THE TWINS

Horse’s leg

The twins were a final purchase.

A dealer friend of mine lay on his deathbed. Bald, pale, and breathing with difficulty, he had asked me to help him with one final deal. He had a family heirloom - a large Victorian taxidermy panorama (said to have been assembled by an ancestor) that needed to find a home. I had driven down to his family’s place at the shore to look it over, and we spent one last afternoon together. He knew he was close to the end, and his doctors had told him that the cancer was no longer responding to treatment. Still: he wanted to at least make it to the Spring, and to one final Brimfield: to set up one last show one last time.

Almost a year before that final meeting he had shown me a grossly enlarged lymph node and a white spot in his throat that had been diagnosed as malignant. He was planning to start treatment after he got back from a show he had scheduled for the next week. That was my friend down to the ground: one of those dealers for whom the business was everything; he was as hardcore as they come. Criss-crossing the country, from the Northeast to the South and West, from New Jersey to Massachusettes to North Carolina to Texas and back all year every year, he was indefatigable. He never missed a show. He was boisterous and engaging, with a steady sales patter, a quick wit and an ear for a terrible pun.

We had gotten up to our share of mischief over the years, concocting ridiculous schemes and bending a few rules. He had a great eye for the whimsical, the bizarre and the ridiculous, and he always picked up a few real treasures along the way. One day he called me over at a market and said: “Hey Evan - have I got a leg for you! A really beautiful leg! Wanna see a leg!?” And it was a beautiful leg: a 19th century skeletal mounting of a horse's foreleg that stands about as tall as I do, with impressive iron work running through the carpal bones and the elbow joint. It still stands in my library - one of my treasured possessions.

My friend had managed to make it through two Brimfields while battling his cancer. Visibly weakened by the treatments, he would set up at our local market in the dead of that Winter, curled up in his car with the engine running, and with his tables full. He had more recently packed up a bunch of large boxes and scheduled a show in Los Angeles when he realized that, finally, he could go no further. As I sat on the edge of his bed we talked about his final illness: the pain evident in his raspy voice, his shortness of breath. “I can’t even stand up any more. I’m too weak to get out of bed.” My friend told me that there was one last drug the doctors were going to try, but it was a long shot.

As a three-time cancer survivor myself I know that, while sympathy is so very appreciated, real engagement can often feel even better; anything to take one’s mind out of the body (if only for a short while). "What’s in all these boxes?" I asked. “That was supposed to be my LA show” he said: “The one I didn’t make." So we unpacked those boxes and sorted through the objects from his final curation. He told me about all the pieces, and where he had acquired them sounding, for a little while, a bit more like his old self. The Twins lay wrapped in an old shirt, packed away in the final box. They were just the kind of thing he would pick up: enigmatic, bizarre and whimsical. “How much?” I asked. He gave me a price. I didn’t haggle. We shook on it. I packed them up, told him that I loved him and that I’d find a home for his piece.

It took me a few weeks, but I finally did find a customer for the panorama. As it happens my friend died not long afterwards.

I still think about him often: I miss his hearty greetings, his ridiculous banter and his whimsically weird eye. But every dealer will have their final sale; goodness only knows what mine will be.

Old Friends and New

When Obscura Antiques and Oddities officially closed on December 31st, 2019 I had big plans. After 24 non-stop years in New York City retail I had decided to take a year-long break. I was going to travel to all those places I’d always meant to visit, but never had the time. Tokyo, Berlin, Barcelona, Reykjavik: there were so many cities at the top of my list - too many for one lifetime.

But it was not to be. Just a few short months after Obscura closed, the COVID-19 global pandemic hit, infecting millions, killing hundreds of thousands, shutting down international travel and bringing life as we all knew it to a halt. It was a time of lockdown and introspection, a time for the counting of blessings and self-reassessment.

I had considered getting out of the antiques business altogether: all those years of running one of the busiest little shops in NYC had left me burned out and ready to move on to the next adventure. I considered doing something else, being somewhere else, reinventing myself and starting all over again.

But the old loves do linger, and some obsessions never lose their hold. After six months of COVID-imposed isolation I was itching to get back in the game. It was then that an old friend gave me a call: he had a space at the People’s Store in Lambertville, and would I care to split it with him? At first I was hesitant: I didn’t miss the rigors of retail (and I was still dealing with a pile of paperwork in the wake of Obscura). Also: I had sold almost everything I had at Obscura and COVID had paralyzed much of the antiques business: in-person auctions, flea markets, house sales, antiques shows - nearly everything had slowed to a crawl or stopped completely. I still had my connections, and there was still private buying, but I would need a lot more than that to start again.

So I found some nice old display cases and started haunting the reemerging flea markets. Buying with a slightly different eye, focussing on design, industrial elements, original artwork, textiles and religious articles - I wanted my new business to reflect the twin realms of spirit and matter, and all those liminal things that fall in between.

So here I am, sharing a little space in Lambertville, starting again. After all the madness and intensity of those high-octane years in the Big City I’m putting together another life in a quieter place. But a few things haven’t changed: my first love is the history of science and medicine; natural history continues to be the focus; the 19th century is still my aesthetic obsession, and mourning will always be observed.

Welcome to Obscura West.