Innholdsfortegnelse for November 1, 2021 i Kovels Antique Trader

DALLAS – A fresh-to-market work by Gil Elvgren that was bought at a garage sale for $5 has just sold for $87,500. The owner of the work even tried to give it away three times, but luckily, she researched the artist and brought it to Heritage Auctions, where it sold in a recent sale of illustration art. The oil-on-canvas calendar illustration by the great American pin-up artist is titled A Weighty Problem and from 1960. The painting was reproduced in Gil Elvgren: All His Glamorous American Pin-Ups by Charles G. Martignette and Louis K. Meisel (Taschen, 1999). The illustration was one of six Elvgren works offered in the auction, including two others that also sold for five figures: Measuring Up, Happy Holidays from 1963, shown above, hammered at $68,750, while…

Iwasn’t even sure how to pronounce the latest toy craze my grandsons were going crazy about. Who is Pokémon? Who is Pikachu? Who is Goomy? Why do they want these cards so much? But all of a sudden there is “Pokémania” and if you were paying attention to the news, adults have been fighting over these cards at stores. Now stores have stopped displaying them and after you have to ask the cashiers if they have Pokémon cards, and are limited to how many packs you can purchase! You can imagine my surprise to see Pokémon on the cover of the latest Antique Trader (September 15, 2021). I didn’t know anything about their history, or what makes them valuable, or why the latest craze. The article was very informative which…

The thrills and chills of Horror Movie Posters offer classic fright night fun. Growing up in La Mesa, California, a small city just east of San Diego, Arthur and James Mitchell’s home was stuffed with Hollywood props, projectors, 16-millimeter films, movie magazines and – most importantly – movie posters. In its early days, La Mesa was in the movie-making business, and the brothers’ father, Lt. Col. George J. Mitchell, Jr., was a big film fan. As a teenager, Arthur hung one of his dad’s old movie posters on the door of the bedroom the boys shared because he “thought it looked cool.” Turns out, the poster was more than cool. It was one of only two surviving movie posters for Dracula, the 1931 horror classic starring Bela Lugosi. That bedroom…

CALIFORNIA Every first Sunday of the month, Alameda. Alameda Point Antiques Faire. Mar 13-14, 2020 Alameda. Alameda Vintage Fashion Faire. Reopening Oct 3 and running every first Sunday of the month through May, Palm Springs. Palm Springs Vintage Market, PS Cultural Center at the Camelot Theater, 2300 E Baristo Rd, Palm Springs. For more info, visit palmspringsvintagemarket.com. Every second Sunday of the month, Sacramento. Sacramento Antique Faire, located at Sleep Train Arena, East Entrance, Sacramento, has reopened with new COVID-19 protocols in place. SH: 6:30am-3pm, rain or shine. ADM: $3 (children 16 & under free), parking is free, no pets please. Food and ATM on site. Oct 23-24, 2021, Half Moon Bay. Lyonessa Collectibles’ Fall Half Moon Bay Antiques & Collectibles Show and Sale, at the I.D.E.S. Society Hall, 735…

Some believe a warm-hearted greeting of “Happy Halloween!” is best done verbally on the day itself, at the front door, while dropping candy into the plastic pumpkin buckets of vibrating, pint-sized trick-or-treaters. And while it’s always a good idea to acknowledge the hordes at your door on Halloween, it’s hardly necessary. Kids are on a costumed mission. As long as you’re handing out Kit Kats, Skittles, Peanut Butter Cups or other like candies, you could mumble shout “Happy St. Patrick’s Day” and they wouldn’t care, so focused are the mobs of masked munchkins racing through our neighborhood. So many houses. So little time. If the holiday’s front line doesn’t work, how should you cheerfully welcome friends and family to these festive times, whose roots stretch back more than a thousand…

DALLAS – Illustrator Robert Peak is so often cited as “The Father of the Modern Movie Poster” that when you Google the latter, you inevitably get the former. The ad man and maker of Time magazine covers painted more than 130 film posters in the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, and was feted time and again “for injecting vitality and vibrant colors” into those works, as The New York Times noted upon his untimely death in 1992. His original painting of a Marlon Brando movie poster for Francis Ford Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War epic, Apocalypse Now, has just set a new record for the artist, after selling for $212,500. The most iconic artwork of Brando as Col. Kurtz was a centerpiece of the recent Illustration Art sale at Heritage Auctions. Peak’s…

Anyone who owns an old house, it’s safe to say, has given at least a passing thought to its being haunted. In my case, that’s an understatement, particularly during a time when I was obsessed with historic ghost stories by American women. In these long-forgotten tales, the dead — always female — pops back to stir things up for a widowed husband, nosy sister-in-law, or just the next poor gal to inhabit her earthly abode. The stories held real creeping horror for me, but fascination, too. How would I react if some spectral sister dropped in? By the time we bought our first old house, I pretty much took it for granted that I’d see a ghost. When weeks passed without a sighting, I went on the offensive and sat…

Donley Auctions, Fontaine’s Auction Gallery and Hess Fine Auctions are offering collectors a wide variety of antiques and collectibles in October, November and December sales. Fontaine’s of Massachusetts and Hess of Florida each have clocks and timepieces central to auctions scheduled on Saturday, October 23. At Fontaine’s, which is in its fifth decade of selling quality timepieces, more than 400 lots will be offered in its American & European Timepieces auction. The top lot includes a highly important E. Howard & Co. and Hezekiah Conant four-pendulum isochronal regulator clock, circa 1888, with maintaining power and four separate escapements. The clock is 96 x 33 x 21 inches, and the estimate is $400,000-$600,000. One of the top clock lots at Hess’ Clocks, French Furniture, & Fine Art sale is a Junghans…

Dubbed “The Dean of Halloween,” Mark B. Ledenbach has collected and studied vintage Halloween memorabilia since the 1980s. His book Vintage Halloween Collectibles is considered the definitive guide on the subject. In the spirit of the season, Ledenbach offers an historical view on the holiday and shares ten favorites from his considerable collection. The antecedents of Halloween in the wider world are somewhat murky and, frankly, don’t interest me much. Well over a thousand years ago, ancient peoples like the Celts celebrated the end of the harvest season in practices that had definite religious connotations. Beginning in the 1550s, All Saints Day was observed on November 1, with the night before, October 31, thought to be the night the dead returned to be venerated. Over a long time period, this…