Given the name, Maine Antique Digest might appear to be a small, provincial magazine. But with print subscriptions over 15,000 and an online readership growing faster, it has become an international publication with an audience that includes the U.S, Canada and Europe. And its offices are right in town. Fifty years ago, magazines about the artistry and history of antiques abounded. Absent was the hard news of the market – everything from auctions and prices, current and old valuations of objects and their buyers and sellers. Sam and Sally Pennington changed that when they founded Maine Antique Digest in 1973 soon after they’d retired in Waldoboro. The journal took off. Talk to current editor Sam Pennington (a.k.a. Clayton to the antiques world), and he’ll say it’s a newspaper because it’s published on newsprint. But with its very fine color newsprint, a stiff spine that binds almost 200 pages, and a phenomenal advertising ratio, one might also call it a magazine. Sam was in third grade when his family moved here. And with a few gaps, he’s stayed in Waldoboro. His parents brought him back for good with a job offer that paid less (he’d been installing cable in the Portland area), and the promise to fire him if it didn’t work out. Sam signed on. He and his sister Kate run the newspaper almost exactly as their parents had. Sam, like his father, is the ideas person, lead writer and now its social media voice, while Kate, like their mother, is the managing editor, keeping everything flowing correctly and ethically. A staff of about fifteen in editorial, graphics, art, layout, advertising, and accounting plus an army of freelancers keep the magazine thriving.
The first story I ever wrote was about an auctioneer who had been indicted for receiving stolen goods. And my father gave it to me to write. Well, I worked on it for half a day, and then told my dad, “I don’t know what I’m doing.”
He said, “Sit down and write: ‘John Smith was indicted today…’” He taught me that simple really is better. I go back and read some of the things he wrote. He was a talented writer with a pragmatic view. He could turn a phrase.
People think the world of antiques is this fancy place where people sip cocktails and discuss the aesthetics of their French furniture. But it’s the wild, wild West. If you buy a house for $100,000, you’ll have a stack of paperwork a foot high with lawyers and titles and stuff like that. If you buy a picture or chest for $100,000, it’s just a handshake often, and your trust that the guy who’s selling it to you is honest. It’s a fascinating world that never ceases to amaze me. It has all of it… sex, robbery, larceny, forgery, smuggling. You name it. We write the hard news of this world.
The best story I ever wrote was about a desk that supposedly was built in memorial of a Civil War brother. It was this gorgeous thing and at the Winter Antiques Show in New York. And it was sold by major art dealer Allan Katz to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford. And if they didn’t want it, the Boston MFA was right behind them to buy it.
Well, about that time, somebody in the field called me and said they thought the piece was a fake. And I was like, “Okay, but it was sold by Allan Katz, and he’s beyond reproach.” So, they sent me a jpg. It was a little 72 dpi image of an unadorned secretary exactly in the configuration of the very ornate one that had just been sold.
So, I called Allan Katz: “People are saying this thing is a fake.” He hadn’t heard one thing about it.
I dug in and as I did, I started hearing about other people’s suspicions. But nothing was conclusive.
Finally, I found a picture of the secretary in a blog post of the fancy secretary, photographed in the exact same corner of the same room as in the photo of the plain secretary. You could match up the things hanging on the wall. You could even match up the floorboards. And you could say, “Oh, this was the chest before.”
These two photographs broke the story wide open. It was an out and out fake, sold to Allan Katz. It was created by Harold Gordon from Massachusetts. He’d fooled everyone.
I once lost a good story to The New York Times. I’d waited for confirmation from a very famous pair of dealers who were not paying their bills, and I held off publishing because they told me they were paying up the next day. I called at our drop-dead deadline, and they told me they were at the bank, so I killed the story. But they’d lied. And The New York Times got it a week later. If we’d been using social media then, maybe we’d have gotten it. But we weren’t. We missed it because we are a monthly.
I wasn’t going to lose this story. I had the whole thing written. I had the whole thing verified. I had Harold Gordon’s confession. The whole thing was rock solid. I called my sister Kate riding the bus back from Boston: “Kate, when you get home, I’m going to email you a story and I want you to edit it, and I’m going to put it on the web tomorrow.”
“Can I do my laundry first?”
“No. You have to do this first.”
She edited it and called halfway in: “My god, this is a great story.”
We broke the story. I’d learned my lesson. I published it online because we were two weeks away from our print deadline.
In the world of Americana, that secretary has turned out to be one of the most famous fakes in the world. The Times picked it up two weeks later.
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