Wednesday, January 02, 2008

"Eight Bells" - Montague Dawson


I found this great framed print over the holidays in an antique shop in Fredericksburg, Texas. It's a huge print (the frame is about 30"x40") of the painting "Eight Bells" by the nautical artist Montague Dawson. While I'm always on the lookout for prints or paintings of ships, this is the first time I found one that I liked enough to buy.

Before I purchased it, I wanted to make sure I wasn't getting ripped off by buying something that could be found online for a lot less so we ran back to the hotel and jumped on the computer to look it up. While several online shops had prints of Montague Dawson's more famous works, we found only vague mentions of this particular print in a few places (and they were mostly from people wanting to buy it!). I decided that it was worth it so we ran back to the store, bought it, and somehow managed to bring it safely back to Arizona.

Another interesting thing I found on our trip was in a book I purchased a at used book store in Llano, Texas. It's an Agatha Christie paperback printed in the 1970's. The odd thing is, there are pages of full-color ads scattered throughout the book!


I have two other Christie books from the same publisher and time period and neither of them have ads like this. However, those books originally cost $1.50 and $1.95 while the book with ads was only $0.95. I guess they were experimenting to see if people would go for cheaper books if they contained advertising. Thank goodness that didn't catch on!

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

I have been searching for the value of Eight Bells by M. Dawson, so I found your comment of great interest. Can you tell me what you paid for it?

Cat Carlisle said...

Sure: including tax it was about $120. It came framed (including glass) and my mother convinced me that a professionally made 40x30 inch frame could cost $100 by itself. Since his new prints were going for $40-50 each I decided that altogether it wasn't that bad of a deal (plus I really wanted it!). Feel free to let me know if you think I got ripped off!

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