Antiques, Collectibles and the Celebrity Collector Go-Star Antiquing & Collecting

Antiques and collectibles, told at full length

Go-Star Antiquing & Collecting publishes long articles about antiques and collectibles and the people who gather them. Each one stays with a single subject long enough to explain it: where an object came from, who made it, how collectors tell an original from a copy, and what such pieces brought at auction or on eBay in the year the sale took place. Prices on these pages are history, recorded with their dates. They are not appraisals.

The subjects run wide. There are guides to porcelain and glass, bottles, Southern pottery, pocket watches and baseball memorabilia, and there are profiles of actors and entertainers who collect everything from cookie jars to vintage aircraft. A Southern accent runs through the whole site: alkaline-glazed stoneware from Edgefield and the Catawba Valley, the Florida landscapes of the Highwaymen, and the furnishings of the Biltmore Estate in Asheville, North Carolina.

Porcelain and glass: marks, makers and reproductions

Porcelain has the deepest shelf of guides. Royal Bayreuth porcelain was a hard white-paste porcelain made in Tettau, Germany, mainly from 1795 through 1917, and its hand-painted novelty wares have always been the most collected part of the output. The marks changed over the decades, from a simple blue cursive “T” to a rampant lion holding a “T” shield and, after 1900, two lions facing each other above a banner reading “Royal Bayreuth,” “Bavaria” and “Priv. 1794.” A rare figural red Santa lemonade pitcher in the article is listed at $6,500.

Marks can be faked, and the guide to reproduction porcelain explains how to read them with suspicion. Europeans copied Chinese porcelain, Kanji marks included, from the 15th century well into the 20th. Asian factories reproduced European porcelain mainly between the 1960s and the 1990s, and fake Meissen marks still appear on recent copies. A mark printed by an industrial ink-jet is usually very sharp, and a hand-drawn mark that looks a little too embellished, or one shown with an old date or a model number, is probably recent.

The French side of the story is in Collecting Limoges, which counts more than 48 factories and over 400 known factory marks in the region, Haviland among them. Glass gets the same close reading. Vaseline glass owes its yellow-green color, and its bright neon glow under a blacklight, to uranium salts that the Bohemian Joseph Riedel first added to glass around 1835. Silvered mercury glass, despite the name, never contained mercury in its tableware formula.

Poison bottles, soda pop and the bottle collector

Bottle collectors have two standard references on the site. A Killer Collection... Poison Bottles explains why poison bottles came in cobalt blue, honey amber, black and emerald green, with latticework, raised ridges or hobnails a hand could feel, and with embossed warnings such as “POISON” and “NOT TO BE TAKEN INTERNALLY.” F.A. Thompson & Co. even made one in the shape of a coffin, and a 3 1/8-inch example sold on eBay for $775 in 1999.

When Was Soda Pop Invented and Who Invented It? opens with a correction. The pharmacists behind Hires Root Beer (1866), Dr Pepper (1885), Coca-Cola (1886) and Pepsi (1893) did not invent fizzy water. That credit goes to Joseph Priestley, who dissolved carbon dioxide in water and was inducted into the French Academy of Sciences in 1772. The story reaches Charleston, South Carolina, where the druggist C. Alf may have been the first soda bottler in America; a rare cobalt pyramid-style bottle of his is pictured at $9,600.

For a stranger closure, the Codd bottle goes back to 1872, when Hiram Codd realized that a marble trapped in the neck could seal mineral water and soda without a cork. The pressure of the gas held the marble against a ring in the neck, and some of those bottles stayed sealed for more than 100 years.

Southern stoneware, the Biltmore Estate and the Highwaymen

Collecting Southern Stoneware covers the alkaline-glazed pottery tradition that began in Edgefield and spread to places such as the Catawba Valley of North Carolina. There Burlon Craig, the last surviving link to the area’s traditional potters, made face jugs, and some of his early work could command over $1,000. The article also tells of Dave, an enslaved potter famous for writing short poems on his vessels, which meant he could read and write in a time and place where that was not allowed.

The Antiques of the Biltmore Estate walks through George Washington Vanderbilt’s house in Asheville, which opened on Christmas Eve 1895 after six years of construction and was the largest private residence in America in its day. Vanderbilt fitted it with electricity, telephones, central heating, elevators and 43 bathrooms. Farther south, the Highwaymen were 26 African-American painters around Fort Pierce, Florida, who sold their landscapes, often still wet, from the trunks of their cars for about $25 apiece.

The Celebrity Collector: cars, castles and vintage aircraft

The celebrity profiles look at famous people through the things they collect. In 2004 Jay Leno kept somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 cars and 80 motorcycles in three warehouses the size of football fields, along with a 1941 American-LaFrance fire truck that the City of Burbank offered him for free. His collection included Stanley Steamers, a 1913 Mercer, a 1909 Baker Electric and a McLaren F1.

William Randolph Hearst started buying coins, stamps, beer steins and porcelain at the age of ten, on a European trip with his mother in 1873; on the same journey he asked her to buy the Louvre. At San Simeon he and the architect Julia Morgan built a hilltop estate in the Mediterranean Revival style, and the collection there stayed intact, in place, as it was in his lifetime: Gothic and Renaissance sculpture, 155 Greek vases, tapestries, silver and Oriental carpets.

Cliff Robertson, who won an Oscar for Charly in 1968, collected vintage aircraft, and Charles Lindbergh once flew one of his Tiger Moths. Other profiles follow Billy Gray’s racing motorcycles, Corbin Bernsen’s thousands of snow globes, Billy Dee Williams’ cookie jars and Dolly Parton’s Chasing Rainbows Museum at Dollywood.

Collecting guides for the dressing table and the watch pocket

Small subjects get long treatment too. Hair receivers sat on dressing tables from Victorian times into the early 20th century, collecting hair from brushes and combs so it could stuff pincushions or be made into “ratts” that added volume to a hairstyle. Antique pocket watches include the railroad watches whose strict standards followed a wreck at Kipton, Ohio, on April 19, 1891, after an engineer’s watch stopped for four minutes.

Japanese puzzle boxes, exported to the West since before 1870, hide a compartment behind a sequence of sliding panels. Chintz china, made from the 1920s to the late 1960s, took its name from the printed cotton fabric of 17th-century India.

To browse by subject, start with the section on antiques and collectibles or open the complete article index, sorted by rubric. Painters and actor-artists have their own page under Art & Artists.