There is a surprising number of fakes on Antique Roadshow. Some are true antiques and have some value on their own. However, we are seeing replicles of Tiffany lamps and others floating in from China.

Georgecarolyn, An Ironrite works fine for tablecloths, but because they are so large (the tablecloths) some people find they have to iron them folded. I prefer not to do that because I think it's hard on the fabric to have a crease pressed in. Besides, in formal households the cloth should properly only have one crease down the center. (Plus it's wicked hard to get the crease perfectly straight on a large cloth, particularly older linen damask.) To avoid the crease problem with a Model 85 Ironrite like I have, you can do some fancy manipulations and turn the tablecloth for every pass and start ironing in the center. The catch here is that very long and wide cloths are still complex to do and you need a helper and a clean drop cloth underneath to avoid soiling it when doing so many passes. If you do a lot of tablecloths, making yourself an ironing table is by far the easiest and fastest way to go. The best thing about the ironing table I described above is that between ironing days you can stow it against the wall of a closet. (Let it cool completely and dry thoroughly, of course, before putting away.) As long as the table is not wider than you can easily reach across you can iron 27-32" at a time. Your 54" wide cloths would require only 4 adjustments; the wider ones would require three, but you'd have to turn it go back the other way because it is so wide. (Though you could certainly make yourself a table that was 90" long.) Still it would be very much faster than using even the widest snout-ended type of ironing board. Where the Ironrite excells is on smaller flats like pillow cases, linen dish towels and cloth napkins. I can whip through those as fast as I can feed them under the mangle, meaning about 10-15 secs each for napkins and about 30 secs for pillow cases. HTH, Molly

Do you want to see stacks of damask napkins?...I even have some in the freezer....awaiting their turn on the ironing board! Huge linen table cloths? There are fine linens being made today, you won't find them on Amazon, but those who will pay for them can find them. What do you suppose the Queen uses on her breakfast tray? and there were coarser linens, spun on a flax wheel and woven at home....I have a sampler dated 1823 on a very coarse linen base. It's just that for the past 15 or so years that fairly coarse linen has been popular....and it will survive boiling just fine, but the color may not!

It is probably not an antique. It was probably made for the hotel by one of the specialist furniture makers and discarded because of the damage. Check with the woodworking forum to see how to repair or re-place veneer. As a lesson in how good-quality furniture goes together it's a good one. Take the time to clean and reglue all the joints properly, with clamping. Their using two glues might be because of the difference in setting time or strength.