Old is gold - what are some most valuable items that could be resued ?

Agreed, Accepted. But then how does a Numismatist or a person who has just started collecting vintage and Antique stuff go about the passion or Hobby. The very simple and sensible answer is to “Go Online”. While trying to give you a peek in the Numismatic Collection of Old and Antique Coins and Jewellery and of course all the old book lovers. We have made an attempt to highlight the advantages of adapting to the modern times and purchasing online.

 

1. The prime advantage of purchasing Old Books, antique Jewellery and Vintage Coins online is that you can order them in the comfort of your home. The main advantage and ease of buying online is that you have wide range of old books and articles of Numismatic interest to choose from. Further if you do visit an exhibition to view Antiques of your choice you can spend only a limited amount of time searching for the item of your choice. Your search may not end with one exhibition. Visits to several exhibitions are also a possibility but could also be tedious at times. Whereas the advantage and ease of buying online is that you can take as much time necessary for selecting the old and vintage stuff of your liking. Taking more time to choose your articles and paintings helps you to zero in on the particular item that you may be looking for.
2. By shopping online get to save time and money by way of time and fuel cost, not to mention carrying the item purchased from the exhibition to your home.
3. The add on advantage maybe the range of old coins, paintings or jewellery not available on the antique dealers’ shelves which may be ingenious in nature and may also be one of its kind masterpieces rarely available in the open market.
4.  What’s more you have the purchase delivered at your doorstep.
5. The time factor of receiving the purchased item is drastically reduced when compared to ordering directly from a vintage dealer.

 

 

Old and Famous books and Authors

True to its saying, indeed old books articles like coins paintings and jewellery are worth their value in gold even today. You must visit an auction either online or in person to believe what you see and hear. The vintage stuff and antiques on display will make you watch in awe. Are they really what you hear about them? Well! You certainly need to attend and a vintage and antique auction because seeing is believing. Let’s start with Old books. They are popular and widely read old books, be it language, literature or Fiction. As a child you would have read P G Woodhouse, Enid Blyton and some Comics like Phantom, Mandrake, Tarzan and Superman. Not to forget the innumerable war comics published. Adventure books like Gulliver’s Travels, Red Riding Hood and Cinderella. Enter teens James Hadley chase, Sydney Sheldon and Robert Ludlum draw you towards them. Enter Youth the view widens and Books like Gone with the wind and your reading choice diversifies. William Shakespeare,  Victor Hugo, Fredrick Forsyth and the list goes on. Why are these old books and many other old books considered Gold? It is because of the content and unique wring style of the Authors’ of these books. Their value today is almost priceless. They fetch you more than twice the purchase value. Some of the must-read Authors are suggested here.  Louisa M Alcott, Jane Austen, James M Barrie, L Frank Baum, Elsie lincoln Benedict, Ralph Paine Benedict, Emily Bronte, Charlotte Bronte, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Lewis Carroll, Geoffrey Chaucer,  Cecil Chesterton, Walter Crane, Leonardo Da Vinci, Miguel De Cervantes, Daniel Defoe,  David Miller DeWitt, Charles Dickens, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Alexandre Dumas,  George Eliot, Edward Gibbon, Kenneth Grahame, Grimm Brothers, Henry Ryder Haggard, Thomas Hardy, Herman Hesse, Frances Hodgson Burnett, Homer, Victor Hugo, Frederic S Ishim, James Joyce, Franz Kafka, Rudyard Kipling, D. H. Lawrence,  Jack London, Niccolo Machiavelli, Herman Melville, John Milton,Lucy Maud Montgomery, Plato, Edgar Alan Poe, Josephine  Pollard, Beatrix Potter, Bertrand Russell, Anna Sewel, Garrett P Serviss,Mary Shelley, Robert Louis Stevenson, Harriet Stowe, The Bible , Leo  Tolstoy, Robert Tressell, Mark  Twain, Jules  Verne,

Virgil Oscar Wilde, H. G. Wells, Walt Whittman and P. G. Wodehouse.

 

Now how do you get your hands on such books? Simple you can either visit an antique book exhibition or just seek them online. The international book Fairs in Jan 2021 are listed below for your information.

January 2021

• Manila International Book Fair, Philippines.
• Taipei International Book Exhibition, Taiwan.
• Emirates Airline Festival of Literature, Dubai, UAE.
• Jaipur Literature Festival, India. ...
• Riga Book Fair, Latvia.
• Lahore International Book Fair, Pakistan.
• Feria International del Libro de La Habana, Cuba.

The Chennai Book Fair proposed to be held at YMCA grounds has been tentatively postponed to 1st February. Book Lovers flying around the world can drop into any one of these exhibitions during their free time after work or business. These book exhibitions are open late into the night. That is not all. Those book lovers in search of old books who cannot make it to these exhibitions need not worry. With the advent of technology all the exhibitions       are listed and displayed online. You can visit each and every exhibition Online browse through the books from the comfort of your living room. But it should be said that an ardent booklover would prefer to visit as many exhibitions as possible.

 

Coins, Paintings and Jewellery

Vintage, Antique is what you term old Coins, Paintings and old Jewellery. Any of these which is more than 100 years old is termed as Vintage and those between 50 and 100 years old are called Antique. This search for old pieces, old jewellery and old paintings is an expensive business. All the three are generally dealt with by Antique dealers. You can of course visit exhibitions conducted annually to explore the domain. You can also visit the e-store of various dealers and even participate in their online Auction.

The oldest known paintings are approximately 40,000 years old. José Luis Sanchidrián at the University of Cordoba, Spain, believes the paintings are more likely to have been painted by Neanderthals than early modern humans. Images at the Chauvet cave in France are thought to be about 32,000 years old. They are engraved and painted using red ochre and black pigment and show horses, rhinoceros, lions, buffalo, mammoth or humans often hunting. There are examples of cave paintings all over the world—in France, India, Spain, Southern Africa, China, Australia etc.

Various conjectures have been made as to the meaning these paintings had to the people that made them. Prehistoric artists may have painted animals to "catch" their soul or spirit in order to hunt them more easily or the paintings may represent an animistic vision and homage to surrounding nature. They may be the result of a basic need of expression that is innate to human beings, or they could have been for the transmission of practical information.

In the case of Old coins and Jewellery

Numismatics is the study or collection of currency, including coins, tokens, paper money and related objects. While numismatists are often characterised as students or collectors of coins, the discipline also includes the broader study of money and other payment media used to resolve debts and the exchange of goods.

Numismatists (coin collectors) today, "generally" collect items in three main areas of interest. The areas most collected today are Ancient Coins, mostly of Greek or Roman origin, Medieval or hammered coinage of the Modern era. The history of old coin collecting is as old as money itself. To the uninitiated, coins are merely curiosities like flies in amber, but their real position is far higher than this. Most of them stand out as illustrations of history, many of them as keys to historical and other problems. In addition, they provide us with numberless examples of antique art.

 

It may be safely asserted that there are few coins which do not stand as reflections of the time and country that produced them or which do not offer a symbol and summary of some interesting aspect of life. No other objects of art contain so much within so small a compass and condense the history of the civilized world. The first means of acquiring the necessities of life was by means of barter, exchanging items such as cattle, agricultural produce and skins or furs. Then with the knowledge of metals and an appreciation of gold and silver came the idea of simplifying the process. The obvious choices were metals as they had the advantage of being portable and the demand for them was constant.

 

The ancients adopted metals as a circulating media and assigned a monetary value to ingots of gold and silver. The purchase by Abraham of the cave of Machpelah for the sum of four hundred shekels of silver was transacted with bars or ingots. The shekal of the Bible stood for a unit of value of gold or silver. Gold or silver has since been the primary means of assessing the value of most items.

 

The first metal coins were crude affairs. While the originator of the first metal stamped coin is very much in doubt, it is generally agreed that they were first issued on one of the islands of Greece. These coins bore a face, the reverse bearing simply a cross mark of the die. The Greeks, Persians and finally the Romans minted coins of silver, gold and bronze. Crossmark of the die.

 

Old, Vintage and Antique Jewellery

For those who love and collect jewellery, there is a romantic, mystical beauty to vintage and antique jewellery which is virtually impossible to match these days. Very often hand-made by skilled craftsmen with extraordinary attention to detail, the subtle sparkle and old-world techniques are unparalleled by modern design. Buying antique, vintage and second-hand jewellery is GST-exempt, which means you should automatically pay 20% less than the equivalent piece made new. There is also no manufacturing costs to factor into the price. With old jewellery you are buying the same quality gemstones and materials without paying a premium for the seller’s overheads. What’s more, many antique jewellery dealers are small businesses which sell via stalls, showrooms or online, saving on expensive retail costs. This tends to be reflected in the price of their jewellery.

Just as when buying a new car, you pay a ‘new’ price for new, modern jewellery. That purchase value then drops as soon as you buy it simply because it is no longer new. With antique and vintage jewellery, the piece has already gone from ‘new’ to ‘old’ before you buy it so its purchase value remains the same.

In the same way that classic cars are always in demand and retain their value, so antique jewellery will always be collectable and desirable and retain theirs.

Today, most modern jewellery is cast. Antique and vintage jewellery was almost always hand-made or at the very least (in the case of newer, vintage jewellery) hand-finished. Even in high-end bespoke modern pieces, it’s almost impossible to find the same level of quality and workmanship as we regularly see in old jewellery. In the past, jewellery was made by highly skilled artisans who took a long time creating bespoke pieces for rich clients. As a result, the workmanship is often more refined than even the best jewellery made today. It takes significant resources to mine gemstones and precious metals which makes it hard to produce jewellery in a truly environmentally friendly way. Buying antique and vintage jewellery makes you a conservator rather than a consumer. Conflict diamonds (also known as “blood diamonds”) only came into existence in the 1980s with civil war in Africa. Diamond jewellery created before this time are untarnished by this unpleasant and badly regulated controversy and finally, most antique or vintage jewellery dealers are one-man-bands or small teams and family businesses, so buying old jewellery supports small businesses as opposed to big corporations. Jewellery was not mass-produced (or even widely available to the masses) until recently so it is highly unlikely that you will ever find a duplicate of a piece of antique or vintage jewellery. Identical matches were more or less impossible.

When it comes to antique jewellery, many pieces will have been created as a one-off by a skilled craftsman for a member of the upper classes. Jewellery was not mass-produced (or even widely available to the masses) until recently so it is highly unlikely that you will ever find a duplicate of a piece of antique or vintage jewellery. Identical matches were more or less impossible. When it comes to antique jewellery, many pieces will have been created as a one-off by a skilled craftsman for a member of the upper classes.