Premier Antique Show, Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Oct 28-30, 2011

The Premier Antique Show Metro Toronto Convention Center, 255 Front St West on Oct 28th, 29th and 30th 2011 is well stocked with furniture, fine art paintings, fancy dishes, antique tools, sporting goods, coins, candy dispensers, musical, medical, military instruments all laid out on beautiful wooden tables or locked away in wood and glass cabinets, or under lights in glass and steel display cases. Each dealer has invested in professional hangers, lighting fixtures and has suitable furniture for showcasing their wares. Most have illuminated display cases on top of which rests a stack of freshly printed business cards. They’re at this show to sell stuff, and also to network and make connections with pickers, dealers, art directors, props buyers, interior decorators and designers. Read Shopping for Treasures in Toronto Thrift Stores on Squarespace.

Antiques Shows Are Like Museums on Acid

Have you ever been to a really high-end antiques show? It’s kind of overwhelming. There are so many beautiful objects of art, and history from all over the planet all collected together without any context or any attempt at sorting out their individual stories, and so to a logical mind, it’s like a museum on acid. Pick up any one object and somebody will scurry over and shed their knowledge and you can eat it up and keep eating and getting more and more knowledge from every dealer until finally, you’re full. And then you just want out. You have to get away as fast as possible before you throw it all up over somebody.

The advertisement boasts, ‘Decorative arts, Canadiana, vintage designs and accessories, fine jewelry, and objects of art.‘ And that’s accurate. It’s the best stuff on the pro tour; the Premier shows are like the PGA of Antiques. Someday in the near future the miracle of cyber computing will make available an advanced inventory management software that will be able to sort everything out and tell user where to find all the bits and pieces of a particular period, niche or genre of collecting, no matter how small.

Each object is a piece of many stories, and today the premier antique show is a kaleidoscope of high end history and culture that ignores shoes, ships and sealing wax to focus on cabbages and Kings. There are cameo broaches by the bushel, bronze statues, Bakelite telephones, long steel swords, authentic military medals and mint condition model airplanes. The elephants are called pachyderms here. There are fine art paintings and art deco signage and lots of great pottery.. But there are NO antique glass bottles or insulators anywhere - there are however some stoneware jugs and crocks but these are hidden away under the cabinets and chests of drawers, and made visible only to the person who's looking for them, and wants to find them.

Antique Dealers Don’t Like Canadian Pickers TV Show

At one point I had an interesting exchange with some very articulate and knowledgeable people with some interesting insights into the cable TV show craze sweeping North America. The rise of such mercantile concepts as Pawn Stars, and other antiques pickers has TV companies scrambling for new concepts in this niche and many of these folks have had phone calls or emails from one television company or another. And to my surprise I discovered that this crowd likes American Pickers TV show, but does not care much for the Canadian version. They noted how Canadian Pickers only seems to shop at well known antique dealers' houses and shops wherein of course they cannot possible find a bargain in the true spirit of being a picker. And more. These snippets of text I scribbled on my pad,
“Its just a TV show and you can't be a real picker on TV. “
“They don’t rip people off - they get ripped off. They pay too much !“
“And the stuff they buy is what’s hot, not quality. They buy art deco signs and TV antiques, old gas pumps and reconditioned juke boxes. Show pieces. I’d like to see one episode on Georgian furniture and then we’ll see how much they really know.”
“The TV Pickers like to buy show what the young people today call ‘vintage’”
Standex Electronics reed switch is a magnet thingy inside a small vacuum tube.

How To Find the Antique Show in the Metro Convention Center

Heritage Antique Shows www.heritageantiqueshows.com

Premier Antique Show, LIST OF DEALERS

Andrew Zegers, Oshawa, ON
Antique Diamond, Toronto ON
Antique Clocks and More, Toronto, ON
Antiquing with Helen, Toronto ON
Artophile, Port Perry , ON
Barry Ezine, Moffat, ON
Bayshore, Kingston, ON
Bernardi’s Antiques, Toronto, ON
Carmen Berdan, Toronto, ON
Cherry Hill Antique, (CADA), Grafton, ON
Christel Art, Montreal, PQ C.R.
Cornish, Exeter, ON
Cynthia Findlay Antiques, Toronto, ON
Decart Inc, Longueuil, PQ
Daniel Tsang, Montreal, PQ
Farirholme Antiques, Toronto, ON
Fred Louckes, St Catherines, ON
Gallery de Louve, Montreal, PQ
Gary Dawson, Aurora ON
George Brown, Toronto, ON
Glenn Manor Galleries, Shakespeare, ON
Great Britain, Toronto, ON
I Miss You Vintage, Toronto, ON
Inquisitive Antiques, Toronto, ON
J. Taylor Antiques (CADA) Hamilton, ON
Jane Vining, Toronto, ON
Jonny’s Antiques (CADA), Shakespeare, ON
Manley & Sheppard, Toronto, ON
Michael Rowan (CADA) Green River, ON
Paul Murray Fine & Decorative Arts (CADA)
Kitchener, ON Patricia’s Antiques, Cobourg, ON
Paul Braybrook, Sarnia, ON
Peter E. Baker Antiquaire (CADA) Elgin, PQ
Peter Vernon, Toronto, ON
Poirer Schweitzer, Montreal, PQ
Polikers, Greenwood, ON
Richard Fienstead Holder, Toronto, ON
Richard Fulton, Toronto, ON
Royal Antique Rugs, Toronto, ON
T. Donald (Perovic) Antiques, Toronto, ON
Times Past Antiques, Ottawa, ON
Turner Chapel Antiques, Oakville ON

Glover Boys visit Meyersburg Flea Market

An article on Dumpdiggers.com details an Adventure in the Meyersburg Flea Market. The story explains how the youngsters sought information and transported a fresh dug amber cork top food flavouring bottle to that location for appraisal.

Exploring the lush countryside west of Warkworth Ontario the Glover Boys found a surface dump filled with bottles and mechanical debris.


Practiced dumpdiggers they took the time to sink test pits all through the site to identify the historic perimeters in order to gain understanding of the whole sum of buried material. It's important to know the answers to questions like, how old is this dump? and where was the gate by which all the dump wagons delivered the trash? And finally everyone was eager to dig down and find out for certain what exactly was moldered away as antique treasure right beneath our feet?



Three foot deep test pits should show signs of period dumping before any further digging occurs. The tell tale clues generally include white furnace ash soil layers atop bits of glass and pottery and the rubble of bricks and cement. Dig deeper and you'll find orange soil and that's where the old bottles lurk.

Dumpdiggers Arena: Best Bullet Battle

It's almost midnight and the Best Bullet Battle inside the Dumpdiggers Arena is about to end. The winning photo will be prominently displayed in the Dumpdiggers Hall of Fame for the rest of time... But who will win? This is what the final hours of the first real battle looked like:


The Arena photo battle, inside the new Dumpdiggers.com antiques and collectibles social networking community website, has been the subject of some criticism. The question, 'Who needs it?" and the complaint, 'Its too competitive' are the most common bits of negative feedback that I encounter, but also there is controversy, and confusion on the part of the developers. Its true the battles have grown from a murky lagoon of confusion and doubt, right up until this point when I can declare... Eureka! It works.

Vindicated, I believe the Best Bullet Battle proves my silly notion works, and diggers and eBay collectors deep inside their niches, perhaps even deeper and more obsessed than I, will find this to be a pleasant distraction and healthy competition.


This is what the administrator sees on the other side of the battles. The check box marked Chose This As Winner is present under every photo in case there's a tie. Using the check box the Admin can choose and make final decisions. If all boxes are left unchecked, the winning photo (the one with the most votes) will automatically be transferred to the Hall of Fame, and the winning member will be rewarded with 25 shovels and have his or her photo displayed in the uppermost section of his or her own mydiggerspace as a 'Blue Ribbon Photo'. In a perfect world, this honour would pay that member a stipend of 1 green shovel per week per blue ribbon photo, but that's something the developers seem to be having a real hard with...

In this battle you can see that eleven people have voted and four of the images have received votes - that means that eleven green shovels were dispensed to voters, and eleven shovels were issued to four members that submitted these 'Grey Ribbon Photos'. CORRECTION That's what it should mean, but when I check my own shovel bank account I can see that I, BobbyC did not get rewarded for voting, this time... But with more beta testing and notes to developers, I'm sure it will be corrected for next week's battles.

Next week's battles will include 'Freshly Dug Prizes' and I hope members will write stories about the recovery of their prizes in the allotted space on the image cards. I also hope the developers will fix the bug that enables the image cards to be viewed before voting occurs.

Arob's Blue Ribbon Photo:

Unless there is a sudden rush of votes for another contender, this is the image that will win the Best Bullet Battle in a few short hours.

This image was uploaded by Arob - the image card reveals that the items actually belong to stonebottles but they were photographed by Arob with his own camera, on his own hand. The dynamic composition and quality of ther image alongside the accompanying text is probably why it was chosen as the winner by five members.

This image will be visible in the Hall of Fame and indexed as Best Bullet Nov 9-15, 2008 for the rest of time. Arob will have this Blue Ribbon image displayed in his mydiggerspace and (hopefully) will earn one green shovel per week, forevermore.