We field repeated requests to ship one artwork from here to there, sometimes along well traveled routes such as Los Angeles to New York and/or return. Often this is a gallery anticipating or having just made a sale, with a single buyer wanting the piece, as they all do, yesterday.

 So we send off an estimate and very often the result is: nothing. We understand: it is expensive to ship a single artwork as many art shuttles, including ourselves, have a minimum charge.

 If you understand the power of the minimum, however, you can use it to your advantage. On our Los Angeles to San Francisco shuttle, for example, you can ship two or even three modest sizes works for the same price as shipping one. Up to ten cubic feet, all passengers ride for one price, rather like a NYC taxi. (And we don’t stop for women with strollers, either…)

 For many of the high value and trade show divisions of van lines, a 500 pound minimum applies. In that instance you could ship as many as ten artworks of moderate size in one crate and still stay within the minimum weight by volume.

 Hence our advice to artists and galleries: ask thy neighbor! Tweet, email, phone or stroll at lunchtime to the gallery down the street and ask if they might have anything going where you need to go. A big element here, however, is flexibility in timing. The more leeway you have in whatever schedule you have promised your buyer the more time there is to “partner” with another sender.

 Pooling resources can save serious money and is win/win for us shippers, too. We get to make two customers happy who hopefully will return next time around.

Betsy Dorfman

Today we crated an antique object so dripping with inherent vice that I wanted to just give it a good shake and ship whatever remained in hand. It was a lacy assemblage of stressed wood with flaking paint and gold leaf, forming some kind of elaborate staff.

I thought that only wizards had these, and I must say; any wizard would be proud to lean ponderously on such a grand walking stick. I was disappointed to be informed that it was not, in all likelihood, the former property of any such character; not the least because it debunked my theory that it was the gradual (and sad) fading of magic that was causing the many unsecured parts to slowly lose their unlikely relative positions and settle into a more natural relationship with gravity.

I do admire a clever bit of woodworking, and in all fairness, it isn’t the staff’s fault that it was never meant to lie prone like a saucy odalisque; much less freighted that way. But long story short, this thing was screaming to be shipped upright – not only for the fragility of its overall construction and distribution of weight, but also for the specific joins used in assembling some of the wooden nuggets.

That some of the said nuggets were quite loose is an understatement. They were ready to leap away from the piece like rats riding the explosion of a sinking ship’s boiler room. But for a variety of reasons, shipping upright was no more an option than not shipping it at all; the latter being a suggestion I slipped anonymously under the general manager’s door this morning before tip-toeing away.

When that plan didn’t work, I was forced to ship the piece in a horizontal attitude. The point of all this is that sometimes you have to just do what you can to make sure the thing is as safe as possible within the tight budget. So here’s what we did:

A cavity pack was pointless, as we would have had to float so many little parts and still catch the more solid areas at all of the correct angels in a Swiss cheese version of (a negative image of) the piece. So vertical guillotines it would be. The staff’s lateral, vertical and axial movement was eliminated by guillotines along the shaft.

One more guillotine on the crown’s widest point took much of the crown’s weight, and also eliminated any possibility of spinning in place thanks to the hexagonal tier.

Tall, tapered bumpers reached up from below to take the weight of each successive tier in the crown.

Belts and straps of Tyvek held the loosest pieces in place while holding the tiers down against their bumpers.

Finally, a safety bumper of softer foam was placed ½” away from the tip of the staff, just in case several other axial stoppers failed.

I still wouldn’t drop this crate from the top of a tall thing, but I can strap it to  a unicorn and wave goodbye to it with confidence.

-Chris