Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
SPECIAL EPISODE 1: The Customer Is Always Right . . . Eventually
11 Plays5 years ago
We’re pushing out a series of new episodes that will examine the COVID-19 pandemic from the perspective of the antiques world. First up, Tim Martin of S. J. Shrubsole. Inspired by Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of stories told by plague-stricken raconteurs in fourteenth-century Italy, Martin decided to publish anecdotes from the curious lore of precious silver, keyed to objects that have passed through his shop, online. In this episode, Martin reads one of those stories, “The Customer is Always Right . . . Eventually.”
Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction: Special Bonus Episode
00:00:17
Speaker
Hello, welcome to Curious Objects.
00:00:19
Speaker
I'm Ben Miller.
00:00:21
Speaker
And this is a special bonus episode to help you fill those social distancing hours.
00:00:26
Speaker
We might release a few more of these in the coming weeks.
Coronavirus Impact on Antiques Industry
00:00:30
Speaker
The coronavirus is obviously it's affecting every aspect of life and every industry, every place of business.
00:00:37
Speaker
And of course, I want to take a look at the effects that it's having on the antiques world.
Project Idea: Historical Plague Stories
00:00:41
Speaker
So where better to start than with my own firm, SJ ShrubSoul?
00:00:47
Speaker
So I'm here with ShrubSoul's owner, Tim Martin.
00:00:50
Speaker
Hi, Tim.
00:00:51
Speaker
Hi, Ben.
00:00:53
Speaker
So the shop is closed.
00:00:55
Speaker
The staff, including me, is working from home.
00:00:59
Speaker
We can't travel.
00:01:01
Speaker
Auctions are being postponed.
00:01:03
Speaker
Basically, you know, the bulk of what we do on a day to day basis is not really possible to do anymore.
00:01:11
Speaker
But we're still occupying the time.
00:01:13
Speaker
And actually, I'd like to think we're being productive in certain ways, in ways that hopefully are interesting to our customers.
00:01:22
Speaker
But Tim, you had a really interesting idea for a project to undertake during
Plague Tankards at the Met
00:01:28
Speaker
this period.
00:01:28
Speaker
And I thought listeners would be really interested to hear about it.
00:01:33
Speaker
So it's actually a series of emails.
00:01:37
Speaker
But tell me about that idea and where it came from.
00:01:42
Speaker
Well, I was sort of thinking about pestilence and plague and being an antique dealer, you know, how people in other times had dealt with it.
00:01:58
Speaker
And the central object for a...
00:02:05
Speaker
The central document of a plague in English silver, which is our field,
00:02:13
Speaker
a set of tankards made for a man called Edmund Barry Godfrey for his sort of resolute and dutiful conduct during both the Great Fire of London in 1665 and the Great Plague of London in 1666.
Literary Inspirations During Isolation
00:02:34
Speaker
And I think actually those two events may have overlapped.
00:02:37
Speaker
But in any case,
00:02:40
Speaker
They're called the plague tankards and the fire of London tankards.
00:02:44
Speaker
And so I went and looked at one of the plague tankards, which is on display at the Met.
00:02:50
Speaker
And we'd had one years ago that I'd always sort of regretted that it was before my time.
00:02:55
Speaker
And being sort of a, I'm generally kind of interested in literature.
00:03:05
Speaker
And so I thought about
00:03:08
Speaker
Camus, and I thought about John Donne, who talks about plague in his poetry.
00:03:15
Speaker
And then I thought about the most fun book probably ever to come out of a time of exile in a time of pestilence, which is the Decameron of Boccaccio, where 10 people were exiled from Florence and told each other
00:03:35
Speaker
Each of the 10 told 10 stories, so there are 100 stories in the book.
Sharing Stories of Antiques Lore
00:03:40
Speaker
And it was something that I had to read in college and enjoyed very, very much and thought, well, since we're going to be in some kind of exile, probably not in a Tuscan villa, but maybe it would help a while.
00:03:59
Speaker
Fortunately for all of us right now.
00:04:01
Speaker
Yes.
00:04:01
Speaker
Maybe it would help to while away the time if...
00:04:05
Speaker
you know, if we could tell some stories and record, I guess also I've always sort of thought it would be nice to record some of the
00:04:15
Speaker
lore of this business.
00:04:18
Speaker
To paraphrase George Frederick Kunze's book about stones, the curious lore of precious silver.
00:04:26
Speaker
Because there are a lot of funny little stories that only a dealer would know.
00:04:32
Speaker
And it had just been the opening of the British galleries at the Met.
00:04:36
Speaker
And walking through them, I was struck by how many objects in there have these sort of funny backstories
00:04:45
Speaker
in the trade, you know, how they, whether it's how they came to be in the mat or how they came to be discovered or how, you know, some funny thing about the person that owned them or whatever.
00:04:56
Speaker
And I thought, you know, this might be a nice way to engage with the clients when you can't be with them in real life.
Rare Livery Pots: The Customer is Always Right
00:05:05
Speaker
Right.
00:05:05
Speaker
Yeah.
00:05:06
Speaker
And it's, I mean, it's a hundred year old firm.
00:05:08
Speaker
You can't be around for that long without accumulating some, some pretty good stories.
00:05:14
Speaker
So I thought it would be nice to get you to read one of these stories for listeners so they can get a taste of what we've been up to.
00:05:26
Speaker
And there was one in particular that actually relates to the Met Museum that involves a very...
00:05:39
Speaker
singular client of ours that I've heard a lot about who was just a little before my time.
00:05:44
Speaker
But I wanted to ask you to read the story that in our email you described as the customer is always right eventually.
00:05:56
Speaker
Yes.
00:05:57
Speaker
Okay, sure.
00:06:01
Speaker
I can do that.
00:06:02
Speaker
Okay.
00:06:03
Speaker
So, um, yeah, this is a story that involved, involved going to the Met and, uh, before this is obviously long before the new British galleries, but, um, right.
00:06:15
Speaker
So the story I titled it, the customer is always right eventually.
00:06:21
Speaker
Um, so if I had a nickel for every time I've bashed my head against a wall about a client, not buying something that they so obviously should buy, I'd probably have
00:06:32
Speaker
$5 and CTE, which is, you know, what is it?
00:06:38
Speaker
It's that brain neuron disease that football players get.
00:06:42
Speaker
When you're a dealer, you look on every really great purchase as a brilliant buy and a fine investment.
00:06:48
Speaker
Clients don't always see it that way.
00:06:50
Speaker
To them, investments are shares taken in wave-making companies like Apple and Oracle, Enron and Tyco.
00:06:59
Speaker
Sometime around the year 2000, sometime in the year 2000, I went to lunch at Partridge's, the vast and sadly defunct Bond Street antique shop.
00:07:10
Speaker
They had a cook and a dining room where they served bibulous lunches on a table set with white linens and silver and flowers.
00:07:20
Speaker
And the whole was presided over by the potty mouthed Rosemary Partridge, who thought everything was really fucking funny.
00:07:29
Speaker
and she would sit at the end of the table and roar with laughter about any kind of joke.
00:07:35
Speaker
The thing was, the partridges were really canny, and in addition to the dirty jokes and the claret that seemed to refill itself, they also placed in front of you, for the duration of the meal, an object from their inventory that they thought you might like and might be induced to buy.
00:07:52
Speaker
And on one occasion, the object that sat in front of me was one of a pair of livery pots known as the Rothschild Rosemary livery pots, which are massive silver gilt baluster flagons about 13 inches tall, made in London in 1602, and which had been owned by Anna Rothschild and Archibald Rosemary, who was the Earl of Rosemary.
00:08:21
Speaker
And I throw down my gauge for anybody to challenge me here.
00:08:24
Speaker
They are the finest pair of livery pots in the world.
00:08:28
Speaker
And by the end of the meal, so fine was the food and so inexhaustible, the decanter, reader, or listener in this case, I bought them.
00:08:39
Speaker
And if you hear the echo of Charlotte Bronte there, it is because a couple of years after I bought them, I felt that I hadn't so much bought them as married them.
00:08:49
Speaker
Everyone I offered them to balked or they offered too little or they wanted to trade something for them that I didn't want, including, and I'm not making this up, a vintage Ferrari, which a man in Canada seriously proposed that I should allow him something like $800,000 and he would pay me the rest and I would have this fabulous Ferrari.
00:09:13
Speaker
So can't believe you passed that up.
00:09:15
Speaker
Yeah, this is a tough one.
00:09:17
Speaker
I decided to do out loud and in life what I'd been doing in my mind for a long time and not just on these, but many other objects, which was to grab a client by the lapel and say, what the hell is the matter with you?
00:09:30
Speaker
And the client I chose to do this to was was Rita Gans.
00:09:33
Speaker
But at four foot eleven, Rita was a little small for roughing up.
00:09:39
Speaker
So instead, I told her to meet me.
00:09:43
Speaker
on a Monday morning outside the Met for what I warned her was going to be an awkwardly convoluted sales pitch.
00:09:49
Speaker
And I walked her into the British galleries and I showed her the Paston livery pots, which are very, very beautiful, very nice, really special.
00:09:58
Speaker
They've got these great big scallop shells and dolphins on them and they're fantastic.
00:10:03
Speaker
And they're illustrated in this wonderful old painting called The Paston Treasure.
00:10:09
Speaker
And we looked at them and I said to Rita, I want you to hold those in your mind and I want you to come back to the shop.
00:10:16
Speaker
And you know where this is going.
00:10:19
Speaker
Back at the shop, I showed her again.
00:10:21
Speaker
I'd showed her to them before, showed them to her before, and she passed on them.
00:10:26
Speaker
I showed them to her again.
00:10:27
Speaker
And, you know, they're bigger.
00:10:30
Speaker
They're heavier, which you can't appreciate in a museum, but they are much heavier.
00:10:35
Speaker
They had this fabulous gilding and they're really just the greatest, probably the greatest piece of Elizabethan silver that's come through my hands.
00:10:45
Speaker
And she bought them, as she should have.
00:10:50
Speaker
And then as with many of her other treasures, they ended up in a great gift that she made to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.
Positive Feedback on Email Series
00:10:59
Speaker
So that's the story.
00:11:02
Speaker
It's a fantastic story.
00:11:03
Speaker
Thanks for sharing, Tim.
00:11:04
Speaker
Yeah.
00:11:06
Speaker
I kind of ad-libbed a bit in the middle.
00:11:08
Speaker
Sorry?
00:11:09
Speaker
I kind of ad-libbed a bit in the middle where I felt that writing wanted a more conversational approach.
00:11:17
Speaker
Well, you're allowed a little creative license with your own work.
00:11:20
Speaker
Okay.
00:11:22
Speaker
The response to this series has been really fantastic.
00:11:26
Speaker
I've been really happy to see how many listeners have, or I should say, how many readers have tuned.
00:11:36
Speaker
Boy, I'm really
Importance of Historical Storytelling
00:11:37
Speaker
in podcast mode right now.
00:11:38
Speaker
Your listeners have tuned in.
00:11:40
Speaker
You're mixing your media.
00:11:44
Speaker
Yeah, I've been really, really impressed with the number of readers and clients who have written in and expressed their enthusiasm and their appreciation for the storytelling.
00:11:57
Speaker
And it reminds me of, well...
00:12:00
Speaker
You know, we're being called back to a lot of traditional ways of occupying ourselves and entertaining ourselves when we get tired of sitting in front of Netflix and telling stories is perhaps the oldest and most hallowed of all.
00:12:19
Speaker
So it's...
00:12:20
Speaker
Yeah, it's a pleasure to hear these stories and to be able to share some.
00:12:24
Speaker
And I think it's a great way for our firm to stay active doing what matters to us and what matters to our customers.
00:12:35
Speaker
Yeah, no, it's, I don't know.
00:12:38
Speaker
I've really found the idea to be...
00:12:44
Speaker
much more rewarding than I thought it was going to be.
00:12:48
Speaker
Um, and frankly, much less commercial than I thought it was going to be.
00:12:53
Speaker
I had sort of envisioned it as, you know, like, you know, go to the website and you can see X. And I don't think anybody's in the mood for that right now.
00:13:04
Speaker
And I mean, obviously I'm going to, you know, tout the goods when I can, but, um,
00:13:12
Speaker
I feel like it's more about maybe just saying that if you look at the life of a firm like ours and the kind of historical
00:13:23
Speaker
reach or their historical breadth, you realize that, you know, all these great collections, they're all put together over a long, long time.
00:13:32
Speaker
You know, people buy silver for 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and slowly put together a beautiful group of objects that they love, that they could afford at the time, whatever.
00:13:45
Speaker
So it's not really about pushing merchandise now, so much as about saying to people, you know,
00:13:55
Speaker
we're going to be around and these goods are going to be around and wonderful things do come up and, you know, watch
Silver's Resilience and Antiseptic Humor
00:14:05
Speaker
this space kind of thing.
00:14:08
Speaker
And if they could survive the Great Fire of London and the plague, then they'll probably survive COVID-19.
00:14:15
Speaker
Yeah, yeah.
00:14:17
Speaker
And silver, as we know, has antiseptic properties.
00:14:20
Speaker
And I really want to get that in.
00:14:21
Speaker
Silver has antiseptic properties.
00:14:23
Speaker
It's very important.
00:14:24
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:14:25
Speaker
Absolutely.
00:14:26
Speaker
All right.
00:14:26
Speaker
Yeah.
00:14:27
Speaker
Thanks so much for sharing that with us.
00:14:30
Speaker
Thanks.
00:14:30
Speaker
I appreciate it.
00:14:31
Speaker
It's fun.
00:14:31
Speaker
And listeners, you can see pictures of these objects on the web at tropsal.com or on social media, of course.
00:14:37
Speaker
I'm at Objective Interest on Instagram.
Conclusion and Call to Action
00:14:40
Speaker
If you haven't subscribed yet, please do.
00:14:42
Speaker
It's the best way to be notified about new episodes coming out.
00:14:45
Speaker
And in the coming weeks, as I said, we may well be putting out some additional episodes.
00:14:51
Speaker
to react to and reflect on the coronavirus situation.
00:14:55
Speaker
So thanks for tuning in.
00:14:57
Speaker
Thanks for listening.
00:14:58
Speaker
Today's episode is edited and produced by Sammy Delati.
00:15:01
Speaker
Our music is by Trap Rabbit.
00:15:03
Speaker
No Michael here today, but Michael Diaz-Griffith, my co-host, will be back with us soon.
00:15:09
Speaker
And I'm your host, Ben Miller.
00:15:10
Speaker
I'll catch you next time.