• Stickley on Craigslist part 2 – and more

    I got over a dozen emails from those of you who found our Stickley-on-Craigslist aggregator (a page that lists all the Stickley items for sale in 15 major American cities’ Craigslists, filtered for those that include photographs), so I not only wanted to remind those of you who may be shopping for a major holiday gift for your Craftsman furniture loving spouse, but also to introduce something new…

    I’ve made variants of the same pipe for a few other search terms. Remember to bookmark this page, as these aggregators will always show the most recent entries for these terms, whether you check them today or next year:

    And remember, if you use Firefox or Safari (now available for Windows, too!) or another browser that lets you use live bookmarks, you can simply drag the rss feed right into your menu bar – or add it to your favorite newsreader or start page.

    Also, while I was playing around with Yahoo Pipes, I created a news aggregator – similar to Google News, but this one not only pulls in news stories, it also illustrates them with new and hopefully related photographs from Flickr:

  • Arts & Crafts on Ebay: September 2007

    Lots of A&C copper, furniture & various knick-knacks of interest to Arts & Crafts collectors and aficionados up on Ebay this week. I’m not including prices since I’m writing this on Monday and by the time it goes up on Tuesday morning, the current bids may all be a bit higher than they are now; I did try to select only what I thought were underpriced / good bargain items.

    copper: Lots of copper, some nice and some crap. Ignore all the "I was told this was Roycroft but it’s unmarked" claims (or this guy, who inexplicably includes the word "Roycroft" in the name of an Joseph Sankey copper pitcher) – they diligently marked all their pieces, and while some of these unmarked pieces are nice items, they are not Roycroft so don’t be tricked into paying a premium for them. Same goes for the folks who list items as "Stickley era" or "possibly Gustav Stickley?" – they’re just using the shotgun approach to get as many people to see the listing as possible, and while you can’t fault their sales acumen, you certainly shouldn’t give money to these ethically-challenged dealers. Here are some attractive pieces which seem to be sold honestly and without the tricks listed above:

    furniture: Again, avoid the folks who have no idea what they’re selling. If it seems too good to be true (a Stickley Bros. armchair for $100?), it probably is; there are many dozens of cases of unscrupulous dealers affixing labels or making fake marks on unsigned pieces to drive the price up, so be careful. The following pieces seem to be listed accurately and fairly:

    lighting: You would be amazed (or maybe not) at the number of jerks who list their cheap made-in-China knockoffs as a "Dirk van Erp original." However, not all ebay sellers are ripoff artists:

    architectural salvage & etc.