Old Stuff in Up-Country Pennsylvania by Earl F. Robacker is a 283-page ex-library hardcover published by A.S. Barnes and Company, 1973, photography by Stephen A. Karas and Bryden Taylor.  The dust jacket is contained inside a plastic cover.  The book is cloth bound with light tanning to the page borders and library markings to the end papers.  Otherwise, the book is structurally sound.  The book is in good condition.

Book Summary

Here is a different kind of book on the subject of antiques; it has almost as much to do with the people and places in a hitherto largely unreported region as it does with the antiques found there.  This very condition, however, serves to lend a live--and lively--quality to unsophisticated objects that might otherwise go unnoticed today--the apple-scraping box, the rein hold, the slate carving, the smokehouse kootsch.  Without an explanation as to what these are and why they came into being they would have the meaninglessness of such other unfamiliar terms as a drover's home or a shoepeg polisher.

The Pennsylvania up-country, which embraces the counties of Wayne, Pike, and Monroe, was historically a highly individual place.  The Pennsylvania Dutch who came up from farther south and the English-Irish who came over from Connecticut were interesting, too, even though as groups they did not always like each other very well.  It would be a little difficult for us today, for instance, to think of a church with its burying ground split down the middle s that the bones of members of one colonizing group would not have to mingle with those of persons of a different background. 

Illustrated with over 180 photographs of the different Pennsylvania Dutch antiques, including a number in color, as well as end-of-chapter lists of what collectors are looking for and buying in the up-country.

ISBN:  0-498-01211-5