![]() Before you make the sale, you must find what they want. "We set up a table in Utah last week on a Saturday at 9 am," Jeff adds. We know that those tables, the way they were crafted, have lasted 100-plus years.” Then there’s shipping the product. “I would say that our construction technique is mirrored after the way the antiques were produced. Getting it to its destination-some 9,512 miles from New Jersey to Singapore-will add another $10,000 to $15,000.Īre these models the best made tables in the world? “We certainly strive for that,” says Bruce Roeder, Jeff’s father. This Brunswick model, constructed of quartersawn oak and adorned with brown leather pockets, goes for $68,000. Jeff points to a four-and-a-half-by-nine relic, ready to be crated and sent to Singapore. ![]() The table pieces-legs, rails, and frames with colorful marquetry-cram in, leaning against one another. Bolts of cloth are rolled tight like outsized sausages, each secured with thick string. Aisles upon aisles of table parts are loaded on shelves. Here lie some 3,000 tables, spanning every style from every decade over the last 150 years. This vast stretch of century old tables, shoehorned into 48,000 square feet of high-ceilinged space, offers a clear window into Blatt Billiards' past, back to 1923 when it first opened its doors in Manhattan, doing business as Sam Blatt and Sons. The Roeder family took over the firm and kept the Blatt name. Jeff is the chief of technology and marketing at Blatt Billiards. Only here you get to walk off with the art. "I call it functional art," says Jeff Roeder, gazing up at the stacked antiques. These tables are just biding their time, awaiting adoption and a change of location to someone’s home. The woods run the gamut: from white oak to elm burl, from Makassar ebony to endless varieties of mahogany. Nonpareil Novelty table from 1874, constructed of dark rosewood with bird’s eye maple marquetry inlays. Here is an 1880 Pfister model made of maple wood. Enter the Blatt Billiards showroom and warehouse in Woodridge, New Jersey, and your eyes will drift upward to the wooden frames of antique pool tables, stacked one on another, climbing to the ceiling.
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