I'm writing a short story about an antiquarian. His mansion really should be full of different things, but I'm not really sure what all to put. I have Ming vases. I could put some artwork in there, but I don't know much about art. Maybe some armor suits? That to me sounds a little cliche, but idk. Any thoughts? Thanks.
My suggestions for ideas: - look up museum exhibits to see what kind of interesting historical or exotic stuff you can find - find some information on real antique shows - old books, scrolls, or texts are always cool, I think - like "ancient Buddhist scripture in the Sogdian language" or "a rare copy of Ovid's works dating from the 2nd century CE)
I would say your best option would be to go to some Antiques auctions. That will give you an idea of a broad spectrum of antiques. If you watch what people are buying, you might also get a feel for what sort of antiques people would use to decorate their houses with. Something to also consider, is most people decorate mansions in the specific time frame of the mansion. A Jacobean mansion would be decorated with period appropriate pieces for example, with no sets of armour in site, but maybe statues and elegant, robust carved wooden furniture.
what you need to consider first, before you go looking for stuff is what your character would want to collect... 'antiquarian' is about as narrow a term as 'historian'... all historians don't study the entire history of everything that ever existed and all antiquarians aren't interested in every single thing in the world that's over 50-100 years old... they specialize... they have specific areas of interest... so, what's your character's character and background?... what would he be interested in?... and what kinds of antiques do you want him to be collecting and living amongst?
Generally, I'd suggest you just think of all the normal things a home would have and then replace those things with retro equivalents. A coffee machine becomes a percolator, plastic ice trays become those crappy old tin or aluminum ones, etc. To get more specific, though, just take mammamaia's advice.
being an antiquarian doesn't necessarily mean you eschew modern conveniences, so unless the character is a nutcase about not using anything that's less than a half-century old, he'd certainly have useful contemporary things as well as antiques, in his home...
