Appraisals are difficult if not impossible
without photos. If you’d like to send
me a photo of your antique, please e-mail me first and get my
permission to
send the file. I often delete e-mail
from unknown addresses, especially those with attachments.
Next, when sending photos, please don’t send
a lot of high-definition photos as my mailbox will fill up and my
e-mail will
start bouncing.
I do purchase
things people offer me sometimes,
but it’s rare. I often advise people to
sell their items on Ebay directly. What
makes old stuff valuable or rare is primarily how many were made
originally. Next value can increase
with pristine condition or decrease with significant damage. Catalin radios were not common in the 1930s
and 1940s, but those which survived became damaged by sunlight, heat
from
operation, and cracked very easily due to the chemistry of Catalin
itself. A cracked, yellowed, warped
Catalin radio
may be rare, but is probably not worth nearly as much as one in good
shape.
You
have to understand where the “best stuff”
has gone over the past 20 years.
Sparton radios are good examples.
They were not as widely produced as other radios in the 1930s
and had
glass fronts, which were fragile. Next
you have collectors who have been grabbing all the Spartons can find
and
bidding up the prices aggressively in the past 20 years.
These radio experts have been scouring every
flea market and antique shop since the 1980s looking for the best
radios and
most of them have been found by now and are in private collections. So, the probability that your antique is
rare is very, very low.
I will be happy to tell you what your item is
worth,
provided you give me enough information.
Telephones are what I commonly get appraisal requests for and
they’re
very hard to put a dollar value on.
Check Ebay, especially completed auctions for items similar to
yours to
get an idea of the value. Telephones
were rented property of the phone company and companies who made the
most
phones, like Western Electric, would be using new parts and 20-year-old
parts
in the same phone depending on what was left over.
The 20-B candlestick phone is a great example.
That phone was made from 1904-1914 (perhaps
beyond) and in those years it changed a lot.
If you have one that’s perfectly intact from 1904 it’s worth
more than
one from 1914, which would have different (updated) parts.
