ABOVE: A vintage Central Asian tribal carpet carries stories of discovery.
Apparently Christie’s is auctioning off a goldmine of rare antiques from the Southam family estate in a house (and by ‘house’ I mean ‘mansion’) not far from my house (and by that I mean ‘1970s apartment.’) A soup tureen may garner six-digit bids. A settee about the size of a condo-sized sofa — and there’s where the comparison ends — will have collectors clambouring to exchange it for heaps of cash.
Like the Antiques Road Show, this news keeps me well aware of the fact that most of the furnishings in my home is, relatively speaking, crap. When I shed my mortal coil, my numerous nephews might cherry-pick a chair here or a lamp there but they’ll likely sell the rest for one everything-must-go price on craigslist.
Yet every once in a while you read about some old lady who finds she’s got a find among her clutter of everyday things, like that garage-sale splatter painting that turned out to be a Pollock. I could be that old lady, I thought, as I started researching a dirt-coloured rug that’s been in our family as far as I can remember.
It’s a wonky little textile, featuring what looks like two bombs and some mysterious lines of arrows pointing in odd directions. It was intriguing enough for my mom to bring it home from a Sally Ann on East Hastings in 1969, and it was intriguing enough for me to save it from going back to goodwill a couple of summers ago.
I searched every book on Oriental carpets at the library, but soon found better luck in an online discussion group, mixing it up with some scholarly collectors of Central Asian tribal rugs. I posted a pic and was rewarded with well-thought-out replies.
Aside from informing me that the carpet was photographed upside-down (how embarrassing), they weighed in on ideas about the unusual design. I felt thisclose to discovering that the rug was a highly collectible rarity from the remote Steppes region of Afghanistan when one collector gently suggested it was a tribal knock-off of a more valuable style — and suffering from a bad case of faded synthetic dye. Pooh.
So this will be added to my one-price-for-the-lot collection of junk after all.
But the search did reveal something else of value: Communities of good-natured, intriguing people are just a click away.
And the value in little old things can be in the stories they hold.
