A Book Review: Yard Sale America (by Bruce Littlefield)

Lest you wonder too long what sort of review this is going to be, let me say I am the proud owner of an advance copy of Bruce Littlefield's Yard Sale America.

 I was sent a CD a while back, and asked to review a "jazz" recording by Amos Lee.  It took me days to figure out some way to say . . . . . . . . . . . . . . jazz?  I have since not been asked to review any more music.  I'm sorry, but send me some music and I'll review it.

This may be a case of preaching to the choir, but I found Bruce's book delightful.   It spoke to me about a passion we share, and I learned a few things - me who has been a yard sale, estate sale, auction, dollar store fiend for about 3 decades.  Yes, I learned something.

It is not what I expected, though.  As a fanatic for old bottles, I know the typical antique books that purport to tell you the worth of things in dollars.  They are all wrong.  Kovell's, in particular, has the annoying habit of walking into an antique store, seeing something priced at ____, and then publishing that as the market value.

Bruce asks - and I am paraphrasing big time here - "Do you like it?" And the answer is, "Then it has as much value as you are willing to pony up."

Any watcher of Antiques Road Show has also been told this over and over.  If something is well-done, then it's good.  If it took someone weeks to do, and you can tell they put their heart in to it, and it's selling for $10, and you like it, bugger what Kovell's has to say.  Buy it!

At first, I was a little surprised at the amounts Bruce was willing to pay.   I was raised Western Colorado lower Middle Class, so keeping expenses really, really low is nano-etched into my red blood cells.  I almost always am a bottom feeder at yard sales.  But really, people do put things in yard sales in the hopes they'll get $50 for them, and this is an area I have been ignoring.  Now that I have a bit of money, why not fly down South with a thousand bucks, rent a moving van and spend 4 days working my way up to Cincinnati through the World's Longest Yard Sale?  Keep your Caribbean cruise, your Canadian fishing trip, your Brinks home alarm system.  I want to go yard saling in the South for 4 days.  Did I say I'm jealous?

What I did not expect, but I probably could have, is this is a design book.  Here I've been making excuses for our psychedelic-themed bathroom, and our western-themed coffee room, and our dark and brooding theatre-like TV room.  I walk into "normal" people's homes and everything was bought to match.  That's design, right?  Well, as it turns out, not necessarily.  Janie and I found a Picasso print at a yard sale, of brightly-colored stick figures dancing in a circle.  We also found a poster of a splat of water on a copy machine, with colored background.  They match!  It's design.

Another thing Bruce taught me in this book, however inadvertently, is to slow down.  The people you meet at yard sales are at least as interesting as their stuff, and you don't have to be racing off to the next sale if you're engaged in a rich and rewarding conversation.  If it's all baby clothes and Nascar Budweiser collectibles, okay, move on, but you've been invited into people's lives, and a large percentage of people are interesting.  Believe it or not.

We are taken into Bruce's world.  Bruce likes to garden, and seized the opportunity to move out of the city.  Bruce bounces up and down in anticipation waiting outside a "tag sale".  Bruce likes to entertain, and stocks a mean liquor cabinet.

I've always wondered what a "tag sale" is.  This book shed light on that.  It's an estate sale, or basically any sale held inside where the whole contents of the house is fair game.

The final observation I have about Yard Sale America is this.  When I was a kid, my parents had a motel in Colorado, and we had a lot of Texans come visit.  One day, I don't know how it came up but one day I was in the lobby and I recommended a book to an older gentleman.  He looked at me, took the book and flipped the pages.  "Ain't got no pictures", he said.  "Book ain't no good if'n it ain't got pictures."  Well, this old fellow couldn't read.  That made a great impression on me.

He'd like Bruce Littlefield's book.

It's got lots and lots of cool pictures.