Gifts and Collectibles #7of8

Emmy thinks Millau, France, is a nice town, probably because it has a flea market where she bought some small gadgets. Among the gadgets is a fancy brass desk-top box with a lid and little pigeon-holes for stamps and paper clips.

In a little antique store in Auxerre, France, I bought the first (of several) of the old heavy books, this one about Paris. The book has 28 detailed maps of Paris as it was then, and 595 pictures from the early 1900’s. There’s neither a car nor a truck in any picture. The book is called “Paris Atlas” and was printed by “Librairie Larousse, Paris.” Carefully clipped newspaper stories about Paris, were found between the pages.

Southeast of Paris, in Chaumont, France, we went to the antique market held in the town hall, where Emmy acquired a brass canister. It is 5 1/2 inches in diameter, 7 inches high, with two handles. Something beautiful, something useful, and something used in our kitchen as a sugar canister.

One day in Paris, France, we got off the Métro and found a used-book store where I found another of the interesting old books. This one has 40 maps and 772 pictures of Spain and Portugal, but is printed in French. The business card says, “Jacques Lévy, Libraire Expert, prés les Douanes, Françaises, Littérature, Erudition, Bibiophilie, Judïca, 46, Rue d’Alésia - 75014 Paris, 327.08.79.”

While on a ship visiting the Greek Islands, a gentlemen named Lukas gave us a picture he had painted of the harbor at the city of Rhodes. It was later stolen from our RV in France, so he sent us another of his paintings. Lukas and his wife Beryl live on the Greek portion of the Island of Cyprus, and we were table-mates at meal-time on this 4 day trip by ship.

We have visited John and Betsy Spindler, in the French Alsace, several different years. John (and his father and grandfather before him) is famous for his art work, called marquetry. The pictures consists only of carefully cut, thin pieces of wood of different colors, no paint or varnish are used. Over the years we bought several of the Spindler pictures, but we sold all but one of them to an art store in Carmel, Calif. The one we kept is of the French Alsace town of Eguisheim. We have a photo of this exact building and location, taped to the back of the picture – they match.