How to Buy or Sell — Beer Cans and Breweriana

There are many collectors of beer cans, but most cans are traded and not sold. The best way to get rid of a collection is to go to a show-and-swap meet for beer can collectors. The local papers and beer can collectors’ publications will list them. Cans are often sold in groups. Anyone who buys […]

How to Buy or Sell — Barber Poles and Barber Collectibles

The barber pole is said to have been made to represent the blood-soaked rags wrapped around the pole in earlier days. The red-and-white-striped pole has been a symbol of the pharmacist or barber since the eighteenth century. Old barber poles are now considered folk art. Information about selling and repair can be found in the […]

How to Buy or Sell — Advertising and Country Store Collectibles

The country store and its contents have delighted collectors for years. Around 1950 the first serious collectors of advertising materials began searching for signs, containers, bottles, store bins, and other objects found in an old country store. It became the vogue to decorate restaurants, homes, and shops with nostalgic collectibles from old stores, and prices […]

Goldscheider Ceramic Artists

There have been many ceramic companies owned by members of the Goldscheider family and they confuse today’s collectors. Friedrich Goldscheider moved from Pilsen, Bohemia, to Vienna in 1885. He started the Goldscheidersche Porzellan-Manufactur und Majolica-Fabrik, a company to make ceramics. He hired famous artists including Michael Powolny, Demètre Chiparus, and Josef Lorenzl and the company […]

Haida Stone Carvings

A Rago auction catalog called a large carved bust made of a black stone a “Haida Argillite carving” and then explained the meaning of the word “argillite.” Antiques can be made by people, companies or methods with unfamiliar names, but this time the auction house realized that bidders needed help. Argillite is a fine-grained black […]

Dough Box

Your great-grandmother may have used this antique box in her kitchen, but not many of us use it today. There are newer, faster ways to get the same result. The pine box is 27 inches high by 36 inches wide by 21 inches deep. It has dovetailed sides and tapered legs. The removable top is […]

Rare and Unusual Furniture

“Unique” is a word that is often misused by collectors. It means one of a kind. There can never be a unique mass-produced chair but there can be a rare one. More than 20 years ago, the Kovels’ newspaper column wrote about a table with a top that was made to look like an American […]

Cia Manna Figures

Pairs of ceramic dancing figures in exotic costumes were favorites in the Art Deco period, starting about 1920. Many different pairs about 19 or 20 inches high have been selling with the mark “Cia Manna” and sometimes the added words “Turin, Italy.” But a search of old books and even new information online have offered […]

Themed Collections

There have been many studies on why people do or don’t collect. Do they hoard to replace something that was missing in their life, a loving parent perhaps? Is it an obsession like gambling? Or is it interest in research on history or art and the emotions they create? Many decorators in the 1950s and […]

Popcorn Wagon

Popcorn wasn’t a popular snack food until the1890s when Charles Cretors created a steam-powered machine to roast peanuts, coffee, popcorn and bake chestnuts to sell from a wagon on the street near his Chicago candy store. He kept improving the machinery and the product, and in 1885, he started C. Cretors and Co. In 1893, […]