About this item
The national treasure hunt, Antiques Roadshow is, in its third season, the most popular show on PBS. Every week it draws millions and millions of viewers to the edge of their seats as independent dealers and specialists from the country's leading auction houses appraise family heirlooms and flea market finds alike. Now this knowledge, authority, and passion is distilled in the Antiques Roadshow Primer, an introductory guide to American Antiques and collectibles. Antiques Roadshow has taught us to look for fortunes in our attics--perhaps to find, as other lucky souls have, an Anna Poole Peale portrait miniature worth $5,000 to $7,000 or a Confederate sword worth $35,000. Focusing on 11 major areas--including Furniture, Painting, Silver, Jewelry, Porcelain, and Toys--the primer addresses the essential things buyers and collectors need to know, covering vital details for each category, such as shapes, styles, and patterns, provenance, periods, and motifs.
About the Author
I live in Manhattan with a sort-of embarrassing-but-beloved three-pound dog, and these days, I only write and take Bean to Central Park. But I used to be, in no particular order: a page in a library - back in the days when libraries needed pages - a model, an antiques dealer, an appraiser, and a restorer of old houses.
For the past twenty-seven years, I've been the New York editor of of the UK magazine, The World of Interiors. I've also authored four books of non-fiction: Antiques Roadshow Primer (a New York Times best-seller) ; Antiques Roadshow Collectibles (the companion volume to the above) ; Good, Better Best (do-it-yourself connoisseurship of antiques) ; and Dog House (a tender memoir.)
Catch 26, my first novel, is about Frannie, an ordinary woman who's been married for so long to a man who doesn't love her that she isn't angry anymore, she's just resigned. Frannie's never had a career, let alone a job, and she grieves every day of her life for the children she hasn't been able to have, but longed for.
Then one day, Frannie goes to a new hairdresser, who -seemingly out of nowhere -offers to help her change her life. Not with a wash and a cut, however. With a tempting, unthinkable suggestion that will involve her in a diabolical arrangement. It will leave her profoundly changed, and ultimately, in a struggle for her soul.
The story is an old one. It's been told many times, but never as I've done it here: with a female hero and a female villain. It felt like it was time.
A footnote: The reader might like to know (or, I might like the reader to know) that all the steamier sections of this book__due to the fact that I met my husband when I was seventeen and we were married for forty-two years__are solely the result of extensive research. Plus a little imagination.
Dog House, A Love Story, is an inadvertent memoir. I actually meant to write about my dogs, but my human family kept butting in.
So the book is about fur and furnishings and about love: the very-mixed-blessing love I had for my son and my husband, the love we all had for our dogs (though maybe not all the dogs all the time) and the insane kind of love it takes to make a haunted house a home.
Throw in a lot of antiques, a couple of triumphs over adversity and more than seems fair of heart-breaking loss, and you have Dog House, a tale of dogs and marriage and life unleashed.
You'll laugh. You'll cry. You'll be glad you don't own a dog. You'll be really glad you do.
Carol Prisant is the author of Dog House, Good, Better, Best, the New York Times bestseller Antiques Roadshow Primer, and Antiques Roadshow Collectibles, and now, Catch 26, her first novel. She is also the New York editor of the Conde Nast publication, The World of Interiors, and has written frequently for The New
