When I saw the five binders in the glass case at the auction house, I assumed they contained postage stamps. I wasn’t that interested in anyone’s postage stamp collection – which seem to be ubiquitous at auctions.
But these binders seemed too bulky to be holding tiny stamps. Since they were in a case and I had no access to them, I asked the auction-house staffer to let me see one of them. I found page after plastic page of handkerchiefs, all kinds with designs other than the usual flowers. That was the predominant design on some handkerchiefs I had seen at another auction house a few years ago. Those were displayed in two boxes on a table.
The ones here were obviously a collection and had been lovingly assembled, protected and stored. Several of them had slips of paper with women’s names alongside them. I assumed that these women had made those handkerchiefs until I saw that some of them had commercial tags.
Were these collected by someone or gifted to someone? I wondered.
As I stood there flipping the pages in awe, a female auction-goer approached the case. Chatting with her, I learned that she collected handkerchiefs and had at least 1,000 of them.
How did she get started? I asked. She began seeing them at auction, bought a few and then couldn’t stop, she said.
That’s how some collections get started. You see one thing that you love and the next thing you know, you have five of them (five of anything = a collection) and before you know it, you have 1,000 of them.
She had purchased some from this auction house and had sold a lot of them on eBay. “The ones with children and travel are very collectible,” she said.
Checking a few pages of eBay, I found that most of the single handkerchiefs were not selling or the sales were spotty. Sets of handkerchiefs did a little better. If you’d like to see some antique handkerchiefs, take a look at these in the collection of the Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum in New York.
The woman at auction suggested that the ones with the slips of paper were collected by the person whose name was attached to it. If the handkerchief was made by hand, she said, the maker’s name would be on it. She figured that these were all collected by the same person.
Most of the handkerchiefs were made for women, and one binder contained ones seemingly for men. Those were not as colorful, lots of beige and brown; in fact, they were dull and boring.
Here are some of the more interesting handkerchiefs from the binders:
