WriteAntiques

Douglas Coates is a professional taxidermist and a more fascinating man, passionate about natural history, collecting, acquiring knowledge and his love of Mother Nature and her creatures, I have yet to meet.
I admit, I thought long and hard about this week’s topic because I knew I would be writing about a sensitive subject. Douglas Coates treats his art with the utmost sensitivity.

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She has long blonde hair, slim waist, narrow hips and not a sign of a wrinkle, even at  50.
Parties will be taking place across the world today to mark Barbie’s 50th birthday  the occasion, and the world’s first store dedicated to the doll has been opened in Shanghai.
Her dolls are now collectors’ items, [...]

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the Ca Mau was engulfed by an intense fire while sailing 90 miles south of Canton on its way to the Malaysian archipelago.
The fire, burning at 1,400 degrees Fahrenheit, may have started in the kitchen as cast iron cooking pots were found welded together.
The heat was so intense that it fused together some pieces of its precious cargo.
The junk lay undisturbed for more than 280 years until, in 1998, two Vietnamese fishermen snagged their nets on some of the porcelain and began to haul it from the deep.
Before the Vietnamese Ministry of Culture and Information stepped in, the fishermen had managed to bring to the surface over 30,000 pieces.
In 2005, the Vietnamese government decided to sell a proportion of the 130,000 pieces that had been salvaged and sent 76,000 to auction at Sotheby’s in Amsterdam.
The sale over three days in January 2007 saw the Ca Mau finally unload its cargo to an eager market in the West after a gap of two centuries.

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