The Christmas shopping season isn’t the busiest time of the year for Antelope Antiques and Coins.

“It’s our second-biggest time of the year,” owner Karl Lagler says. “Art fair is far and away our biggest time.

“We’ll do as much during the 4 days of art fair as we do in all of December.”

But the store in the basement of the Liberty Street Mall has been busy all the same with efforts to drum up sales for the holiday season.

It has extended its holiday hours, including opening on Sundays and Mondays, and Lagler said he’s trying to merchandise more effectively by placing Christmas-themed items, such as vintage ornaments, postcards and other Christmas items dating from the 1800s through the 1970s in the store’s sidewalk-level windows.

Certain items are individually marked 50 percent off, including African masks, furniture, oil paintings and large and big-ticket items, Lagler says.

“We passed out flyers on Main Street last week,” he says. “We’ve got a sandwich board out front to try and bring people in. We had a big sale last week, which I probably shouldn’t mention because everybody missed it.”

Lagler, who runs the store with his wife, Amy, is a longtime hand in the antiques trade in Ann Arbor. He ran the old Ann Arbor Stamps & Coins on Washtenaw Avenue from 1979-86 and later the Antiques Mall of Ann Arbor, first on Jackson Road and then later on Plymouth Road.

The couple opened Antelope, originally on Fourth Avenue, in 1997 until 2001. They re-opened in their current location in May 2008.

The store is a history lover’s paradise. Notable current inventory includes a 1920s brass cash register, a 25-cent slot machine from the 1930s, an upright Victrola crank phonograph player. There’s also the regular stock of thousand of postcards and historical books, U-M sports memorabilia and Czech pottery and glass.

“The Czech artisans, particularly from 1918 to 1938 between the wars, were a huge influence in both glass and pottery internationally and they produced some beautiful glass and pottery,” Lagler says. “My wife and I both deal in it, and we’re probably the largest dealer in the country.” 

The lifelong Ann Arbor townie expects holiday sales to dip slightly this year even as sales so far have seemed strong. More people are coming in to sell gold, silver and antique coins, and customers are spending less than in previous years, he says.

But shoppers seem “pretty upbeat.”

“I think they may scale back a little bit, but not significantly,” Lagler says.

Sven Gustafson is a freelance reporter for AnnArbor.com. You can reach him at sventg123@gmail.com, or follow him at twitter.com/sveng.