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@sharyn A friend and I ran a stall at an antiques fair on New Year’s Day next to a very friendly Scottish gentleman’s large stall full of traditional British porcelain. I think over the eight hours of the fair he sold one mug. We’re doing it again in March, so if I see him there I’ll tell him he should be selling it as “Grannycore”. 🙂
I’ve been keeping a lookout over the last two or three years for Mochaware mugs. I’ve seen only one, a damaged mug at a Newark antique fair priced at £80.
One area that does seem to fetch good prices (but not thousands!) is Chinese Yixing teapots. There’s a lot of modern ones which aren’t worth much, but the older ones can be valuable. The Chinese restaurants in America in the 1920s and 1930s used them. There’s an Edward Hopper painting, Chop Suey, which shows one.
There’s quite a bit of repro Clarice Cliffe around, and 1980s designs inspired by her. I gather Art Deco is out of fashion over here.
As regards tea cups I honestly don’t know. The market in the UK for traditional and antique dinnerware is pretty moribund. Mason’s Ironstone was popular with collectors as was Royal Crown Derby, but not so much now. Some Poole, such as the early Art Deco stuff and the MCM abstract designs seem to be popular. There’s a lot of Poole pastel-coloured teasets around, but they’re quite fragile.
I viewed one of Nurse Flipper’s videos about tea cups- seems that the German ones covered in gold fetch the most. The way tea bags stain the mugs I use, I wouldn’t like to use a thousand-dollar gold-lined cup for a cuppa!
@christiner That teacup has an unusual shape (broader, flatter) and the pattern seemed unusual for Wedgwood. Seems that it’s made for the American market as all the examples I found for sale were from US and Canadian sellers. I guess it’s for drinking tea without milk, in a warm climate.
I picked up a small clock in a wooden case from a box of junk at a flea market, thinking it was modern. But when I looked inside I spotted an old label hidden behind a bell, so I bought it. Turned out to be an E. N. Welch of Connecticut clock from about 1860, which is working- fortuitously I picked up the key from another box of junk without knowing what it was for. Judging by the dry un-waxed state of the case, and the dust I managed to breath in when I opened it, the clock probably hasn’t been used for decades.
I’ve started doing the screen grab->cleanup in Gimp->Google Lens thing on online listings. That’s fun. You can then email
Sotheby’sthe local auction house and tell them where they’ve gone wrong in their listings. They love that sort of thing. 🙂@craig-rex I don’t know anything about comics either! Or bus timetables, though a local auction house sold a small collection of them for 420 GBP (500 dollars) recently. The ones I picked up aren’t as old- seem to go for around 20 GBP or less.
Next week, Honus Wagner peeking out from behind a 1970s TV listing magazine.
Saturday’s scavenge was a big pile of 1950s theatre programmes, 1960s bus timetables, 1970s speedway programmes, and some comic where the Justice League of America assault a giant starfish. I gathered these up from boxes on the floor of a car park in the dark at 6 in the morning. There was a crowd, but nobody else was bothering with the paper, so did I miss something or was there only one near-mint 2,000-dollar comic in amongst the timetables? Weird.
The tissue I use is acid-free white tissue, which I get from a packing supplier. I buy cardboard boxes from them as well- they make their own, but fur some unknown reason they make them slightly larger than the maximum allowed sizes for parcels in small and medium. I didn’t realise that until a postmaster got his tape measure out. One centimetre too high- £2 extra on the postage.
Buyers love their items wrapped in tissue. I helped a friend pack a large item yesterday. She used shredded junk mail, ripped-up poly foam and some scrunched-up 50-year-old weird waxed brown non-sticky tailors tape.
It’s possible the buyer is being charged customs duty. Printed paper used to be exempt from duty, and may still be. When I’ve shipped books to the US using GSP I’ve noticed that the buyer has been charged customs duty. Books and magazines are printed paper; photo albums are apparently not.
As the sun rises above the hall of the Mountain King coffee is served 🙂
@christiner I didn’t know what a Stanley cup was. And now I do… They’re selling them in the UK at 60 dollars for a one-litre (2 pint) mug, which is kind of Munich-beer-festival size.
I bought a couple of West german typewriters from the 1960s from a thrift shop for 10 dollars (7 GBP). They were priced cheap as the staff checked them out and noted sticky keys- normally they ask about £20 to £25. So it was a bit of a speculative buy, but it appears typewriters are not too bad to work on, so long as nothing’s missing or broken. I did an antiques fair on New Year’s Day with my friend, and she’s up for doing another one so I guess I’ll take them along, after de-sticking.
And then there was this;
left an online bid, which was unfortunately the highest, at £25 plus costs. Says French, but is Flemish, The phrase is the same in Dutch, which is what I initially thought it was, but then I found a seller in Spain who was selling the identical pattern, but in French, and also some Belgian monks who had one in their brewery in Flemish. I have a theory about the roof on the cross- the crucifix represents not an actual crucifixion but is a representation of a roadside cross, which would have a roof. Anyway, guess that’ll be listed in the breweriana section, for connoisseurs of “het Belgische bier”.
