by Editor | Nov 3, 2026 | Prints and Early Photography
Real photo postcards are where photography stopped being something you went to a studio for. Between about 1903 and the 1930s, ordinary people and small-town photographers turned out millions of them: main streets, train depots, county fairs, floods, family farms, and...
by Editor | Nov 3, 2026 | Prints and Early Photography
Cabinet cards are the bigger, bolder successor to the carte de visite. They’re the stiff portraits you find tucked in Victorian albums, propped in old frames, and stacked in shoeboxes at estate sales, usually showing a family, a couple, or a stern-faced...
by Editor | Nov 2, 2026 | Prints and Early Photography
If you’ve ever opened an old family album and found rows of small portraits mounted on stiff cards, you’ve probably met the carte de visite. These little photographs were made by the millions in the 1860s and 1870s, and they still turn up everywhere:...
by Editor | Oct 31, 2026 | Art and Auction Catalogs
Most people think of an auction catalog as something you flip through before a sale and toss afterward. Collectors, dealers, and researchers see it differently. A good catalog is a record of what was offered, who owned it, how experts described it, and often what it...
by Editor | Oct 31, 2026 | Antique Jewelry
Few kinds of antique jewelry carry as much feeling as mourning jewelry. A black brooch, a ring inscribed “In Memory Of,” a locket with a lock of hair behind glass: each was made to keep someone close after they were gone. Today these pieces are among the most...
by Editor | Oct 31, 2026 | Antique Jewelry
A handful of London firms have shaped British jewelry for well over a century. Their names turn up inside ring boxes, on the backs of brooches, and in the provenance lines of auction catalogs, and they can add real value to a piece. For collectors, knowing who these...
by Editor | Oct 31, 2026 | Prints and Early Photography
Pull a Victorian paper peepshow open, put your eye to the little hole in the front, and a flat paper booklet becomes a deep, crowded scene: a ballroom full of dancers, a tunnel stretching under a river, the glass halls of the Great Exhibition. It’s a simple trick, and...
