Whether you’re looking to sell antiques to turn a profit or buy them and collect your very own pieces of history, you’ve got a host of options available to you. From malls and local markets to small towns across the country boasting hole-in-the-wall antique shops, there are plenty of places to buy and sell antiques of high quality at the best prices possible.
That’s especially true now that the market is going digital. On TikTok, #antiquestorefinds gets millions of views, and major auction houses like the Dallas-based Heritage Auctions now rely heavily on online-only sales. With these avenues drawing in younger digital natives—including millennial and Gen Z buyers looking to buy sustainable furniture and invest in fine art—the antique market is stronger than ever, and a Statista report notes that it sold over $11.3 billion worth of art, furniture, and more in 2023 alone.
What that means is that you’ll need to expand your know-how if you want to successfully navigate both physical and digital antique spaces. Buyers and sellers alike can benefit from learning more about appraising pieces, how to spot a good restoration, and how the antique market works as a whole. To get the quickest but most informed insights possible, why not pick up an ebook?
Ebooks: your handy guides when dealing with antiques
Ebooks contain all the expert advice you need from antique dealers and antiquarians with years of experience, all wrapped up in a convenient digital package. You can fit as many as you want on your preferred device, then take notes, add highlights, and even place bookmarks so you can instantly refer to relevant tips even as you appraise a piece personally or from home. More importantly, they can address the fact that books on antiquing are hard to come by and that compiling all the titles you need can get pricey, especially if you want to focus on a specific collectible like coins or furniture.
With today’s digital platforms, you can easily look up ebooks relevant to antiquing—and you don’t have to buy each title that interests you individually. Subscribing to Everand’s library of art ebooks means you can read as many works as you want from its dedicated Antiques & Collectible section for a flat monthly fee. That includes titles like Ebay and Beyond: What’s Hot and What’s Not in Antiques and Collectibles and Come Collect with Me: Musings on Collecting and American Antiques, all of which you can download offline for easier reference. A library card provides similar benefits. That’s perfectly illustrated by what’s available at New York’s public libraries, which allows residents to freely sign up for the Libby app using a library card. Through Overdrive, Libby can connect you to the database of Kovels Antiques, Inc. In turn, that will let you access countless resources on antiques and collectibles, including ebooks. That said, it’s worth checking out what libraries offer where you live, such as if they subscribe to apps like Libby.
To get you started, though, the following ebooks can give you a leg up in today’s antique market.
The best titles for improving your antique know-how
The Ultimate Guide to Antiques
Antiques don’t have to be show-stoppers. Reader Digest’s list of valuable antiques finds that even everyday items, including old toys and newspapers simply gathering dust in the attic, can be worth so much more than you initially thought. But how do you know if they’re worth buying, or if you’re being offered the right price for them? That’s where The Ultimate Guide to Antiques comes in. This ebook covers the different types of antiques, what they’re worth, and exactly how you should go about buying or selling them to get the best prices possible. You’ll also learn how to hunt for the right pieces in crowded marketplaces and how to care for them afterward. With additional insights from notable antique experts, this ebook is truly one of the best ultimate guides to antiquing you’ll read.
Dust to Lustre
If you’re a buyer aiming to breathe life into worn but hidden gems, a seller wanting to polish their offerings before going to market, or someone concerned because their pieces got damaged in transit, turning to an expert can help. Restoration services can easily bring antiques back to their former glory. However, wooden artifact conservator Thomas Heller notes that it can be a long and detailed process. For furniture alone, a restoration professional needs to consider the materials to use for structural repairments, the varnish needed to deliver a client’s preferred finish, and how they’ll help the antique function in museum and utilitarian settings. In fine arts, these considerations extend beyond restoring frames to assessing loss of paint and replacing discolored varnishes. With all these factors coming into play, restoration only becomes more challenging, with more opportunities for things to go wrong, especially since matching the likes of wood species and paint colors gets harder as time goes on. To ensure you get the results you want out of restoration services, it can thus help to read up on what they involve. One ebook you can try here is Dust to Lustre: The Pleasures and Pitfalls of Antique Restoring. It’ll teach you more about different restoration tools and techniques, bolstered by a comprehensive history of antiques and practical tips from professional restorers. It’s the perfect read for informing the discussions you hold with your own restorer as they work on your pieces—and, if you take a fancy to it, this ebook can even give you the advice you need to start your own restoration business.
Antiques Don’t Bounce
If you want to learn more about the inner workings of the traditional and modern digital antique market, there’s no better expert to get your ebooks from than Richard Bullivant. He boasts nearly half a century of experience, joining his first antique shipping company in 1977—and since then, he’s worked his way up from student trainee to company sales director, gone on countless buying trips, and acted as a courier between parties on both sides of the Atlantic. With Antiques Don’t Bounce, you’ll gain better insights into how the trade of both antiques and fine arts has evolved over time, from where and how they’re bought and sold to the ways they’re safely shipped all over the world—the kind that can help give you a better feel of how to buy, sell, store, and ship your own pieces as you navigate the market yourself. The best part is that Bullivant shares his decades of experience through amusing anecdotes, making this a great and quick read that’ll help you learn and give you a laugh at the same time. Antiques Don’t Bounce is the first in a trilogy—so if you enjoy this work, consider continuing to expand your antique know-how with Bullivant’s next title, Antiques Won’t Fly.