Shadows at the Spring Show Read Online Free Page A

or collector, but which contained hand-colored natural history prints. Since the books were already imperfect, removing the plates could be done without guilt.
    Maggie browsed through two other booths of books, but both collections were too modern for her business. She was looking for seventeenth-, eighteenth-, or nineteenth-century engravings or lithographs. Definitely not the photographs or pictures in mid-twentieth-century books.
    “Have you any automobile repair guides from the 1930s?” she heard a young woman ask. Someone else was looking for Pennsylvania road maps from the early twentieth century. There were people who collected high school yearbooks or Playboy magazines or the cards that were packaged with single packs of cigarettes in the early twentieth century. Maggie paused at a booth piled high with comic books. She remembered reading Archie at a friend’s house the summer after sixth grade.
    She was halfway through the small show. It had been fun to see Joe, but so far she hadn’t found anything for Shadows, her antique-print business. Shadows because old prints were shadows of the past that let us see the shape of the world as it once was.
    Another postcard dealer. A poster dealer. Maggie paused again. She liked some posters, especially World War I recruitment posters, and the travel posters used by transatlantic steamship lines in the 1930s. But posters were very different from prints, and she didn’t know enough to invest in them. Justenough to know their prices were high, and they took up so much space in her booth that they crowded out the prints she did know well, and that her customers looked for.
    If she didn’t find anything today to add to her inventory, that was all right. It happened. But if you didn’t look, you wouldn’t know.
    The next booth was full of children’s books, from early-nineteenth-century primers with woodblock engravings to Golden Books and twentieth-century first editions of children’s classics like Charlotte’s Web and The Dark Is Rising. There were even copies of the UK editions of the Harry Potter books, with the different covers for adult and child readers. Paper shows specialized in “old paper,” but the definition of old was increasingly flexible, and first-edition Harry Potter books were certainly collectible.
    There was only one more booth, in the corner, filled with twentieth-century magazines. Cartons of Life and Saturday Evening Post issues and stacks of National Geographic, Time, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, and Sports Illustrated.
    There were a few magazines she looked for. December National Geographics in the 1940s had ads for Coca-Cola on the back covers that featured the classic Santa Claus that the Coca-Cola Company now reproduced as cards, toys, and prints. Maggie included a few in her portfolio of Christmas prints.
    Twentieth-century ads weren’t exactly in the same category as eighteenth-century engravings. But they were collectibles for some people. Ads featuring dogs and cats, from White-Cat cigar labels (1890–1910) to the dog on a Ken-L Ration lithographed tin door push (1932), were hot sellers.
    She sorted through the Good Housekeepings from the 1920s and found two that interested her. Both had covers of children by illustrator Jessie Willcox Smith. The address label on one cover had torn the picture slightly, but the other was in excellent condition. “How much to a dealer?” Maggie asked.
    “Twelve . . . oh, you can have it for ten dollars,” said thedealer, an elderly man whose clothes were immaculate despite the dust on some of his inventory.
    “Okay,” said Maggie, handing him a $10 bill. Not exactly a treasure, but she could mat the cover, complete with the Good Housekeeping logo, and price it at $40. Although she preferred earlier prints, people loved Jessie Willcox Smith illustrations, and some collected her Good Housekeeping covers. They weren’t seventeenth-century astronomy engravings, but they might sell faster.
    She