Researching Antiques

Series Summary

Products, tools and decor are constantly being created. Throughout the history of mankind, one thing that society can count on is innovation. However, even though new items are invented, old ones still hold an incredible value. It's always interesting to see how society has made its progression. Whether for beauty, rarity or age, some individuals thrive on collecting items of the past. These antiques represent a previous era in human society that many hold dear to their hearts. Antique collecting is an ancient hobby that shows no sign of slowing. But, be warned. Despite the recent trend to go vintage, an item is only considered an antique if it is at least 50 years old. Antiques can come in a variety of forms, such as books, furniture, jewelry and tools, and there are infinite options for the antiquer. In this free video series, get some tips for collecting antiques. Jan Braunstein is a certified antique appraiser. She discusses some options for collecting antiques. Learn about popular antique collectibles, such as fishing lures, costume jewelry, teddy bears and fountain pens. Braunstein explains how to find out the value of antiques by using reference guides and magazines. Identify the condition of antiques with her tips as well. So, take a moment, and learn more about antique collectibles today!

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is Jan. Before you start scanning you want to do your research and your reference prior to your selection, so basically, you want to know what the heck you're doin' before you go out there and see all that cool stuff. You want to be able to tell how old it is. You want to get a rough idea of how much it's worth, and we all know that, you know, Internet is available to do that, and the Internet's interesting, but you know, you can't necessarily peruse or go through all the different items, so one of the things that I like to do, especially like right to get some night reading you know, you might want to get some nice books and take a look at, you know, what, take a look at subject by subject what is available, and how you can differentiate between, differentiate between all the neat stuff, because if you look it up on eBay, you might see one item at a time. If you go to an antique mall you're going to see one item at a time. So what I've done here is selected a grouping of books that are probably the most collectible and hot items out now, and we'll take a quick little editors tour of these, and I'll do like a little book review of each and tell you kind of what to look for, cause' there's some great stuff out there, and there's an amazing amount of stuff that they've put in these books and it, you can't believe there's so many; for instance, fishing lures."