Here the business of selling is practised as a fine art. The attendant is so well bred, well groomed, so condescending and obliging you feel yourself a criminal if you escape him without making a purchase. You say: "I should like to go back and see that satinwood chair again." "Ah," he replies, "that is a most interesting piece; King Edward often sat in that chair. It belonged to the Hon. Oliver Grimes, a great friend of King Edward; it was the King’s favourite seat when he visited the Hon. Oliver at Redcote Manor. And here is the oak table you admired so much as we passed along. We know the pedigree of it. It came from Monkwood Hall, Derbyshire. It has been in possession of the family since the year 1620. We bought it at the Hall last week, and so it has never been in the trade. How beautifully the frieze is carved; what a fine patina it has formed; it shines like a mirror; surely the butler must have polished it every week when he waxed the oak floor. It has never been damaged or repaired; it is genuine all over. It is a precious and faultless piece of Jacobean oak, and the price is only...!"
There are dangers and pitfalls besetting the buyer of old furniture. Even in the garden of antiques a slimy serpent spoils the smiling landscape. Fraud is not unknown side by side with honest dealing. Not all furniture is old as it looks. That is where that predatory rascal called the faker creeps in and preys upon humanity in general and the innocent amateur in particular.
There are sly manufactories of old furniture busy to-day in shoddy workshops, building up immaculate high-grade chairs, tables, cabinets, out of oddments of oak and mahogany collected from the scrap-heap of broken and decayed furniture. New wood is added in parts where necessary to complete the transformation, and when these modern antiques are blended, stained to harmonize in colour, and a glowing patina rubbed on by the artful dodgers, it takes a keen eye to detect the villainy of the deed, as that arch-swindler Gaspero Bandini said to his fellow-conspirator: "We must make it as antique as possible: we must sell the old wine with the dust on the bottle."
There is no fixed market value to old furniture as there is to postage-stamps or War Loan stock. The dealer sets his own price on his goods, and the cupidity of the public guides him how best to do it. He is a keen observer of human nature, and plays up to its little weaknesses for his own advantage, and he does it smilingly.