Tuesday, January 24, 2006

Valuable

Over the weekend I decided to splurge and pick up that expensive and not entirely practical table I'd seen in the antique store.


plane table cropped

I did need a table for this end of the couch. So it's not really a completely frivolous purchase!


It's very cool, and way too stylish for the likes of me, but having discussed its provenance with the shop owner my inner historian tut-tuts about it. It was originally an ashtray table, circa 1935, but as smoking has fallen out of favour demand for such items has dwindled. So the shop owner took the ashtray off, and replaced it with a piece of contemporous trench art that he'd acquired at auction. The two are from roughly the same era, and they look good together, but they don't technically belong.


plane table detail

Not many coffee tables come with their own kamikaze attacks!


I guess all that does is make it a historical art object rather than a proper antique. And in 100 years' time, the fact that it was cobbled together in 2006 will only add to the rich tapestry of its heritage, like having bakelite light switches in a 19th century house.

3 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Morning Blanders!
Cool table! Very cool indeed!
You know, I think the aircraft might be a Spitfire (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supermarine_Spitfire) - the long nose and elliptical wings are quite distinctive. First flight was 1936, so the model couldn't be earlier than this. Just a little bit of erudition for you to casually drop into conversation at your next party.
It's doubtless excessively pedantry on my part, but it's quite unlikely that a Spitfire would undertake a kamikaze attack on your coffee table. Kamikaze attacks on coffee tables were much more the preserve of the Mitsubishi Zero.

9:45 AM  
Blogger Eric B. said...

Sierra-Delta-5 moves in to strafe the surviving h'ordeurves. Gook bastards hit that convoy back up by the Salsa and took out his brother on the SS Cheeto. He'll make them pay, oh will he make them pay.

1:25 PM  
Blogger MC Etcher said...

Cool, neat table!

1:42 AM  

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