Chats on Household Curios

In 1914, a collector of modest means sat down to write a love letter to the objects that surround us. Fred W. Burgess had spent years haunting antique shops and prowling attics, and he had come to believe something radical: that the most precious household relics often carry no remarkable price tag at all, only the weight of daily use and the invisible passage of generations. This book is his meditation on what we inherit beyond money, the brass candlesticks that lit a grandmother's table, the cracked porcelain figurines that survived a move or two too many, the odd brass key to a door long since rekeyed. Burgess writes with the gentle urgency of a man who senses that the old ways of living are fading, that gaslight is giving way to electric, that the parlor is becoming a thing of the past. He asks us to look at our own homes with new eyes and recognize the curate's cabinet of small wonders hiding in plain sight. For anyone who has ever held an object and felt, irrationally, that it was trying to tell them something.