Those of you who enjoyed seeing the Ornamental Wood Company catalog may be interested in reading about the R.J. Horner catalog I just acquired over on the Horner blog.

Not everyone has dipped their toes into the murky pool of buying antiques online. I wrote the following list of tips in the forum and thought I’d clean it up and post it on the main blog for a wider audience. Hopefully, some of these tips will aid the journey.

Tips for buying on Ebay or other online Antique Merchants:

1. All too often the pictures that accompany an online sale item don’t do the piece justice or just don’t “disclose” enough about the item’s condition. In general, merchants who have been in the business for many years do much, much better with photos than the average Joe tossing an attic item up for sale on Ebay. If you aren’t happy with the quality or quantity of images provided online, ask the seller to send you more of them and be specific about any focus areas that you’d like them to be sure and photograph.

2. Often these photos are darker than we would like for providing detail, so buy a tool like Adobe Photoshop Elements or a similar photo touch up tool that provides a brightness or shadow/highlight adjustment feature. You’d be amazed at how you can lighten almost any photo to allow you to see more detail. I took the following image and adjusted it in about 2 seconds in Photoshop, allowing me to see more detail than in the original photo.

3. Condition, color, and patina surprises are inversely proportional to the number of photos an item listing provides. The more angles, perspectives and lighting changes that the pictures convey, the less chance for an “I wasn’t aware of that…”. For example, on this lamp I am about to sell. If I didn’t provide you with the second, unlit photo, would you realize that the top and bottom slag panels are different colors? If I didn’t bother to include the second photo you might not have known until you received the lamp. In this case, I feel the two colors would be a welcome surprise, but a surprise nonetheless.

4. Ask the seller for information on condition, repairs, breaks, scratches and “anything else I should know” and get it via email. You now have a permanent record of their portrayal of the item.

5. Save the online listing description text and images for later reference in case you have a problem upon receipt of the item. Do not bookmark the listing in your browser. Instead copy/paste to a file or save via the browser save feature. Their listing may disappear some time after the sale so you can’t count on it as a permanent record. I had purchased a parlor set and when I received it the upholstery was punctured and a leg was broken. I was not present upon delivery due to being out of town, but spoke to the auctioneer and referenced the photos of the items that they provided during the sale as evidence that it was not received as expected.

6. Check the shipping cost beforehand to prevent heart-attacks. One of the biggest surprises to buyers buying items online for the first time is how expensive it is to ship that 133 lb marble table to Tuscon. Sometimes sellers will ship small items themselves but will not ship large items. Read the terms and conditions to see what the shipping policy is. Ask the seller for recommended shippers to contact for quotes. You may also ask Rare Victorian readers via this forum for recommended shippers. Try to use one that others have used previously before you experiment.

7. Realize that you may not receive your item for several months after winning. Ask the shipper what the shipping schedule would be when you request quotes. Shippers need to consolidate multiple shipments by region to make it economical and this can cause a delay.

8. Pay by credit card when possible so that you have another safety net in case you need to dispute a problem with the item. Paypal allows you to pay via your credit card at the time of payment if you so specify.

Tips for buying items sold on Ebay Live Auctions:

1. Ebay frequently runs online auctions for items simultaneously as the items are being sold in a conventional live auction house environment via their Ebay Live Auctions site. In this case, you will be bidding against other online and in-person bidders in real time. Bids for these items are either taken as absentee bids via the Ebay interface in the days leading up to the auction or live during the auction. You will not know the current bid price for these items until the lot is being sold live since absentee bids are kept secret until it hits the block.

2. Absentee bidding for an item is disabled shortly before the live auction on the day of the event. If you really want an item, leave an absentee bid at least a day in advance so you don’t miss it. There have been many times that I intended to watch the event live to bid on an item and a change in my personal obligations wouldn’t permit me to attend when the auction came around so I missed it.

3. You must register in the days leading up to the event to be assured that you get approved to participate. You cannot just attend an Ebay Live auction at the last minute and bid without registering, though you can watch with bidding disabled. The turnaround on registration approvals can vary from immediate acknowledgment to days.

4. If you’re bidding live via Ebay’s bidding console, you’ll never know when the item will be auctioned off timing-wise, so you may be leaving the browser window open and checking back over the course of the day for your specific item to hit the lineup. You may find yourself blocking off the better part of a day to wait for it to come up for bid.

5. Pay attention to the progression of items being sold over time. If the same item appears to be up for sale for 20 minutes with no change in the bids, your browser may have frozen and you need to restart it.

6. Check the auction description to see if items are auctioned in numeric lot order. Some auctioneers clearly state that they do not sell in order (lot #32, then item 18, then 156, then 7…). These are very frustrating since you need to sit in front of the window all day waiting for your specific item of interest to come up for sale or provide an absentee bid in advance.

7. There is normally a buyer’s premium charged to the buyer when buying via the Ebay Live Auction format. An auctioneer may have a 15% buyers premium when bidding in person but 22% when you buy via Ebay Live Auctions. Read the auction terms for details.

8. Realize that there is a time lapse between submitting a bid via the live console and when it is registered by the auction house as a bid. Live in-person bidders’ bids are being submitt
ed at the speed of light to the auctioneer (a wave of a hand in the audience). When bidding online, you’re limited by the speed of your typing skills, your Internet connection and all points between you and the auction house personnel monitoring the online bids. You will need to be alert, type fast and submit the bids quickly so that they do not close bidding before you hit the enter key.

Yes, There is More Risk Buying Online

Realize that even with all of the above followed, you may get surprised when you finally receive the item. In the end, you are buying something you’ve never seen or touched in person. For the convenience of not having to be there live, you are taking a risk that it will be to your liking. Start with less expensive items until you feel comfortable with the world of buying this way.

There are many more tips to be conveyed but that is a reasonable starting point. I welcome other tips from you in the comments section.

Ever see historic masonry patched up with white, modern mortar? Not a pretty sight.

This is off-topic, but may be of help to others as it was for me. As an owner of an older home, I was having problems finding mortar that would match the color and texture of the mortar used 121 years ago to build the exterior of my home. Around the property I also have stone walls and flagstone patios that were added in the 1920s or 30s for which I had the same problem and a yet a different style of mortar.

I ran into this company which appears to be a good source for historically accurate mortar for use in repointing or complete masonry rework. They have a handy reference page to help you identify the style of pointing used on your historic property and I found the style of mine in one of their samples, shown above. They also allow you to send them a chunk of mortar for them to recommend a particular mix for the best match. Their site also enables you to search for qualified professionals if you are not so inclined to do the work yourself.

Many of you have expressed interest in seeing more pages of the catalog for the Ornamental Wood Company and I’m investigating ways to do this. I would not only like to provide this catalog, but others as well over time, so rather than find a quick solution, I’m trying to decide upon the best means to accomplish this for the long haul. Since I’ll be launching the revamped website sometime in April, I will try to have the catalog display solution coincide with that.

One of the key issues to work out is how to prevent wholesale downloading of these valuable catalogs. The individuals who have these in their possession spent money to acquire them and it wouldn’t be unfathomable that someone could attempt to take a downloaded version and resell it. Striking a balance between sharing this important information while protecting the owners of the originals is something to resolve. I also believe that we’ll get more contributors of these items if they know that there are some controls in place.

Some of these catalogs are at libraries and I think I’ll have a better shot at getting their approval to make them accessible to us if they know that the viewers can reference the documents while not downloading. For example, the Schrenkeisen catalogs will require approvals from the Winterthur Library in Wilmington, DE.

Thanks for all your interest in this and if anyone has original Victorian furniture-related catalogs that they’d be willing to share with the Rare Victorian community, please contact me.

I’m certainly open to feedback on this topic.

Well, I’ve been looking for something like this for quite some time. These are excepts from a 43 page catalog exclusively detailing ornamental wood pieces that furniture makers could purchase to incorporate into their furniture. This catalog is from 1874 for Ornamental Wood Company of Bridgeport, Conn. They are certainly not the only manufacturer of these adornments from the time, so there are still many catalogs yet to be found out there.

Offered for sale in the catalog are doorknobs, shutter knobs, escutcheons, medallions, rosettes, panel ornaments, brackets, leaves, heads, curtain pins, sleeve buttons, jewel boxes, and ornamental buttons for clothing - made “In Natural Woods”.

The above page is one of the most interesting to me since it shows some familiar elements that we’ve all seen adorning furniture we own or see in the market. There are no carved bust furniture arms available in this catalog so I am still looking for a source that supplied some or all of the furniture arms for Jelliff, Schrenkeisen, J.W. Hamburger, and others.

In the images below you will see carved elements that are represented in the Ornamental Wood Company catalog that had been utilized on antique furniture made during the period. The lion head image is from the Herter Brothers bookcase that I previously featured in my blog postings and it is item #58 in the catalog. The top rosette on the bed footboard is from page 16 in the catalog. The female head on the table skirt is one of the heads pictured at the top of this post.

Thanks go out to Steve Rowe, a new Rare Victorian reader who is the owner of the original catalog. I hope Steve continues to share more of his knowledge and resources over time with the Rare Victorian readers. Thanks for sharing the images, Steve.

If any of you have resources or a story to share with Rare Victorian readers, please drop me a line. Thanks to contributors like Steve, we all learn more about this period of furniture-making that we all enjoy.

I would also like to open up the blog to other writers. If you would like to express yourself directly to the Rare Victorian readership and share some Victoriana with us, contact me. As this is a blog and not Time Magazine, we do not have to be professional writers, so don’t be put off by any concerns there. Over time I would like to add additional writers to supplement my postings and provide more content and value to the readers. It will take time, but that is a longer term goal.