Dear Lee,

Not many stores sell buggy whips today, and very few sell hoop skirts. Times and technology change, and there are new needs, new products, and new types of stores. Huge wholesale stores like Wal-Mart, men’s clothing “warehouses,” and home improvement stores that stock every type of tool were unknown before 1960. These “big-box” stores have changed the way we buy, helped keep prices low, and influenced the way small stores compete for business. So why are some pundits of the antiques and collectibles press moaning and groaning about change? Why are they writing that the antiques business will disappear or change horribly in the next 20 years? They are not students of history.

The antiques world was dramatically different in the 1950s, when we started collecting. There were very few shows, and only one major show a year in our Midwestern city. Flea markets sold fresh corn, handmade potholders, tires, and tube socks, with an occasional table filled with used toys or dishes. There were no shopping malls. There was, of course, no Internet. The antiques newspapers were thick, heavy, and filled with ads for the popular antiques of the day. Our first price book, published in 1968, listed cranberry glass, coin silver, bells, trivets, copper luster, miniatures, vasa murrhina, and Vaseline glass-all of less interest today. It also listed bottles, candy containers, carnival glass, dolls, furniture, lamps, milk glass, pewter, pressed glass, Royal Doulton, Staffordshire, and other collectibles still popular today. But the toys listed in that book weren’t battery-operated toys or model cars or teddy bears. (Believe it or not, there was not a single teddy bear in the book.) The most expensive Tiffany lamp was a “dragonfly” at $3,500; most of the Tiffany lamps were under $700. Most Roseville pottery pieces cost less than $15. There was no Grueby or Ohr pottery, no sports, comic art, costume jewelry, or Mission furniture, and very little Victorian furniture. There were a few store tins and cans and just 15 signs, including the large DeLaval tin sign for $15 (price today, $2,500).

There are more collectors today than in the 1950s, more places to buy, more bargains hiding at garage sales. It is fashionable to furnish with collectibles and used furniture, to ignore the rules and buy what you like, to have shelves filled with dozens of egg cups or apple peelers. It may seem that we have too many fast-food restaurants and too many antiques malls, but the good ones do well. Even collectors who want only old things like to buy in new ways. And the dealers who prosper are those who keep up with the times.