I love to read and I love antiques and collectibles, so finding a way to combine the two is always a treat. I’ve come across two novels lately with heroines who are antiques dealers and thought I ‘d share my finds.

The first is Savannah Blues by Mary Kay Andrews which tells the tale of Weezie Foley. Once married to the wealthy son of an old Savannah family, she now lives in the carriage house behind her old home while her ex and his new fiancee, Caroline, live in the big house. Weezie is an antiques picker, trolling back alleys and junk shops searching for treasures to clean up and resell to dealers, but she dreams of having an antiques shop of her own. Upon sneaking into a mansion the night before an estate sale for a peek at the goods she finds more than antique chairs and lace tablecloths - Caroline’s body. And now Weezie is the main suspect. And what happened to that cupboard she hoped would make her career? Savannah Blues is a good read with fun characters, a plot that holds your attention and plenty of antiques-talk.

How Elizabeth Barrett Browning Saved My Life by Mameve Medwed is story of Abby Randolph, Harvard dropout and antiques dealer . Recently dumped by her philandering boyfriend, still mourning the loss of her mother in an earthquake and struggling to make a success of her antiques business, Abby has a serious case of the blues. At the suggestion of another dealer she takes a chamber pot left to her by her mother on the Antiques Roadshow, where she discovers the item is valuable enough to change her life. Unfortunately, there are others who want to get their hands on the chamber pot, forcing Abby to work up some gumption and stick up for herself. Abby’s journey to self-esteem and happiness makes for a good story, although I’ll admit I found the “poor me, I’m such a victim” stuff at the beginning a bit annoying.

Happy reading!

My dad was an early adopter of the tape cassette. Audio cassettes (as the past 30 years or so showed) had a good sound quality, were nicely portable, and held one or two albums of music depending on if you could fit one on each side of a 90 minute tape. As such, I didn’t meet an 8-track tape in person until the early 1980s while getting a ride from a friend’s mom. She had several strewn about the front seat of her boatlike 1970s car, one playing Willie Nelson tunes jutting out of a rectangular hole in the middle of the dash. That would be the last time I saw an 8-track up close until college.

8-track tapes grew out of a few earlier tape technologies of the 1950s and 1960s. Reel-to-reel tape was considered an equal to vinyl by many audiophiles, but it proved too fragile for portability. Several different companies worked on a portable version of the reel-to-reel; William Lear (the LearJet mogul) found success by creating the 8-track cartridge.

While these cartridges were rather simple, their operation is quite a feat to behold. Inside the cartridge is one large tape reel, around which the tape is looped and wrapped on top of itself. As the tape is pulled from near the center of the reel, the reel turns and pulls in the tape that had already been fed past the playback head. Friction-reducing coatings on the tape and a light coiling of tape allows the system to operate as smoothly as possible. The tape is pulled past the playback heads by a pinch-roller, half of which is mounted inside the cartridge. Each tape has (as you might guess) 8 tracks, each paired up in to four separate stereo programs. Each program lasted around 15 minutes (it varied depending on how the tracks could be broken up for song length), and ended/started with a small piece of metallic reflective tape. This tape told a sensor to automatically switch tracks, creating an unending loop of audio — something cassettes couldn’t do until much later.

In college, I was offered a treasure-trove of 8-tracks by my grandparents. They had found a box in the basement, none of my aunts or uncles claimed it, so I accepted it. Most were quite worn, so I learned how to repair and restore 8-tracks by getting these to play. While 8-tracks were relatively simple machines, they often were not manufactured with longevity in mind. Most 8-tracks, even ones still in their cellophane, may need some minor repairs before they can be played.

Most often, the metallic tape strip could weaken, resulting in a broken tape loop. If this happens during playback, the cartridge might have to be opened to recover the end that was ’sucked in’ by the rotating reel. An excellent replacement for the metallic splice is aluminum tape, often found in the plumbing or painting section of a hardware store. Another common repair is the sponge pressure pad, located in the cartridge and positioned to press the tape against the playback head. Again, the hardware section is the right place to find a fix. Sponge weatherstripping is an excellent replacement, provided it isn’t too firm. If the surface isn’t smooth enough to allow the tape to slide well, a layer of cellophane tape on top can help. Playing a cartridge with a loose splice or otherwise damaged will only damage the cartridge further, so all cartridges should be inspected before playing them.

I, unfortunately, have gone through a number of different 8-track players. Like the cartridges, players aren’t particularly complex, but few were made after the 1970s and are in significant disrepair. Happily, most are relatively cheap and moderately common. Two of the players I owned were even quadraphonic: quad 8-tracks were considered an improvement even over quad record albums, which had to encode the rear channels onto a stereo track. Quad 8-tracks used four separate tracks to create two front and two rear channels, improving the quality but reducing the length of recorded time by half. Quadraphonic playback decks are recognizeably by having four output channels on the back, and an extra ‘arm’ inside which detects a notch present on quad cartridges and automatically switch between stereo and quadraphonic modes.

8-track tapes are much easier to find than players, and rarely cost more than a dollar or two apiece in played condition. Collectors prefer unopened or near-mint cartridges, and rarer ones from the later years of 8-track production. Despite the waning interest in 8-tracks during the late 1970s, they were still manufactured and new recordings were distributed in this format until the late 1980s. Even as CD players were entering the market, some mailorder and record club companies were still selling 8-track recordings.

Because 8-tracks aren’t an “invest for your kids’ college tuition” collectible, most of their value is in the fun of tinkering. As with vinyl, numerous recordings from the late 1960s and 1970s are not available on CD, opening up new opportunities for discovering forgotten or overlooked bands. Car collectors looking for genuine period details would be wise to add an 8-track player, often installed under the dash, to their prized vehicles. Fans of 1970s style can find all sorts of players in retro-futuristic forms. The most fun, for adults and children alike, are 8-track recorders. These are most often found in single-unit systems that also included a record player or radio, but I’ve also seen standalone components that can be added to any stereo. Once you acquire a few duplicates or a bunch of ‘blank’ 8-tracks, you could be the proud owner of the only Green Day, Ruben Studdard, or Nickelback 8-tracks in existence.

To find out more, 8-Track Heaven has the most comprehensive information on 8-track tapes, including an excellent section on cartridge repair.

Phil Hale’s painted figures explode from the canvas, but against their will. Caught in awkward mid-motion, it’s more like they’re being shoved and broken as they get forced outwards, angry and stumbling from their reality into ours. It’s like a Tom Waits song in motion; charred, gritty, blind and twisted characters getting together for a ritual that we can barely understand, and this is why I love the man.

Hale is a mysterious figure. Where many modern artists, especially those who dabble as illustrators, have websites and biographies and make themselves as public as possible, he remains an enigma. Even his recently assembled website, which seems to be his first personal foray into the world of the digital, is serpentine and hard to decipher, with icons flashing and evading the cursor, more often than not leading you somewhere that you didn’t intend to go, and when you get there, you’re still not entirely certain what it is that you’ve found.

His most recent print release is called ‘mockingbirds/relaxeder’, published by Donald M. Grant, is a two-book set meant to accompany a recent pair of gallery shows by the same name. He’s only had two books previous to this, entitled ‘Double Memory’ (with artist Rick Berry) and ‘Goad’. The rest of his work, which is prolific, graces comic book covers and magazine articles, but often remains uncollected. The set retails for about 45 dollars, are jacketless and dark green, and are bound to each other by a single band of paper. They’re fairly narrow volumes and they don’t explore a very wide variety of Hale’s work, but they’re impressive in what they explore conceptually.

Affixed to the inside back cover of ‘mockingbirds’ on a small foam disc is a CD of music which accompanied the gallery shows, as performed by Golden Phone. Normally, these art book CDs are snooty and abstract compositions without any standalone attractiveness, but the 8 song album is beautiful - an echoey mix of Elysian Fields, Medeski Martin & Wood and Calexico, and worth the price of admission alone.

‘Mockingbirds’ is a deep exploration into a single image of an old and shirtless man, captured from many angles, many of the images simply titled ‘mockingbirds’, perhaps a reference to repetition or each image mirroring the previous one. The summation of all of these images, all of them slightly different and from various perspectives, sometimes with added or subtracted details [like the man’s head, or an item in the hands], gives the impression of someone walking through a dim room and blinking while reality betrays them. It’s as if Hale snapped a roll of film as he walked from the center of the room and out the door, every exposure on whatever his eyes settled on. It’s vaguely ‘horror movie’, and completely engrossing when viewed in rapid succession, almost as an animation. There’s plenty of time to go back of inspect each image more carefully. As the series progresses, we enter the more violent and familiar territory of Hale, but the references to the earlier ‘mockingbirds’ works are still revisited.

‘Relaxeder’, the second volume, explores Hale’s sketches and found-object photomontages. His sketches are torn and covered in tape, missing cut-out segments, and all in thick pencil lines. There’s an energy to them, all of them capturing action and motion in broad, general strokes. Hale’s photographs, subsequently, are completely static depictions of objects, which are usually small machines that are completely of his own devising. Disjointed, effectively useless, and really convincing. Perhaps most unnervingly, there’s an image of a severely truncated typewriter that only retains a few keys, cut and reassembled as if nothing’s wrong at all.

The two books comprise a fascinating exploration, and are a great addition to any art book collection. Once things like this sell out, their first editions usually skyrocket in price, so get them while they’re more common. Check out Allen Spiegel Fine Arts for more info and ordering information.

Today the antique furniture lover will have no problem finding beautiful dressers, bookcases, china closets and armoires, but it wasn’t always so. Until the 1600s, household items like linens and dishes were kept in boxy, lidded chests, much like the hope chests still seen today. The chest was the favored method of storage for centuries, as far back as Ancient Egyptian days, and could function as an extra seat or table in a pinch. The problem was that finding things buried deep at the bottom of the chest could be a challenge, so in the 1600s a drawer was added at the bottom of the chest, an innovation that would lead to significant changes in storage furniture. The drawer proved so popular that by the beginning of the 1700s, the chest-of-drawers was in use, with three or four drawers instead of one. At around the same time the armoire, or linen press, was developed, with shelves for folded clothes hidden by tall doors and a drawer or drawers in the base. In the 1800s the armoire was further developed to include a space for hanging clothes.

The 1700s saw many new styles in furniture as cabinetmakers took the idea of the storage drawer and ran with it. There was the chest-on-chest, or double chest-of-drawers, a taller piece of furniture that resembled two chests-of-drawers stacked together and the high chest-of-drawers known as a highboy that became popular in America. The curved commode was a popular variation on the boxy chest-of-drawers. In the dining room, the serving table gave way to the sideboard, a long, thin piece of furniture with a flat top for tureens and serving platters and drawers and cupboards beneath for storage. For the drawing room, cabinets and cupboards were designed with shelves enclosed by glass or other space intended for displaying books, ceramics or other treasured objects.

The word ephemera comes from the Greek word ephemeros, meaning ‘lasting but a day’, and so ephemera refers to anything transitory, short lived, or not meant to last. From a collector’s point of view these items are treasured because of their temporary status, regardless of their age. While there are many interpretations (or definitions) of ‘what is ephemera’ by collectors themselves, many people consider paper to be a key component.

Paper in and of itself is flimsy enough to lead a short-lived life and many ‘every day’ items of seeminly little consequence are on paper. When one thinks of ephemera, one thinks of such things as matchbooks, postcards, receipts, bills, brochures, photographs, flyers, stickers, advertising, packaging, letters etc. The things most of us throw away on a daily basis.

Again, these items need not be old to have value to collectors and historians. The thrill of collecting lies in the combination of the story the items tell, the rarity due to their temporary nature, and ironicly, the lack of interest by the general population to see any value in the items at all. Because these are things not meant to be saved, ephemera literally is the treasure picked from the trash of another.

Given this sort of a definition of ephemera, I see a new area in ephemera collecting: digital ephemera.

Today, technology and the internet offer us new possibilities of ephemera. I don’t refer to paper print-outs of emails, websites, and document searches, but to the digital format of these things themselves.

Many libraries and universities are creating digital collections. This allows them to keep the material, without the storage and maintenance issues paper requires. But there is more to the digital world than the mere preserving of paper and saving of space. There is tangible in the seemingly intangible. For example, entertainment.

MP3s are now just another means of listening to music — as were Edison cylinders, vinyl LPs, bootleg recordings, and import CDs. Will MP3s be valued for themselves? Many music collectors currently covet digital duplicates of rare recordings they would otherwise never be able to obtain, but perhaps MP3s themselves will charm collectors on their own. As will other sound, game, and video file formats. And why not? There are so many small bands, performance artists, flash animators, game hobbyists, etc. which work in digital mediums — with many works not available in any other format. (Or at least so few copies are made, and many are considered ‘toss-able’ too, to make for nary a one to be found in a decade!) What will happen to them as technology advances? Surely not all will be converted to the new media.

Think back and remember Beta video, early laser disc movies, and even the early silent films themselves… Not all of these were preserved, let alone copied to the latest technology. It would be vain and naive to think all of today’s films and other forms of entertainment would be saved when many of the great (and not-so-great) creations of the past have not.

I’d like to believe collectors will jump in and do the preserving.

The folks behind the Wayback Machine must feel similarly, for they now archive Moving Images, Texts, Audio and Software along with Web Sites. I imagine soon others will feel even more passionate and not only expand the categories, but will take it upon themselves to collect and store what appeals to them the most, ‘art’ or not.

For the ephemera collector not only preserves the art of the past, but they collect the mundane items too. Will databases and spreadsheets be as collectible as catalogs and ledgers? Will blogs be as desirable as diaries? Will signature lines, emoticons, avatars and chat room conversations be added to the collections of business cards, calling cards, photos, and correspondence? Aren’t the flash intros to corporate websites as valuable as their brochures? Aren’t the skyscrapper and banner ads as relevant as any other advertising? (Think of all that has already been lost to document the dot.com boom and bomb!) If one can find paper Wal-Mart receipts riveting, then isn’t the opportunity to save Spam, in its original format, equally as illuminating or entertaining?

I envision that in the not-to-distant future, there will be digital ephemera collectors as diligently saving the mundane scraps of our digital existence as paper folks do now. Only instead of protecting fragile paper in acid-free scrapbooks free from sunlight, these digital collections will require special archival needs of their own.

As technology changes, our definition of ephemera may not change — but it will surely expand. There must be collectors eager to gather our now-new technology as it becomes the retro stuff of yesterday, the vintage data of nostalgic memory, and even the quaint antiques of times gone by.