I recall many years ago getting into debates with older dealers and collectors about the future of the market. Many of them had collected antiques not only as a hobby but also as a piggy bank for retirement. This was, and may still be, a common practice and gave rise to the old auction adage that items from a living collector always sell for less than one who is dead. The flaw with this assumption is that antiques will always rise in price and there will always be new collectors who want the items. Over the last two decades, we have seen a definite decline in prices for many categories of antiques. This, in my opinion, is not surprising and frankly has more to do with disposable income and artificially high pricing. Antiques will come back, it is just a matter of time, and new collectors are entering the market. And that to my mind is the rub. We all need to foster collecting among young people. Its about them seeing antique shops as places of wonder and hope and enjoyment. How does the trade do this? 1.) Make items affordable for young people. Folks, we all started collecting by looking for bargains. So rather than pricing things to the nines, lets price them to get people to buy. Todays $10 buyer will be tomorrows $20 buyer or maybe buyer of 20 $10 items. 2.) Engage young people with antiques that they find interesting. I got myself into trouble years ago when I cried foul over the idiotic notion that young people dont have good taste and so will never buy real antiques. What elegant bull droppings. None of us were born knowledgeable, and I have seen plenty of rich and poor collectors in their middle ages who no more had a sense of design or taste than the man in the moon. We need to engage future collectors in their own interests. If a 12-year-old wants Pez dispensers, then lets support that hobby rather than decrying their lack of interest in Queen Anne highboys. They may end up collecting 18th-century furniture or they may choose something else, but the fact is that they at least are collecting. 3.) A truism of the antiques world is that most people begin collecting what their grandparents owned. Grandma and Grandpas home was a place of comfort and safety, and so items found there are often what collectors want. For my generation, this led to the craze of collecting golden oak, mission and late Victorian. For my oldest daughter, it is 1970s modern, and for my youngest, well, we have yet to see. 4.) There is the collector mantra that Gen Z and Millennials do not collect and so the trade is dead. I think that is a pretty broad stereotype. My argument would be that these generations are attuned to the world, and reusing old things is very much aligned with a sense of modern environmentalism. A Chippendale chest has a low carbon footprint in 2022. In my next column, I will discuss how we can create the next generation of collectors. Born to collect should be the motto of Peter Seiberts family. Raised in Central Pennsylvania, Seibert has been collecting and writing about antiques for more than three decades. By day, he is a museum director and has worked in Pennsylvania, Wyoming, Virginia and New Mexico. In addition, he advises and consults with auction houses throughout the Mid-Atlantic region, particularly about American furniture and decorative arts. Seiberts writings include books on photography, American fraternal societies and paintings. He and his family are restoring a 1905 arts and crafts house filled with years worth antique treasures found in shops, co-ops and at auctions.