think of the value of these items and ship them off to places like Salvation Army where the wholesalers and other antique dealers pluck them up at bargain rates to later resell for vast profits. Charity shops such as Salvation Army, however, quickly got wise to the routine and upped the price of anything that looked remotely antique.
While Cape May had its share of pompous antique stores, it also provided a range of more reasonable place in which you could cover the full spectrum of junk collecting. One place located on the way to Sunset Beach -- a few hundred yards south of the more historic Cape May (and the most notorious hunk of junk Cape May had to offer as a sunken concrete ship) was straight out of the 1950s era. The store had originally served as a boat or furniture show room with the 1950s futuristic display windows and excess space above the glass for signs it no longer displayed. The place was thick with odds and ends from every era. The owners of his fine old junk store had refused to specialize the way so many of the more pretentious places had, nor price its treasures to the point of making wood and glass more valuable per ounce than gold or diamonds. And walking through its aisles for me has become a stroll through memory lane – with me spotting many small pieces I recognized from my family’s home when I was a child.
Most antique stores, of course, refuse to admit they sell other people’s cast off items, and often dress up to give their establishments sophisticated airs, treating their precious relics like museum pieces. Such places often scent their air with exotic fragrances while allowing classical music to murmur in the background. Sometimes you are greeted with a silence so solemn you might mistake the place for a funeral home.
When Sharon gets it into her head she must enter one of these places, we part company and I explore other more interesting places until she is through. Inevitably, she takes much too long and I have to “rescue” her. While this is a simple chore along the relatively small shops in the Washington Street Mall, Sharon’s favorite shop resembles a multiple-chamber cave where finding someone requires a search party.
You can get bargains in antique stores. In fact, among the least valuable items in nearly all of the posh shops are books. In many cases, you can acquire a complete collection of classic literature for less than you might be expected to pay for a single platter. Yet no matter how poor or posh an antique store is, you will find a sampling of books – adding to the prestige – though often as not, the books are consigned to a dusty corner.
Because the harbor side antique store had a volume of junk sufficient enough to sink any of the larger fishing ships docked within a hundred yards of its doors, it also had by weight a sufficient number of books on display. Most of these were segregated into an alcove of book shelves studiously avoided by the prospecting public, whose eyes glazed over when they saw the accumulation -- although a few did peer down at a handful of titles, mostly to relieve the strain on their eyes from viewing so many high price tags on the more collectable items elsewhere in the store. Most prospectors, however, fled the book area as soon as possible, seeking protection from the horrors they remembered from high school where teachers had actually expected them to read one or two. Thus my examination of these covers created no competition when I paused there from my search for Sharon. At worst, I got odd looks from those passing as if the thought crossed through their dim minds for a moment that I might know of some value in these volumes they had not previously perceived, and for a second, each passing set of eyes flashed with greed only to grow dull again with the realization that these books sold for a dollar or less each. Certainly if books had value, management would not seek to unload them as such a deplorably low price -- and they left me to my private treasure hunt to move on to pieces more worthy of their time and effort.
In pursuing books in such places for as long as I have, one certainty emerges which might seem odd to the uninitiated antique hunters. Three authors invariably show up in every collection no matter how sparse the number of books: William Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Charles Dickens. With Dickens the titles usually include Great Expectations, Oliver Twist and occasionally, Tale of Two Cities. Shakespeare provides any of the tragedies for a cheerful evenings' read. Twain takes you on the river with Tom Sawyer or Huck Finn.
And the Cape May shops I visited with Sharon did not disappointment, and, in fact, presented a variety of other interesting volumes only the truly intellectuals would take much of an interest in. Since two of the three authors published while the Victorians reigned in Cape May these tomes seems particularly appropriate -- though in all my research I could discover no instance in which either of them made their way to Cape May.
Twain, of course, treated New Jersey a bit shabby in his humor, but remembered us fondly for introducing him to ice cream – one mo my favorite treats when I’m in Cape May.