Читать книгу Collecting Old Glass, English and Irish - J. H. Sir Yoxall - Страница 10

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In fact, the limits in glass-collecting are not yet fixable; you never know what quaint or rare thing you may not come upon in old glass. Other lines of collecting are already systematized, and part of the systematization is a limiting of what you may expect to find and a raising of what you may have to pay. With glass there are no such boundaries, at present; anything out of the ordinary in shape, purpose, or date, may be acquired, and should be—the uncommon pieces are the best—though often because a piece is quite unusual, it will be offered you at a very low price. The smaller dealers know that from half a guinea to a couple of guineas is what they may charge for an old wine glass, according to the knobs or the spiral in its stem, but they do not know any fixed price for less common specimens, and they will sell at a hundred per cent. profit on the very small charges they themselves have paid.

COMMUNION VESSEL, SHOWING PURFLING ON THE HANDLE, AND “WRITHEN” ORNAMENT ON THE BOWL (DATE CHARLES II)

Armed with knowledge of the general tests which I give in the next chapter, a collector may enter a dealer’s shop near Bond Street or a marine stores in the Old Kent Road, a broker’s at Hackney or a cabinet-maker’s warehouse in a country town, a second-hand furniture shop at Hammersmith or the Caledonian market on a Friday; he may look into a butler’s pantry, peer into a cupboard in a kitchen corner, search amidst the dust of a lumber-room, or reach to the deep interior of a farmhouse dresser or sideboard; and almost always he will come upon a collectable bit of old glass. He may hope to come upon an old crystal gazing-ball, used by fashionable fortune-tellers a century ago; or even one of the old glass eggs which eighteenth-century ladies held in their hands to keep their palms cool for a lover’s kiss.