The Antiquers by Elizabeth Stillinger is a 296-page hardcover published in 1980 by Alfred A. Knopf, and is a stated first edition. The dust jacket has light shelf wear and surface rubbing. Inside, the book has some underlining but is otherwise clean and the binding is tight. The condition is good.
Book Summary:
Elizabeth Stillinger's book provides the first authoritative chronicle of the colorful, eccentric collectors who led the American people into an interest in, and then a passion for, American antiques. The story has its beginnings in the nineteenth-century tidal wave of fashionable machine-made furnishings that swept the older handmade objects (furniture, ceramics, silver, pewter, and other decorative pieces) out of use and banished them to attic and barn. There they remained, unheeded, until the first inquiring strangers--apparently somewhat deranged--appeared at the door to poke about and buy. Portraying these pioneer antiquers and those who followed, Mrs. Stillinger gives us their remarkable personalities and their relentless quests; analyzes the patterns that characterized their collecting; and charts the course of their influence on the ever-growing popularity of American antiques, from the mid-nineteenth century through the great era of collecting that ended with the Great Depression to the present.
