"Luck Is When Knowledge Meets Opportunity"

Collecting is pretty addictive.
(Image via Maureen Stanton, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money).

So says antique dealing whiz Curt Avery (a pseudonym) in Maureen Stanton's book on the flea-marketing and antiquing world, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money. With Avery's sturdy guidance, Stanton scavenges the realm of bottle-diggers, gramophone dancers, shrunken-head purveyors, stalwart dealers and tentative feelers at the tables and tents of America's auctions and antiques fairs.

There are thousands of books out there for collectors and wanna-be dealers, but few capture the carny atmosphere and canny arcana of flea-marketing quite like Killer Stuff. It's a behind-the-scenes peek at how vintage and antique dealers make their trade, told through the eyes of one successful dealer who has built a steady business over decades of self-taught and hard-won lessons in eyeing the prize. Part road biography, part History of the World As Seen from Card Tables, Killer Stuff is also a friendly and fascinating compendium of information as diverse and diverting as anything you might spot among the estate lots.

Stanton takes us from the first known weathervane (48 B.C.E., Athens) to the development of auction theory and its implications for economics (William Vickery won the Nobel Prize for it in 1996), with side trips to the introduction of tea to England (documented by none other than my personal hero Sam Pepys) and the invention of heroin (as an aid to kicking opium). As Stanton unpacks a slew of factual finds she leads us through her encounters with passionate collectors and errant oddballs, fakes, fanatics, and fabulous finds, investing her tale with the rugged and eclectic charm of the hunt.

Stanton became interested in her subject in a very fitting way: It grew on her over a lifetime. "Scavenging is a habit that dies hard, or maybe never dies," she writes, recalling a childhood of “dump picking” with her frugal mom who reassembled old rotary phones as an avocation. In her college days, Stanton haunted junk stores and flea markets and "wore 'bag lady' coats I now know were swing coats from the 1940s," along with "1950s dresses, costume jewelry, funky plaid men’s blazers (one in mustard color—still have it)."

Still, Stanton didn't think about writing about her interest until Avery, who'd been a friend in college, looked her up when he was attending a glass auction in her city. "He needed a place to crash. I went with him to the auction and took notes. A few years later, I asked to tag along with him to a flea market. I found myself drawn further and further into that world. It was fascinating and entertaining."

Surprising, too: "I thought I was entering a world with fairly low-level vendors, maybe even down-and-out people who had an edge of desperation. I didn’t even know my friend had transformed himself into a really knowledgeable, successful dealer." Stanton became acquainted with "this whole subculture of people...who are experts and authorities at little cells of our collective history—the guy who sells and repairs only antique and vintage toasters.... the collector who self-published a book on Wistarburgh glass, the oldest glass manufactory in the country." Many of the most successful denizens of the flea market circuit are as knowledgeable as art historians and scholars--and sometimes more so. "These squadrons of people are lay historians, quasi-curators, and they are driven by a passion and love for objects—not money, because it’s just not an easy way to make a living."

Now that she's been on the road with the best in the business, can Stanton spot a fake or a find herself? 

"I have definitely gained knowledge that has helped enormously." In fact, Stanton has shopping tips and a few other bonus items at her website. Yet, "I still get caught by reproductions, though, like a pair of Roseville candlesticks I bought about a year ago. Within a minute of researching them at home, I realized they were repros. I’d been careless and hasty and made some classic mistakes.  The price was too good to be true, they were dirty so I did not see that there wasn’t really any “wear” where there should have been but didn’t look closely enough, lighting was poor and I didn’t have a flashlight or magnifying glass, they’d been sitting there for hours in the open in a large group shop that dealers pass through all the time, so they would have been gone if they’d been real. I didn’t know the dealer or his reputation, but it was a lower-level indoor flea market so he wasn’t really knowledgeable (though I think he knew these were repros and did not let on to me). I’m doing a lot better than I used to in spotting reproductions. Fakes are harder to tell because someone went through a lot of effort to make something look old, but I do know how to tell fakes in a few categories. I think you have to worry more about fakes as the price goes up. I paid $35 for those candlesticks and that was the cost of my lesson, and a mistake I’ll never make again."

Although the book is full of insights into aspects of collecting, this is not a how-to, but a firmly driven narrative about the thrill--and frequent upsets--of the hunt for killer stuff.

"As I was researching and writing over seven years, I kept thinking someone was going to come out with a similar book at any minute since this story hadn’t been told," recalls Stanton.  No books, so far, "But there has been a huge onslaught of reality TV shows," including a new competitive show called Market Wars, just announced by PBS. "There was one when I started—Antiques Roadshow," Stanton remembers. At last count, Stanton says there are now 45 shows on the topic, with 30 of them being launched in the last two years or so (from 2010 to 2012). As entertaining as they are, none of those shows gives an in-depth or truly authentic or holistic look at the subculture because the medium doesn’t allow for that sort of depth."

Killer Stuff and Tons of Money is available in hardback, paperback, and ebook. You can still probably pick up a first edition of the hardcover--and keep it in good shape if you do. It could be worth a lot more one day.