Antique lore with a sharp comic bite.
Antiques Freaks follows Ken and Dee through odd corners of antiques and collectibles, from Liddle Kiddles and paste jewelry to mass-market romance paperbacks. The show mixes antique-market context with digressions, mock outrage, literary riffing, and recurring readings of Varney the Vampire.
PRESS PLAY
Antiques Freaks is an antiques and old-texts show built around curiosity, research, and unruly conversation. Ken and Dee return again and again to objects that sit somewhere between collectible, cultural artifact, and strange little problem. Vintage toys get treated seriously, but never solemnly. The Liddle Kiddles episode looks at tiny dolls, their late-1960s origins, later resurgence, fragile vinyl bodies, wire interiors, and collector appeal. The paste jewelry episode starts from a period-drama viewing question and follows it into leaded glass, molds, softness, cutting, and the surprise that the material begins as actual paste. Publishing history gets the same attention. The mass-market romance paperback episode frames 1980s and 1990s clinch-cover romances as a future collectible category, tying together scarcity, visual design, changing publisher habits, and the decline of the mass-market format. The show also loves bad, strange, or overripe prose. The College Freshman's Don't Book becomes a source of antique advice, tortured wordplay, and gleeful irritation. Varney the Vampire is a whole parallel obsession, read aloud with commentary and guests as the Bannerworths, Admiral Bell, Mr. Chillingworth, Jack Pringle, and Sir Francis Varney inch through gothic chaos. Those chapters often turn into live literary demolition: unclear speakers, slow break-ins, improvised traps, odd hats, and chapter titles that promise more momentum than the plot provides. When Terrible Book Club appears for a Conan Doyle story, the same energy carries into old-fiction weirdness. Antiques Freaks works because the speakers sound both informed and impossible to impress. They like the objects, but they also like the mess around the objects: bad names, brittle materials, baffling metaphors, and market logic. It is funny first, but the research keeps the jokes anchored.
Made for: For listeners who like antiques, vintage toys, book history, gothic fiction, and conversational comedy with a blunt edge. It especially suits people who enjoy learning why odd old things mattered, broke, sold, vanished, or became collectible.
What sets it apart: The show pairs object research with recurring read-aloud literary chaos, especially Varney the Vampire. Its best moments come from the collision of collector knowledge, historical trivia, and quick reactive banter.
Two freaks explore antiques every week. Updates Wednesdays.
Based on 6 episodes we listened to · September 2026
Antiques Freaks turns old books and collectibles into lively conversations about materials, markets, storytelling, and the peculiar reasons objects endure.
Antiques Freaks follows curiosity from collectible objects into the stories, materials, and markets attached to them. Ken and Dee can move from the fragile construction of Liddle Kiddles to the disappearing mass-market romance paperback, explaining why certain things survive…
Antique dolls and Victorian vampires meet the same fate: your education keeps getting interrupted by excellent heckling.
Press play if you want
Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
Ken and Dee finish a freshman advice book with a card pun, a dispute over silence, and a possible "bite risk" sticker.
Ken and Dee reach the final chapter of the College Freshman's Don't Book and find plenty to argue about. The advice to keep quiet leads them to wonder whether a lesson counts if someone hears it and chooses to ignore it.
Ken and Dee make a playful case for keeping an eye on old romance paperbacks.
Ken has an unlikely answer to the question of what cheap, overlooked object might become collectible: mass market romance paperbacks from the 1980s and 1990s, especially the ones with clinch covers and embossed titles.
The Bannerworths' slow departure gives Ken, Dee, and Olivia plenty to question and joke about.
Ken and Dee welcome Olivia back for chapter 56 of Varney the Vampire and make a game of the reading. Each takes a turn until a stumble or a laugh hands it to someone else; heckling is part of the fun.
A Doyle story prompts a lively group reading full of suspicious instructions and beetle-boy jokes.
Antiques Freaks joins Terrible Book Club for a lively group reading of a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story about a beetle hunter. A loaded cane and Lord Lynchmere's visible nerves give the group plenty to interrupt, especially when he keeps telling his companion never to leave his…
Ken and Dee discuss the Zoob Tube, a retro toy from 1989 that makes laser blast noises using a cardboard tube, solo cups, and a spring.
Ken, Dee, and Tara read Chapter 52 of Varney the Vampire in an Eye of Argon style, with humorous banter and heckling.
The hosts of Antiques Freaks read and react to the final chapter of a 1910 advice book for college freshmen.
The hosts recap the previous chapter of Varney the Vampire, discussing the departure of the Bennerworths and a trap set by Admiral Bell that catches a cat.
Ken and Dee discuss the history of Liddle Kiddles, a line of tiny Mattel dolls from the 1960s that later saw a 1990s resurgence.
Ken, Dee, and Tara discuss the 1845 vampire novel 'Varney the Vampire' and a blood-themed ice cream from Salt and Straw.
Ken and Dee discuss the history and definition of paste jewelry, correcting common misconceptions about its name and composition.
Ken argues that 1980s and 1990s mass market romance paperbacks, sold in 5-by-7-inch pulp format with embossing and clinch covers, are being cut off by traditional publishers.
Antiques Freaks chapter 56 of Varney the Vampire follows the Bannerworths leaving Bannerworth Hall while Sir Francis Varney's house burns nearby.
The hosts of Antiques Freaks and Terrible Book Club comically read and heckle through Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's non-Sherlock Holmes story 'The Beetle Hunter'.
The hosts banter about an ugly lamp given by one host's mother, discussing its questionable aesthetics and their podcast's crass humor.
Ken and Dee from Antiques Freaks host Chris and Paris from Terrible Book Club to discuss E.F.