Antiques Roadshow has taught us to look for fortunes in our attics--perhaps to find, as other lucky souls have, an Anna Poole Peale portrait miniature worth $5,000 to $7,000 or a Confederate sword worth $35,000. Focusing on 11 major areas--including Furniture, Painting, Silver, Jewelry, Porcelain, and Toys--the primer addresses the essential things buyers and collectors need to know, covering vital details for each category, such as shapes, styles, and patterns, provenance, periods, and motifs. A 32-page full-color section amplifies each chapter by illustrating numerous examples of styles and techniques, and individual items are fully identified, often with their appraised value. Above all, it helps even first-timers to answer the two key question every collector must face: Is it old? Is it valuable?
Dog House, A Love Story, is an inadvertent memoir. I actually meant to write about my dogs and my family kept butting in.
So the book is about fur and furnishings and about love: the very-mixed-blessing love I had for my son and my husband, the love we all had for our dogs (though maybe not all the dogs all the time) and the insane kind of love it takes to make a haunted house a home.
Throw in a lot of antiques, a couple of triumphs over adversity and more than seems fair of heart-breaking loss, and you have Dog House, a tale of dogs and marriage and life unleashed.
You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll be glad you don't own a dog. You'll be really glad you do.
Carol Prisant is the author of Good, Better, Best, the New York Times bestseller Antiques Roadshow Primer, and Antiques Roadshow Collectibles. She is also the New York editor of the Conde Nast publication, The World of Interiors, and has written frequently for The New York Times, New York Magazine, and Martha Stewart Living, among many others. She lives in Manhattan. . .with Ajax
