Antique & Collecting Article Index

How the antique and collecting article index works

The index below lists every article on the site, grouped by rubric and dated with the month it first appeared. The rubric tells you what kind of article to expect. A Celebrity Collector profile is built around an interview and a private collection; a collecting guide is a long explanation of one material or type of object; the short rubrics answer a single question or tell the story of a single famous piece.

The date matters more than it might seem. Sale prices in these articles are records of what a piece brought at a particular auction, show or eBay listing in that year, and remarks such as “recently” or “today” belong to the year of the article. A 1999 auction result for chintz and a 2015 result for Royal Bayreuth describe two different markets. Read every price as history and check current sales before buying or selling.

The Celebrity Collector: actors and entertainers and what they keep

The largest rubric profiles famous people through their collections, and the range is wider than the names suggest. Allan Rich, acting since 1943, was blacklisted in the McCarthy era, worked as a stockbroker and then opened a gallery of modern and contemporary art on Madison Avenue. Curtis Armstrong collects books, a passion that led him to Washington Irving. Adrienne Barbeau insists that everything she collects be used, so her Fiestaware is everyday dinnerware and her old wooden firkins serve as end tables and wastebaskets.

Others collect closer to their roles or their families. Michael Gross inherited railroad memorabilia from his grandfather Chester, who worked for the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe for 56 years. Hank Garrett kept wardrobe pieces he wore on screen, including the brown Adidas, owned by Robert Redford, that gave away his killer in Three Days of the Condor. Lana Wood collects Madame Alexander dolls and vintage jewelry, Olivia Hussey about 70 spiritual statues, Joan van Ark anything bearing the fleur-de-lis, and Cindy Pickett the stereopticon cards that let Victorian families see photographs in 3-D.

Television and film history run through the rubric as well. Yvonne Craig, Batgirl on the 1960s Batman series, collects African masks, and Bryan Cranston collected Los Angeles Dodgers baseball cards as a boy in the early 1960s. The range runs from Jack Larson, the Jimmy Olsen of The Adventures of Superman, who lived in a Frank Lloyd Wright house, to Clinton Derricks, whose golliwog collection began in a Hollywood antique shop in 1984 and grew into a book, Buy Golly!

Collecting guides by material

The collecting guides are the reference shelf. Each takes one material or type of object and works through its history, its makers, its marks and the features collectors check. Porcelain and glass have the most entries, from Royal Bayreuth and Limoges to Vaseline glass and the Lancaster Glass Co., and the overview on the antiques section page groups them by material.

Some guides follow an object that most people have handled without a second thought. The Dixie Cup covers the picture lids on ice cream cups, which began in 1930 with circus animals and performers before turning to film and cowboy stars. Iconic Beauty explains how studio publicity departments printed 8-by-10-inch stills by the thousands, while larger portraits from 11-by-14 to 16-by-20 inches were made in limited numbers. Paris Porcelain Boxes starts in Tutankhamen’s tomb, where boxes for cosmetics and games were found.

When Was, Famous Antiques and Cowan’s Corner

Three rubrics are short by design. When Was answers a single question of invention history, and its soda pop installment moves from Joseph Priestley’s carbonated water in the 1770s to the first soda bottlers in America. The pharmacists behind Coca-Cola, Pepsi and Dr Pepper arrive late in that story, more than a century after Priestley.

Famous Antiques reveals the answer to a name-the-object puzzle and then tells the object’s story. Paul Gauguin’s Fruits on a Table was stolen in London in 1970, abandoned by the thieves on a train in Turin, sold five years later at a railway auction to a Fiat factory worker for about $25, and kept on his wall for almost 40 years before his son spotted it in an art book.

Cowan’s Corner looks at folk art, the work of untrained or self-taught makers. Its sand bottle article is about Andrew Clemens of Iowa, who made detailed pictures inside glass bottles using only colored sand and tools he made himself.

Rubrics on eBay sales, marks and Civil War relics

Three rubrics have their own entrance pages. What’s Selling on eBay reads past online auction results one item at a time, with an appraiser’s comment on whether the price made sense. Antique Detective collects advice on marks, reproductions and dating, with links to the porcelain and glass guides. Ask the Civil War Collector covers the relics, documents and reproductions that Civil War collectors bring for identification.

Art & Artists and the Celebrity Artist

Painters have their own rubric under Art & Artists. Featured Artist pieces cover the Highwaymen of Fort Pierce, Florida, the Russian-born Expressionist Sacha Moldovan, and Harold “Tubby” Raymond, the University of Delaware football coach who painted his senior starters. The Celebrity Artist pieces turn to performers who paint, such as the actress Barbara Carrera, whose Hollywood Legends series portrayed 22 film stars, and the mime Robert Shields, who built a design business in Sedona, Arizona.

Many of these artists overlap with the antiques pages. Highwaymen paintings are collected much like folk art, and their early landscapes from the 1950s draw the most attention. The articles on them read best alongside the Cowan’s Corner piece on Andrew Clemens and the guides to Southern pottery, which deal with the same kind of self-taught regional work.