Owl & Twig
The Field Guide
How to identify, date, and value the things you find. Written from what passes through our hands, one estate sale at a time.
LatestArt & Paper
The printer's tray: 89 compartments, and why none of them match
The sectioned wooden tray on a thousand living room walls is a California job case, and the reason its compartments are all different sizes is that they are a frequency table of the English...
Nothing in that drawer yet.
Art & PaperThe Wish Book: how Sears taught America to circle things
For sixty years it arrived in late summer and was read more carefully than anything else in the...
Art & PaperM.C. Escher: what a real print looks like, and what he carried home from Amsterdam
He failed his secondary school exams, never took a mathematics course past eighteen, and spent the last thirty...
Art & PaperThe Dutch woodcut artist whose owls are yours to keep
Julie de Graag died in 1924. A century on, her owls, cats and mushrooms belong to everyone —...
Art & PaperCrewel Is the Thread, Not the Style — and Other Things Sellers Get Wrong
Wool on linen, four hundred years old, and the thing your grandmother stitched from a kit in 1972....
Art & PaperPaint by Number Was Invented in Detroit. Here's How to Collect It.
A Detroit package designer, a boss who hated his first attempt, and a hobby that put an oil...
Art & PaperFirst Edition or Fifth Printing? How to Read a Copyright Page
Almost every question about a book's edition is answered by one page and one row of numbers. How...
Art & PaperDuck Decoys: Why Worn Original Paint Beats a Clean Repaint
The most important commercial decoy maker in America was in Detroit. Here is how to read a decoy's...