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Quote by Camille DeAngelis

“Sometimes the people who’ve owned the books in this shop leave little clues between the pages, and not just love notes or pressed flowers. You might come upon an unused Amtrak ticket tucked between the pages of The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes or a sprinkling of crumbs along the gutter inside The Complete Engravings, Etchings, and Drypoints of Albrecht Dürer. Makes you wonder what kind of person noshes on a salami sandwich over The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.”

Quote by Camille DeAngelis

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Petty Magic

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Camille DeAngelis

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“Going by Dr. Marriott's description, Zoe imagined it to be small and elegant as she peered into dozens of shelves, rummaging through the contents. There were globes and charts and atlases, pocket watches and hand-painted Indian silk, gold-plated cutlery, litter coffers of spice, inlaid combs, silver fasteners, trinket boxes, blown-glass figurines, turn-of-the-century postcards with foreign stamps, and portraits of Victorian authors in elaborate frames. But nowhere did she discover a stone of any kind, with or without runes.”

“The risks in antiques fraud are relative. Other criminals risk the absolute. You've never heard of a fraudster involved in a shoot-out, of the "Come and get me, copper!" sort. Or of some con artist needing helicopter gunships to bring him. No, we subtle-mongers do it with the smile, the promise, the hint. And we have one great ally: greed. And make no mistake. Greed is everywhere, like weather.”

“The spicy sweet fragrance of the large full blooms, which rambled over the side and top of an arched metal framework, welcomed them as they walked beneath them. Shafts of sunlight pierced the canopy, dust motes floating languorously in the golden beams that spotlighted clumps of wayward snowdrops growing in the lawn.”

“She loved old things. The brown-brick place was a survivor of the 1907 earthquake and fire, and proudly bore a plaque from the historical society. The building had a haunted history- it was the site of a crime of passion- but Tess didn't mind. She'd never been superstitious. The apartment was filled with items she'd collected through the years, simply because she liked them or was intrigued by them. There was a balance between heirloom and kitsch. The common thread seemed to be that each object had a story, like a pottery jug with a bas-relief love story told in pictures, in which she'd found a note reading, "Long may we run. -Gilbert." Or the antique clock on the living room wall, each of its carved figures modeled after one of the clockmaker's twelve children. She favored the unusual, so long as it appeared to have been treasured by someone, once upon a time. Her mail spilled from an antique box containing a pigeon-racing counter with a brass plate engraved from a father to a son. She hung her huge handbag on a wrought iron finial from a town library that had burned and been rebuilt in a matter of weeks by an entire community. Other people's treasures captivated her. They always had, steeped in hidden history, bearing the nicks and gouges and fingerprints of previous owners. She'd probably developed the affinity from spending so much of her childhood in her grandmother's antique shop.”

“All useless, according to the common sense of utility, yet all of them inspiring in me curiosity and the simplest delight. Delight in the fact that beautiful things made by people forty years ago sit around, bringing pleasure to a stranger in the now. It reminds me of my duty, everyone's duty, to the future. My friends kids will need in twenty years to find crap like this at the markets so that they can feel held by the hands of past people's future dreams and not feel totally alone.”