Innehållsförteckning för July 15, 2020 från Kovels Antique Trader

The history of Depression-era glassware is fascinating, and to more fully understand why this glassware captivates so many collectors, it’s important to know the histories of many American glass houses. By exploring how these companies developed new patterns and technologies, merged, and sold their wares, the story becomes clearer. To begin with, Depression glass is known as such because collectors generally associate mass-produced glassware found in pink, yellow, crystal, or green with the years surrounding the Great Depression in America (1929-1933). Actually, the major manufacturers involved in making Depression-era glass, such as Federal, Hazel Atlas, and U.S. Glass, had established their businesses well before the Depression hit. In the case of U.S. Glass, the company formed a consortium of many smaller glasshouses in the late 1890s and combined factories, companies…

HERE’S A LOVE STORY for you. It takes place in New York during the ’70s, a time when the city was almost unlovable. Massive debt. High crime. Social strife. It wasn’t pretty. And it was going to get uglier. In a speech before the National Press Club on October 29, 1975, President Ford denied the near-bankrupt city a federal bailout, prompting the New York Daily News to run the famous headline: “Ford to City: Drop Dead!” As far as brushoffs go, that was brutal. But graphic designer Milton Glaser didn’t see it that way. New York was his city. So he crawled up the Empire State Building, pulled out the biggest pocketknife you ever saw and carved an even bigger heart right in the side of the building, declaring for…

The movement’s furniture proves that Arts & Crafts is a design philosophy and a way of working, more so than a “style.” How else to explain so many design vocabularies? “Chippendale, Shaker, Danish Modern — these styles of the past are easy to identify ... not so Arts & Crafts furniture in its many forms,” wrote revival furniture maker Kevin Rodel in the book Arts & Crafts Furniture. Designers from London to Vienna, in Glasgow and Syracuse, Chicago and Pasadena created furniture that was extremely diverse. That’s true in today’s revival as well. Artisans are creating not only reproductions and adaptations but also wholly contemporary pieces, deemed Arts & Crafts only because they may be designed, built and finished by one maker. In an Arts & Crafts Tudor house, oak…

Dear Antique Trader, I have just read and enjoyed Leonard Lauder’s story in this week’s copy of AT. I, too, have been a long-standing member of the Metropolitan Postcard Collectors Club, though not as long as Leonard. I joined in 1970. After losing both of my parents in one year, 1968 and 1969, as an only child I had the task of clearing out their home. Needless to say, it was heartbreaking work while having to also take care of my very young children. Among my father’s things, I found a postcard that was sent to him by a friend that was a radio operator on the Lusitania. That started my interest in postcards because of the historical events about this card. I have collected many different things during my…

So often these three words are used interchangeably, with good reason. Gustav Stickley, the most influential promoter of Arts & Crafts philosophy and design in America, affected taste not only through his furniture workshops and persuasive catalogs, but also because of his highly influential magazine, The Craftsman (pub. 1901–1916). Companies including his advertisers co-opted the word “Craftsman,” which became a generic term for American Arts & Crafts houses, furniture, and decorating through the late 1920s and ever since. Also, Stickley was quite literally a family of companies; four of Gustav’s brothers were competitors making furniture from New York to Michigan. “Mission” was first used by a New York furniture maker in the late 1890s, a reference to colonial-period missions. How it came to be a synonym for Craftsman is unclear.…

After suffering serious injuries in a motorcycle accident in 1966, singer-songwriter Bob Dylan was bedridden and rumored dead. To generate positive publicity for his forthcoming album, Bob Dylan’s Greatest Hits, CBS Records commissioned Milton Glaser to design a special poster to be packaged with the album. Taking inspiration from a Marcel Duchamp self-portrait, Glaser depicted Dylan in profile, his abundant curly hair rendered in electric, saturated colors. The design became one of the most famous posters in rock history. Glaser died on June 26. He was 91. His original work is in the Museum of Modern Art, Manhattan. An original Dylan poster from the 1967 album is worth around $65.…