OLD CURIOSITY SHOPS.

Sun (Christchurch), Volume III, Issue 699, 8 May 1916, Page 4

OLD CURIOSITY SHOPS.

Shopping does not seem to have fallen off' in many directions, and curiously enough not in some directions in which it might have been most expected to fall off' (says the "Queen"). We all know the little unobtrusive old furniture shop which, in the days before the war, we used to rejoice to find when motoring about the country-side. While one waited for lunch or tea in a little town one had the habit of wandering out to rind an old curiosity shop. True, they had most of them become of late years much more sophisticated than they appeared to be; bargains in the real sense wove not so easy to obtain; and there was more than a suspicion that the air of innocence about some of the shops did not necessarily mean genuineness in the goods for sale. Still, if there were fewer astonishing bargains, there was always the chance of finding at a fair price something rather out of the way; and very often a dealer had his limitations. He would know the price of a certain class of antiquities, and very little about some other class. These are the shops that might have been expected to suffer heavily from the war. For one thing, there, has been much less touring, and especially on the part, of Americans. Then economy, which is not so readily practised in our ordinary shoppings, is easier to remember when it is a question of dropping into an old curiosity shop. Yet. it would seem that, in some districts, at any rate, the curiosity shops have not been badly hit. While the. people who \ised to spend hundreds of pounds a year on their collections may, no doubt, have drawn in their expenditure, the people who used to spend perhaps £4O or £SO a year are still spending something like that. No one would suppose that the curiosity shops are as successful as they were before the war; but the remarkable tiling is that they have not been more affected.