How many come up for sale each year?

About 33 waterfall bookcases come to market on Sellingantiques in a year, and 121 different dealers have listed one. That spread matters. It's a form almost any general furniture dealer will handle, rather than the preserve of a few specialists.

Which timber is most common?

Mahogany, and by a long way. It carries 178 of 319 titles, with oak second at 37 and pine third at 17. Everything else is scarce. Rosewood appears in a handful of titles, and satinwood, burr walnut, fruitwood, yew and teak each turn up only once or twice in the whole sample.

Are waterfall bookcases usually glazed?

No. Open shelves dominate, and only one sampled title mentions glazed doors at all. Where a piece is enclosed, it tends to be at the bottom rather than the front: a cupboard, drawer or chiffonier base under the open tiers.

What do the Regency and Georgian labels mean here?

They're dealer descriptions, and they overlap. Regency appears in 79 titles while the dated field records 45 Regency entries, and George III, George IV and William IV between them account for another 21 titles. The dated field runs 1800 to 1960, with 110 of the 319 listings carrying a clean year. The rest rely on reign or century labels, and the largest single bucket is the century-wide 19th Century. Treat a reign word as an opinion about period, not a fixed date.

They do, in 22 titles. Sampled pairs include mahogany, oak, walnut, pine, satinwood and teak. They sit well above single examples and occupy a disproportionate share of the top of the range.

Are there unusual variants of the form?

A few one-offs appear in the samples: a hanging version, a tabletop one, a double-sided example, a writing-desk hybrid, a Canterbury variant and a breakfront pair. Revival pieces are more regular. Nine titles use the word, mostly on Edwardian through to 1930s mahogany made in an earlier taste.

Home > Bookcases > Waterfall Bookcases > Page 3

Antique Waterfall Bookcases

53 items · page 3 of 4

← Page 3 of 4 →

A free-standing open bookcase whose shelves step forward and down, each deeper than the one above, made for drawing rooms and small rooms rather than the library wall.