Friday, February 20, 2009

Estate Sales are Awesome

My neighbour invited me to an estate sale she heard about through a friend who collects books and sells them on Amazon. It was right around the corner from my house, and had lots of very cheap, albeit disorganized, ephemera. Very few things had prices and there was a long wait at the cash - so you just had to hope it would be reasonable. I got a bunch of silly things like these mini books. They had a whole collection of doll house acroutrements.
I bought three bags of these cheesy wooden birds. i wonder what they were for? I think painted plain white and glued onto a branch they might look really interesting.
They had quite a few old sewing patterns for 25 cents, so i grabbed a bunch. It was funny to see that they had some of the same ones i remember from my sewing days back in the 70's. I looked at a big bag of wooden thread spools, but opted instead to just take a full roll of brown seam binding.
I picked up a few random vintage paper things, like these silhouettes, two envelopes with interesting handwriting, a 1939 high school yearbook from across the bay in Crockett. It is not very thick, but i love the images and so many signatures. I also got a stunning Architectural trade magazine. it has floor plans of mansions and NYC apartments i just love pouring over. But the BESTEST thing i got today, is an actual audubon book from way back, with 435 bird illustrations. I mean like, i NEVER have to buy or download another bird image ever again. Have you ever seen a room in a magazine, where they practically paper the walls with images from an old book? It would be SO cool to use these images on a wall. I guess you'd have to use 218, since they are printed on both sides.

2 comments:

Seth said...

Great haul!! Those silhouettes are very cool.

Anonymous said...

oh, the audobon book looks great. Are you going to photocopy or actually cut it up? You should check the worth first!