vintage
On dreary wintry days like today, I love to wander through antiques shops on small-town Main Streets. I love the smell, the dusty library quality, the racks upon racks of kitschy junk mixed with beautiful loved things, the snooty old women who perch on stools behind the front counter and and watch you balefully as they work on crossword puzzles, their lips pursing and their fingers clutching their pens a little more tightly when you pull the 1894 map off the wall because the tag ($65!) has slipped to the back of the frame.
I suppose I was supposed to be shopping for wedding stuff (that’s all I’m ever supposed to be shopping for these days), but I got bored with that and bought books instead. Oops.
I’ll have to head back to one of the stores next week to see if the polished aluminum 1960s sugar/flour/coffee/tea canister set and I are meant to be. It was a bit more than I wanted to pay, and so I usually let such things rumble about in my head for awhile to see how badly I really want them. I don’t know why I bother—I always do go back.
The last time I did this I managed to hold out for an entire month before breaking down and returning to one particular shop to purchase the giant Simplex cafeteria clock (c. 1960s) that had been pulled from a school that was being demolished. It’s about 16 inches in diameter, non-functioning, and hard to hang because of the three-inch deep mechanism on the back. For now, it perches on an end table in my living room, propped against the wall next to The Bane of My Fiancé’s Existence, a purple glass mid-century lamp I received as a gift from an elderly Indian doctor— a man who, on the same visit, gave me a rocking chair, a 1960s school desk, and a shoelace strung full of his deceased wife’s bangle bracelets. I have no idea why the fiancé hates that lamp so much. He hates all my vintage lamps. I think we are doomed to always have the exact opposite taste in lamps, as he likes things blocky and squat and wooden (read: ugly), and I like colored glass and ethereal curves or art-deco angles (read: lovely).
Anyway, the books. I got a really lovely set of 1938 E.P. Dutton editions of A. A. Milne’s When We Were Very Young and Now We Are Six. They’re in fantastic shape considering their age, and the red-ink illustrations are wonderful.
The real triumph, however, was the most curious edition of Alice in Wonderland. Well, that’s what it calls itself—it’s actually both of the books, Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There—bound together and sold as a single Alice. It lists Goldman Publishing Company of Chicago as its publisher, and it doesn’t have a publication date, but I’d guess 1930s or 1940s. Judging by the condition of the binding, it has probably only been read once or twice. I bought it because it was a cheap Alice in nice shape and I collect them, but when I got home and started to page through it, I discovered the most wonderful thing: it’s bootleg! Or whatever you would call it: the title page clearly promises “With Original Illustrations By John Tenniel,” but the actual illustrations are definitely not Tenniel’s work. They’re the most elaborate copies, with all the details, but—well, I don’t want to call them shoddy, but they’re certainly not particularly skilled. The shading is simplified, Alice is oddly misshapen, and judging by the artist’s depictions of the Cheshire Cat and Dinah’s kittens, I don’t think he had ever seen a cat in real life. It’s the most peculiar, wonderful thing, my bizarre bootleg Alice.
