Annals of Ephemera, Part III: Aging 2.0

Aging dye, one of the many materials found in the Making Memories Distressing Kit

When I was little, my mother had an acquaintance who purchased, at considerable expense, a piece of brand-new furniture. Soon afterwards, she paid someone (at even greater expense) to turn it into an antique. The transformation was both rapid and remarkable, begging the question: how did this happen?

“Easy!” replied the acquaintance. “We hired someone to beat it with chains.”

The image of someone being well-compensated for performing what was essentially a hatchet job on a spanking-new table struck me then, as now, as rather strange. (At the time, it also provided a tangible image for my then newly-minted understanding of the word arriviste.) Yet as time went on, I began to notice a slow but steady increase in the public consumption of such things...

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