Description
More excerpts from the article:
…His education was helped tremendously in 1991, when Arader acquired a large group of globes and related reference materials at a Sotheby’s auction of the collection of aficionado Howard Welsh, and turned them over to Glazer to catalogue and market. One of his first customers was Mary Tyler Moore, who bought a pair of early Wilson nine-inch-high globes in 1992. “Welsh collected an unusual number of American globes,” says Glazer, “and when I realized that there was a whole field of American globes that nobody had really looked at, I decided to specialize in this field.”
…As Glazer points out, “what makes globes interesting is also the thing that possibly keeps dealers or other people from focusing on them, which is, they combined different disciplines. They are scientific instruments–maps and cartography–as well as decorative arts, so none of the dealers in any of those fields, or even possibly the scholars, feel entirely comfortable with these aspects. Usually, somebody’s interested in one or the other. They’re neither fish nor fowl.”
…”One of the things I try to do here, that I’m not sure all antique dealers do, is try to tie the thing into a historical context. Globes are really more interesting than maps,” he insists, “and I can make a case that globes are the most interesting thing that one could collect. They have everything, really, and relate to so many different things.”
He rapidly ticks off a list a laundry list of possible interests: “there’s travel, history, science, geography or something about your ancestors or politics that you can learn from a globe. They can be used to demonstrate principals of astronomy. So it’s surprising they haven’t been collected more.”
…Glazer summed up: “there is no one great collection of American Globes; but those globes that have passed through my hands would easily constitute the greatest collection of American globes, that’s for sure. But I just don’t have the luxury of keeping them, either money or for space. That’s the life of a dealer.”
— Judd Tully covers the New York art and auction scene for a variety of publications, including the London Antiques Trade Gazette.
