Price It Yourself by Helaine Fendelman, Joe Rosson (2003, Paperback)

This book is written by people who make their living and build their personal collections buying and selling antiques at auctions and in shops. They do the TV show, Treasures in Your Attic as well. They have learned the art of appraising things to determine if something is real, a reproduction, or an outright fake and finding the objects value given that determination.

This book will not make someone with no knowledge whatsoever proficient at appraising antiques. This book won't even make a collector of particular catagory of antiques able to appraise any given object. What it will do is give someone - especially a collector - with broad knowledge in an area or areas to do a much better job of determining the authenticity of what he or she is contemplating buying and determining the value within their area of expertise.

The book is full of excellent examples from many areas of interest. Lots of resources are given - even as far as breaking down the Dewey Decimal or Library of Congress cataloging numbers/letters for appropriate reference materials from public or university libraries. Finally, the book gives practice tests to help train the budding appraiser.

You will find this to be an entertaining read even if you have no desire to learn to appraise yourself. The authors tell story after story about objects they and others they know have come across and their trials to determine age, authenticity, value and, in some cases, even what they were looking at.