By Dave Margulius, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2008)

In this interview, Wes Cowan talks about collecting 19th Century photographs, including daguerreotypes, CDVs and stereoviews. Cowan, who appears as an appraiser on Antiques Roadshow and is a regular cast member on the PBS show History Detectives, is founder and owner of Cowan’s Auctions, Inc. in Cincinnati.

I’ve always been interested in antiques. As a kid, I collected a variety of stuff – fossils, rocks, minerals, natural history stuff, Indian artifacts and antiques. I grew up in Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother had a lot of Victorian antiques. We lived in an old Victorian neighborhood, one of Louisville’s old traditional neighborhoods. In the 1910s and ’20s it had been very vibrant, but started to go downhill after World War II when people moved to the suburbs. It was a natural place for antique dealers because the rent was cheap, so there was a high concentration of them.

By the time I got into high school, my interest in antiques was waning. I became interested in archaeology. When I was in graduate school at the University of Michigan writing my doctoral dissertation, I started going back to antique shops, probably as an excuse not to write my dissertation. I didn’t really have any money, but I became fascinated with early photography and I could buy photographs reasonably because the antique dealers in the early 1970s didn’t really know what the stuff was.

I could always walk into an antique shop, spend literally a few dollars, and buy 19th- and early 20th-century photographs. I was drawn to them because of the visual impact, but also because they told a story about a person or some historical event that might not have been a big historical event but was certainly peripheral to some event in American history.

It wasn’t long before I met other people in the southeast who were photograph collectors and found that these people would actually pay me for the photographs I was buying from antique dealers, or trade. By the time my dissertation was completed, I was well on my way to being a collector and part-time dealer of 19th-century photography.

My collecting interest gradually evolved into stereoviews (also known as stereographs). I was very interested in 3D card photographs and collected those very heavily for a number of years, but I don’t really collect them anymore. I still have a pretty fine collection of them, small but very nice.

I became disillusioned with collecting photography, because, as most collecting categories do, it went through a cycle. First is the rediscovery by some group of people. Then there’s a run-up in prices, a Gold Rush mentality, and then the market matures. I became very disenchanted with the idea that what started off for me as a pleasing hobby evolved into money, money, money. There was too much competition, and I just felt like I didn’t want to participate in it.

But also, as I became exposed to different kinds of antiques, I found lots of other kinds of things that I really liked. When you collect stereoview cards, they sit in a drawer and you can take them out and look at them, but it’s not like having a nice piece of furniture or a painting or a piece of folk art that you can walk by and touch and have it be a part of your life. So that’s what I’m collecting now. I’m very interested in Midwestern decorative arts and folk art and paintings, things that were done primarily before 1840.

Collectors Weekly: How did you know which photographs to buy, when you first started collecting?

Cowan: I didn’t. It was whatever I thought was interesting and appealing. Like all collectors, I went through a period of just buying all kinds of stuff. Then as your interest and knowledge matures, you look back at your early purchases and say, what was I thinking? My interest in what I was buying evolved as I became better educated.

There’s a huge world of 19th century photographs, and I’d never presume to dictate to a collector what their individual taxonomy should be. I’ve always taken a historical taxonomy to what photographs were available during what particular period of time. Then the social context and historical context of that particular process, and then what the photographs represent within those particular periods.

If you’re interested in the earliest history of American photography, for example, then you’re going to collect daguerreotypes, because that’s the first commercially viable photograph that was produced in the United States. The daguerreotype is a copper plate that is covered with a thin layer of polished silver. The image, which generally comes in a little leather case, looks like a mirror when you hold it one way, and if you tilt it another way, you can see the image itself. A lot of people at the time called the daguerreotype the mirror with a memory.

Daguerreotypes were introduced in the United States in 1839 and were the dominant form of photograph taken until the mid-1850s. Their success exploded in the early 1840s. People tend to think that the daguerreotype is a fairly rare type of photograph, but it’s not. The initial daguerreotypes were very expensive and not very many were taken because not many people knew how to do it. But by the mid 1840s prices had been dropped to the point where the average person could have their picture taken, and there were literally hundreds of thousands of daguerreotypes, if not millions, taken in America. And they’re still around.

The most common daguerreotype is a studio portrait – somebody went to a photographer’s studio and had their picture taken. So if you collect daguerreotype portraits, you have a lot of options. Do you want to collect daguerreotypes of children with their toys or pets? Daguerreotypes of whole families? Daguerreotypes of female sitters, male sitters, men wearing hats, men smoking cigars? There’s a huge range of avenues to pursue. But if you want to collect daguerreotypes that were taken outdoors and show scenes of buildings or streets, they’re far fewer by a factor of probably a hundred or more.

In the mid-1850s, the daguerreotype was replaced by another photographic process called the ambrotype process. The ambrotype process is basically a photograph on glass to negative made positive by putting a black backing on it. Then the tintype started to become popular in the late 1850s. The Civil War gave a kick in the pants to American photography in a huge way, because every Civil War soldier wanted to have his picture taken. I would guess the average Civil War soldier had his picture taken three or four times during the course of his service.

Paper photography was being experimented with on both sides of the Atlantic, but the French were initially more successful than American photographers were with it. By 1859, a new style of photograph had been developed in France was introduced in the United States. That was the carte de visite, or the CDV as you’d say. It was based upon a calling card that had been in common usage in the mid-19th century – something you’d drop in somebody’s bowl when you came to visit them that had your name and how to contact you. The photographic carte de visite has its roots in that calling card.

Paper photography was introduced to the United States in a big way in the late 1850s, just in time for the Civil War. Photographers were very clever in that they found a way to develop a camera that would take multiple exposures at one time. A Civil War soldier might go into a photographic studio in 1860 and have a dozen photographs made for a couple dollars. These dozen photographs might be taken with a camera that had six or eight lenses, so they’re taking an identical six or eight photographs at the same time. There were literally millions of carte de visite photographs taken between 1860 and probably 1875, including hundreds of thousands taken of Civil War soldiers.

Collectors Weekly: Is the survival rate of paper photographs better than the other types?

Cowan: I don’t know, but there were more paper photographs taken because it was a cheap way to make a picture. Condition can be a big issue if the photographer was sloppy. Many photographs that were taken in the 1860s are still around and look just like they looked in the 1860s. But if the photographer didn’t take care to wash or to fix his prints, then they deteriorate. In general, it’s not the process, how they were taken care of by the photographer. People think a sepia toned photograph is an old photograph, but sepia toning is a product of a photographer not using good chemicals and not fixing the prints to keep them from fading.

New troves of 19th Century photographs are being discovered every day; important discoveries. There are plenty of photographs still out there. I’m not sure that the supply will ever be depleted. There are important things still to be found.

Collectors Weekly: How significant are big-name photographers to 19th-century photograph collectors?

Cowan: Big names are often associated with some of the most iconic images of the 19th century. There were many great 19th-century photographers. Mathew Brady was the entrepreneur in the Civil War, but many photographs that are credited to him were taken by people that worked for him. A lot of those guys went on to very important careers. Alexander Gardner and Timothy O’Sullivan, for example, worked for Brady. They didn’t like working for him because he took all the credit and didn’t give them any.

George Barnard was another great Civil War photographer who began his career in western New York and went on to make a name for himself. He was a photographer for the Army, and then after the war published a monumental book about the Civil War, an iconic photographic book. A.J. Russell was another great Civil War-era photographer who was actually employed by the U.S. military railroad to take photographs. He’s a guy people don’t know very much about, but he made unbelievably great photographs.

After the war, lots of these guys went on to have careers in the American West. O’Sullivan moved west and accompanied several government expeditions. Gardner was hired to work for some of the railroad companies that were building the Transcontinental Railroad. They were looking for routes, so they hired Gardner to go out and take pictures of the scenes along the way. Russell went along the northern route of the Transcontinental Railroad and took photographs, primarily stereoviews. He marketed those stereoviews to make a living, but he also took larger format pictures and some important early photographs.

Collectors Weekly: Why were stereoviews so popular?

Cowan: They were a great form of parlor entertainment. There was no television, no radio, and newspapers didn’t have any photographs, so this was a way for people to look at the world. You’d pass a stereoview around, and you were immediately thrust into the scene.

Stereoviews started being made in the late 1850s, but their heyday was in the 1870s, when any medium size town had a photographer taking them. They were sold locally; if there was a stationery store in the town, you could go down there and buy stereoviews that were being marketed by other photographers from other parts of the country.

Starting in the late 1880s, a number of companies decided that they were going to mass market stereoviews and opened offices regionally in various parts of the United States. They had salesmen going out and trying to sell them to homes and schools. They would basically put together a set of stereoviews of China or Greece or Germany or some foreign country and put them in a box.

There were half a dozen companies by the mid-1890s doing this. The Keystone View Company of Meadville, Pennsylvania ultimately bought out all their competitors. Keystone’s motto was “a stereoscope in every home,” and they had regional offices all over the United States that marketed very aggressively to schools and libraries. The sets they sold often came in a box that looked like a book, so you’d open the box and there’d be 50 or 100 stereoviews inside you could look at.

Keystone sold stereoscopic libraries to schools which would have a tour of the world, for example. They came in 100-card, 200-card, 300-card, 600-card and 1,200-card sets that would take you literally on a tour of the world through the stereoscope. By the 1920s, that market started to fade. Newspapers started to have more photographs. There was radio. People were getting news in different ways. The Keystone View Company finally closed its doors in the mid-1960s, and all their negatives now are at the California Museum of Photography in Riverside.

Collectors Weekly: Have you noticed any recent trends in collecting 19th-century photographs?

Cowan: eBay has been a great leveler of the marketplace for 19th-century photography as well as American antiques in general. That’s not true at the top of the market, but certainly for the vast majority of collectible 19th-century and early 20th-century photography, eBay has depressed the market, just like it’s depressed the market for R. S. Prussia and Fiesta ware and carnival glass. You name it, if it was produced in a factory, the value of this stuff has gone down.

Some images that are incredibly rare and important have still held value, but if you were a person who was collecting Keystone View Company stereographs in the 1970s and paying $10 or $15 for a Spanish American war stereoview, today that stereoview is worth $3 or $4 because there were so many produced. So it’s been great for collectors.

If you’re a daguerreotype collector, you want to collect large daguerreotypes of unusual subject matter. We sold a daguerreotype of John Brown last year, one of six known to exist, for $96,000. A few years ago, we sold a daguerreotype taken during the vigilance period in San Francisco in 1852 that sold for $129,000. If you’re a daguerreotype collector, those are the ones you’re looking for, not a mundane portrait that’s a snapshot of somebody in the 1850s. Scarcity and condition are the driving factors.

I wish I could tell you I know of a lot of photograph collectors in their 20s and 30s, but I don’t. I think this is a reflection of the antiques business in general, not just photography. Most people that are collecting seriously are in their 40s and up. That’s when you hit your stride in terms of disposable income.

Collectors Weekly: Is the market for 19th century photographs primarily American collectors, or is there a global interest?

Cowan: Primarily. There are European collectors that would collect an iconic 19th-century American image, but primarily it’s an American market, and not necessarily people that are just interested in photography. Somebody may be interested in the history of the American West, and they recognize a great photograph of Dodge City, Kansas in 1870 that will go well with their Kansas collection. There are many people collecting the story behind the image and the history behind the image, too.

Collectors Weekly: What about markings or signatures on photographs – is that a major issue?

Cowan: It can be very frustrating at first if you see a great image, and want to know where it is, but there’s no indication. A lot of 19th-century photographs were mounted on card stock or a board that the photographer imprinted his logo or address on. But there are many, many anonymous images that you find and say, gosh, I wish I knew where that was or who this is or what this scene is.

There are some people who have cataloged photographers’ imprints, and they’re great sources. If you’re a daguerreotype collector and you find a signed daguerreotype, you definitely must go to www.daguerreotype.com, the online database of a guy named John Craig from Connecticut. John has been a photographic dealer for 40 or 50 years. He published two massive volumes on daguerreotypes, and then once the Internet came around, he put them online at his own expense. It’s absolutely free. There’s no advertising on there. He’s received awards from the Daguerreian Society.

Carl Mautz, a book publisher who lives in Nevada, publishes Western photo history books. He published a book called Biographies of Western Photographers, and it’s mainly 19th-century photographers. It’s a wonderful reference; I use it all the time. It’s a 600-page labor of love.

If you’re a stereoview collector, there’s one great book you want to have in your library: The World of Stereographs by William C. Darrah. It’s out of print, but easy to find, and it gives you a great history of stereo photography.

There are great overviews of the history of American photography. One is by Robert Taft, Photography and the American Scene. It was published in the 1940s, but it’s a classic book on the history of American photography and I recommend it for anybody. Photography and the American Scene: A Social History, 1839 to 1889, is also a great book. William Henry Jackson was a great photographer who began his career in the east and ended up in Colorado. He was one of the first photographers to publish photographs of the Yellowstone Country. His photographs were distributed to Congress and directly led to the creation of Yellowstone National Park.

Collectors Weekly: It seems like a lot of these photographs are ripe to put on the Web. Is anybody doing that?

Cowan: I don’t think anybody is yet. It doesn’t mean it won’t be done. We are going to open our photographic archive up beginning in 2009. We probably have 15,000 or 20,000 photographs on our website right now that people can look at from our prior auction catalogs. Arguably, we’ve probably sold more 19th-century photographs than any other auction house in the country, outside of eBay, in the last 13 years.

Collectors Weekly: Any other advice for people thinking about collecting 19th-century photography?

Cowan: The same advice that I give to everybody, and it’s the same for any kind of antiques: collect what you like. Learn everything you can possibly learn. Buy the very best that you can possibly afford and be a collector, not an accumulator. With photography in particular, you can collect a photograph for the historical value of it, and collecting it for historical value, you might not care as much about its artistic merits. If you’re collecting for artistic merits, you need to learn to be a connoisseur, but if you’re collecting for historic merit, who cares?

Collectors Weekly: Thanks very much Wes for taking the time to talk with us.

(All images in this article courtesy Cowan’s Auctions, Inc.)

By Maribeth Keane, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2008)

In this interview, Russ Grunewald talks about collecting, restoring, and touring with vintage Ford Model T’s, and gives a brief history of vintage Ford cars. Based in Texas, Russ can be reached through the website of the Model T Ford Club of America, which is part of our Hall of Fame.

The Model T Ford Club of America is headquartered in Centerville, Indiana. We have about 115 chapters in the United States and other countries like Argentina, Australia, Belgium, Canada, Germany, Austria, Great Britain, Holland, and New Zealand. The club started in Indiana, but it’s one of the smaller states as far as members. I think they’ve got six or eight families. It just happened to be where the couple that runs the club lives.

The club was founded in December of 1965, and I’ve been a member since 1980. I got talked into running for the board, and didn’t get elected the first time, so I gave up, but they said, “No, you’ve got to run again.” The second time I ran, I was elected. That was six years ago. As president, I run the board meetings and write a president’s column for our magazine – the magazine comes out every other month, six times a year – and just watch the overall running of the club. Some people become life members, and I get to sign their life membership certificates.

I got interested in vintage Fords the same way a lot of people do. As they get older, they go back and start looking for a car they had in high school or wished they had in high school. Back in the 1940s when I was in high school, I had a 1925 Model T Runabout until I left home. So when I finally retired and had some money, I went looking for another Model T.

Collectors Weekly: Did you find the same exact car?

Grunewald: No. I had a ’25 Runabout, which is a single-seat. You might call it a Roadster. They were called Runabouts in the Model T era. They became Roadsters in the Model A era. But I bought a Touring Car. A Touring Car has a front and a backseat. It can hold four people or more.

The Model T was manufactured for eighteen model years, and it was called the Model T because it was just one model, but they did change the body styles. The first Model T was actually made in the fall of 1908, but just like today, they were 1909 models. The first 2,500 were pretty much the same, with few changes. Although the body style changed, the basic engine transmission stayed the same. I can take the engine out of my 1926 Model T engine transmission and plop it right into the Model T 3000, which had been a 1909 model, and it’ll fit.

Ford made coupes and town cars and the pickup truck and some heavier duty trucks, which they call TT trucks. They had a little different drive train and differential on them. But the Model T is unique because it’s so well known. From the 1909 model until they quit making Model T’s in 1927, they made 15,007,033. There was no other car by model that exceeded that until the 1980s when the Volkswagen Beetle finally made 16 million or something. By that time, they weren’t making them in the United States; they were made down in Mexico or South America.

There were so many Model T’s made, that people were still driving them during the Second World War and we still had a bunch of them on the streets in the 1940s. They have a planetary transmission, which doesn’t mean anything to you unless you’re into gearing, but if you own a modern car with an automatic transmission, the automatic transmission is a planetary transmission. So it’s a pedal car. We shift the gears with our feet.

We have no idea how many vintage Model T’s are still out there now. There are estimates from 50,000 to 150,000. We’re way up in the thousands just within our club because we have about 8,000 families, and almost every family has one. Some families have three or five, and a few people have ten of them. So there are probably 12,000 to 15,000 just within our club.

Most people have just one vintage Model T, but maybe 40 percent have two or more, because you get one and the next thing you know, you want another one. A lot of people will have one or two running, and they’ll be restoring a third from scratch. One of the good things about a Model T is that it’s just easy to go grab parts and put one together.

Collectors Weekly: How long does it usually take to restore a vintage Model T?

Grunewald: Three months to 30 years. It depends on how much time and money you have, how many parts you need, whether you try to find all the parts at swap meets or you buy them all reproduced. Someone that’s retired and puts their full time on it and has unlimited money could do it in three to six months, but people who can only work on it nights and weekends, it’s going to take them probably three years. There are some businesses that will do it for you, but get out your checkbook, because it’s going to cost lots of money.

Once the restoration is done, the value depends on condition, body style, how much somebody’s willing to pay. We got a new magazine out today and there’s a 1917 Ford Runabout round-up restoration listed, upgraded to 1919 style – for $14,000. There’s also a 1922 rusty Model T pickup with an extra transmission in it, extra brakes, chassis completely rebuilt, and new wheels. But the body looks like it was just picked out of a junkyard; it’s rusty and dented. Mechanically it’s a great car, but it’s one you probably wouldn’t want to restore because it looks so junky.

In terms of parts, there’s any number of companies that reproduce them. The only parts you cannot plunk down money and buy reproductions of are the basic chassis and the engine block. Out of 15 million cars made, there are so many chassis and engine blocks and engines still left that it’s no problem to find them. You’ll find them at junk piles and such, and maybe they’ll need overhauling, but the basic parts are there.

Collectors Weekly: Do vintage car collectors tend to focus on just one manufacturer?

Grunewald: Some have many different cars. Jay Leno has about 1,330 cars of all makes and models, including a Model T. But most of us will pretty much stick to one brand. There’s also related categories to collect. I’ve got a few vintage signs and a lot of Ford tools, made strictly for Fords. I’ve got tools from the 1910s and ’20s that could be used on different makes of cars. For example, a socket set has a ratchet handle, and you can stick on all different size sockets. It will fit all different size bolts and nuts. Back in the 1910s, each of those sockets had their own handle, so you would have a whole wall rack of all these T handles with a socket more or less welded at the bottom. So you can collect those kinds of things and line them up on your walls.

Auto swap meets are one of the best places to find all these tools and the cars themselves. And so many people are going to eBay. If people want to sell their cars, they put them on eBay; antique cars and antique parts. eBay makes it easier to find the cars, and you don’t have to go running all over the countryside to swap meets.

The great grandmother of all swap meets is held in Hershey, Pennsylvania in early October, and it’s the biggest in the world. Hershey is pretty good for old cars. You’ll find some Model T’s and such there but most of it is ’50s to ’70s, a lot of speed hot rod stuff. The only trouble with Hershey is it’s so big that you’ve got to get there early. If you walk up and down every aisle, it’s 20-something miles back and forth.

I’m also in the Model A Club here in Fort Worth, and we put on the world’s third largest antique auto swap meet. Last year, we sold out at 7,000 vendor spaces. You probably only have to walk 7 or 8 miles at our meet.

Collectors Weekly: How often are vintage car shows held?

Grunewald: Around here, there’s probably one just about every weekend if the weather’s good. There aren’t too many national big car shows. Charlotte, Carolina’s swap meet, they have big car shows there. There’s one out on the West Coast, I think in the Los Angeles area.

Vintage car shows are usually just people showing their cars off, not selling. When we have our swap meet here, we don’t have a car show, but we have what they call a car corral, and if you have a car for sale, you put it in the car corral. It’s like a used-car lot. There’s nothing else in there but cars, and if you’re looking for a car, it’s much easier to walk up and down the aisles, just looking.

Collectors Weekly: What were the major differences between the Model A and the Model T?

Grunewald: The Model T evolved a little bit over 18 years in looks and things, but mechanically it stayed basically the same. In 1925, Chevrolet sold more Chevrolets than Ford sold Model T’s, and Henry Ford’s son Edsel said, “Dad, we’ve got to do something.” Henry said, “Nope, we’re going to make Model T’s forever.”

Henry Ford was the sole owner of the company, so whatever he wanted to do, he could do. Some other people with ways and powers told Henry, “You’ve got to do something, because you’re going to go out of business.” So he put his engineers to work, and they took the Model T engine and doubled the horsepower – they went from 20 horsepower in the Model T to 40 horsepower in the Model A.

They switched the transmission from the planetary, because they could only get two speeds forward in the planetary transmission, and they put a standard gearshift transmission in the Model A to give you three speeds forward, and they diced up the body a little bit. It’s hard to tell the difference between a 1927 Model T and a 1928 Model A in some models, because the fenders and such pretty much look the same. If you bought a 1928 Model A closed cab pickup truck, the door on the Model A pickup truck was going to be a Model T door off of the Model T pickup. It’s not unusual for car manufacturers to use the same parts over and over.

It was such a radical switch to more horsepower, the standard gearshift and other things they did that Ford started re-lettering the cars and named it the Model A in 1928. Actually Ford made its first Model A in 1903, and from 1903 he made B, C, D, F, Z, R and S. Then we get the T, and they thought they were going to make Model T’s forever.

The Model F was a big car. Ford still had stockholders then, and they wanted a big, fancy car they could drive around. Well it didn’t sell, so they made very few of them, and they went on to some other models. So some of those letters didn’t even get past a prototype, and they went on to the next one up. And then the few, particularly the Model N, they made quite a few of those, and the R’s and S’s, they made quite a few of those. But when they got to the Model T’s, they said enough of this changing stuff, we’re just going to make one car.

They probably decided to stop making the Model T in 1926. We don’t know for sure, but by the beginning of 1927 they had convinced Henry he had to change, and the engineers designed the Model A in a matter of months. The last Model T was made in March of 1927, and they shut the factories down and switched over to make the Model A.

They made the Model A for four years – ’28, ’29, ’30 and ’31. By that time, the other auto manufacturers were coming up with newer and better inventions and things, and Ford switched to the early V-8 Fords and made V-8s for years and years. That’s all Ford made was V-8 engines.

Collectors Weekly: Has the vintage car collecting hobby grown a lot since you started?

Grunewald: I’m too narrow to say, I’m just focused on the Model T. Within Model T collecting, we’re staying pretty level. As the old folks die off, younger folks like my son and son-in-law, they’re too busy with work and with kids. Particularly in the Model T side, we’re getting less young people involved. We’re holding onto our membership though, so enough are coming in. But the current money crunch in the country is going to hurt all collectors and parts suppliers.

In July, we had our 100th celebration of the Model T Ford in Richmond, Indiana, and we had 900 Model T’s. About 2,000 people showed up. We had a parade from the fairgrounds to downtown Richmond, Indiana, and we set a record for the most cars at one marquee or one make and model in a parade. Fiat had it before with 170-something cars I think, and we had 375 Model T’s in the parade.

Collectors Weekly: What is a vintage Model T tour like?

Grunewald: We take off about 8:00 or 8:30 in the morning. Usually the police help us get out of town. We stay off of the interstates; keep on back roads. People have scouted out the routes, and we have maps and we’ll go into little towns and hit their antique stores. A lot of times we’ll go to a small town and this is all set up ahead of time. Then a church will open up and have cookies and coffee and hot chocolate for us, and we’ll go somewhere and have lunch. Sometimes it’s on your own; sometimes it’s part of your registration package. We usually have an opening, welcoming banquet or buffet when we start, and then on Saturday night we’ll have a closing banquet. Then on Sunday everybody gets in their cars, and the Model T’s, we normally trailer them. Some people will drive them round and round. I trailer mine.

The point of the tour is to drive the cars. And anytime you stop somewhere, people start gathering around and want to know this and that like what kind of gas mileage do you get? How fast will it go? What do you do if it rains in this open car? You get wet!

There’re all kinds of vintage car clubs that tour. There’re national clubs, the Antique Auto Club of America, Horseless Carriage Club of America, Model A Ford of America, Model A Restored Club, Model T Ford of America, Model T Ford Club International and on and on.

Collectors Weekly: Thanks for talking with us today Russ!

(All images in this article courtesy members of the Model T Ford Club of America)

By Maribeth Keane, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2008)

In this interview, Joe Yates talks about collecting antique fishing lures and tackle, from the big five manufacturers (Heddon, Shakespeare, Creek Chub, Pflueger and South Bend) as well as smaller shops. Based in North Carolina, Joe can be reached via his website, Joes Old Lures, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

I grew up fishing. And I always had a few old lures – several came from my grandfather – and I just decided one day that they were pretty pieces of art as well and it would be neat to have a collection of them. I went out and started looking for them and got collecting that way. That was about 20 years ago.

I have a couple thousand lures now. The lures themselves are small, but you also get into things like point-of-sale display pieces and advertising pieces which can be a good deal larger than the individual lure. When you start with hundreds and thousands of lures, of course, you have to have a place to put them all. Most of mine are in display cases, and they take up a whole lot of space.

You pretty much have to focus on a specific type of lure. I started out acquiring pretty much anything that I could find. Back in those days, there was no Internet; I would go to flea markets and yard sales and buy whatever was available, which really wasn’t all that much. Over the last 20 years, the Internet has become available, there have been more lure shows, and you’re just exposed to a lot more fishing items, so you have to specialize.

About the only thing I’m really interested in anymore are lures that were made in the state of Florida. I was born in Florida, I lived in Florida off and on before moving back to North Carolina, and I think the Florida lures are prettier than any others made.

Florida had both large commercial lure-making companies and a lot of small mom-and-pop backyard lure-making operations, so you get the whole gamut, from the very professionally slick-looking lures to the real folk art-type homemade lures. I like the folk art look of so many of the Florida baits and the fact that so many of them were hand-painted.

There were several large lure making companies, like Heddon and Creek Chub and Shakespeare. You’ll find collectors who specialize only in Heddon or only in Creek Chub, or even particular lures made by those companies, like Creek Chub Wiggle Fish or Heddon Spin Divers or Shakespeare Underwater Minnows. You can have a very large and very expensive collection, collecting only a single lure by a single company.

Collectors Weekly: How many types of lures did each manufacturer make?

Yates: There were some that only made one lure, and others literally made hundreds of lures. Within each lure, you have to know how many different colors might have been made, there are lots of variations within each lure.

Several popular manufacturers got started around the turn of the century, like Heddon. Pflueger and Shakespeare got started in the late 1800s. Creek Chub and South Bend, the last of the big five, started in the 1920s and ’30s.

The only one of the big five that’s still in business is Shakespeare. They began operations in Michigan and are now out of Columbia, South Carolina. Heddon is now owned by another company that makes Heddon-brand lures. The Heddon Company as people knew it is no longer in business, but they still own the older patents and copyrights. There are also a few Creek Chub lures being made the same way. Creek Chub has been out of business for a long time, but somebody else owns all the rights to their materials and still makes a few lures.

Collectors Weekly: Why are the big five lure makers so popular to collect?

Yates: They’re the guys that invented commercial lure manufacturing, and their products were what you saw when you went to the stores to buy fishing lures. They had more ideas, more different lures, they were the big gorillas in the room.

Fishing lures go back as far as the Native Americans, and tribes in Europe would make fishing devices – you could call them lures, I suppose – out of bones and stones and whatever else. Somewhere along the line in the 1800s, people started making metal spoons and lures that were called phantoms and demons. Fishing tackle really sprang up in England before it did in the United States. They tended to be metal.

I like some manufacturers more than others. Florida had hundreds of lure makers, and some of them were very small, single-person operations that might have made one lure. I really like some like Jim Pfeffer, for example, or Earl Robinson, but I collect a lot of different Florida makers. I probably have lures from a couple of hundred different Florida makers.

Jim Pfeffer is probably my favorite. His work was all handmade and hand-painted. He would carve the lures by hand and his wife would paint them. She would take a wooden matchstick and dip it in a bottle of paint and put those little dots on each lure with the tip of the matchstick. It was just a very small operation. They did some beautiful work.

Collectors Weekly: When did people start collecting fishing lures?

Yates: When I decided I wanted to start collecting, I really thought I would be the only person in the world who collected fishing lures. I thought I would be able to go out to the flea market and buy as many as I wanted and just go crazy collecting the darn things. I went to the flea market, and sure enough, there was somebody out there selling fishing lures. I couldn’t believe how much he wanted for his old fishing lures. I thought he was crazy! He wanted $10 apiece for them, and I thought that was lot of money for a stupid, old fishing lure. Little did I know there were a lot of people collecting a long time before I ever heard of such a thing.

There are several organized fishing tackle collector clubs and some regional clubs, and there’s also the National Fishing Lure Collector Club, which has over 4,000 members. All the clubs put on shows. The national club has shows throughout the country. As for the regional clubs, the Florida club, for example, holds four shows a year in Florida. The larger show generally has about 600 tables, 8-foot tables that people rent and bring parts of their collection for display or sale or trade. Some of the shows are just really big events, with thousands and thousands of lures.

Beyond the people who belong to the clubs, who knows how many thousands of closet collectors there are out there, people who just collect for fun and choose not to belong to the organized collecting world. There are a lot of lure collectors, believe me.

Collectors Weekly: Do people collect lures in Europe as well?

Yates: They sure do. There were a lot of European-made tackle. A lot of folks in Europe specialize in the stuff that was made there. There are also European collectors who collect American tackle, and there are a lot of collectors in Asia. You’d be amazed at how many collectors there are in Japan, for example. They have a passion for American lures. One of their main areas of interest is American plastic lures that were made in the 1960s. Just like me, they’re fascinated by lures, and they collect what they can identify with. This is what they might have fished with when they were kids, and they just collect them because they like them.

In some other cases, they collect because there are a lot of bass fishing clubs in Japan. Bass fishing is a big-time serious hobby in Japan, and there are hundreds, maybe thousands, of bass fishing clubs. Some of the clubs have rules that say, you have to have this, you have to have that, you have to have something else. You have to have a Phillipson bait-casting rod, you have to have a Heddon fishing reel, and you have to have Heddon plastic fishing lures if you want to be a member of our club. Some of these guys just pay incredible sums of money to buy this stuff. It’s crazy.

Collectors Weekly: What are fishing lures made out of?

Yates: Anything – wood, metal, plastic. I’ve got one that was made out of a fishing shell. Shells, bones, plastic, wood, metal, paper, feathers, fur, rubber, anything.

The mainstream of the fishing collectible world will tell you that the most valuable lures are the ones made from wood, generally the wooden lures with glass eyes. A lot of people will tell you if a lure was made of plastic, it’s not worth collecting, and the people who collect plastic lures will tell you, well, those are just the elitist snobs. It all comes down to point of view. But generally the old wooden lures, they’re the most desirable and most valuable.

There was a lure sold at auction a couple of years ago that brought a little more than a hundred thousand dollars. It was an American-made bait from the 1800s, and it was rare for a number of reasons. It’s the first American-made lure where wood was mentioned as a material for the construction in the patent design for it. It was actually a metal bait, but it had a wooden interior, and it happened to be in a size that nobody has ever seen before. It’s a one-of-a-kind size of this particular bait, which was made in several sizes. So this was a metal bait with a wooden core, and it’s the most valuable lure ever sold.

Some lures would have been made in one size. Others would have been made in who knows how many, two or three or sometimes 10 or 12, just depending on what the maker chose to do.

Collectors Weekly: Do most collectors search for the lure boxes as well?

Yates: Most people who are interested in boxes would want the lure to go with it. They wouldn’t collect just the box itself, they would obviously want the lure to go in the box, but as a general rule, the boxes are worth more than the lures themselves. The boxes are just more rare. If you think about it, you’d go to the store and buy a lure. You’d take it home, open it up, throw the box away and go fishing with the lure. Over time, the lure’s still there, but the box was in the trash can. Many times you’ll find a lure that may be worth a hundred dollars, but the box it came in may be worth 10 times that much.

Collectors Weekly: Do most fishing lure collectors fish?

Yates: I would say so. Although I know some who don’t fish, who just don’t care anything at all about fishing. Some people collect this stuff as a financial investment. It’s like precious metals and diamonds and that type of thing. But most people who collect fishing lures are probably fishermen. I am an avid fisherman. I love saltwater and freshwater fishing, and I have a ton of fishing lures and tackle that I fish with that are not considered collectible at all.

I’ve fished with some of the older lures, but it’s always if I find a beat-up, old lure where the condition is not very good, just to see how it works, what it looks like in the water and whether it catches fish. For the most part, most of my fishing is done with newer fishing stuff, not collectible tackle. There are some guys that collect old lures and actually fish with them. There are guys who go fishing with hundred-dollar lures, and maybe they’re using old rods and reels. Of course you’re not going to hurt them, you’re not going to lose them, but they’ll use the old rods and reels and maybe a hundred-dollar lure or more. More power to them.

Collectors Weekly: What’s the difference between collecting fishing lures and collecting tackle?

Yates: Tackle includes things like rods and the reels and creels for the fly fishermen. There are other ancillary things, fishing bobbers and line and hooks and sinkers and all of that good stuff.

There are some who collect nothing but reels, some who collect nothing but rods, some that collect nothing but lures. The fellow who bought that hundred-thousand-dollar lure that I mentioned earlier, he used to collect fishing bobbers, the cork and wooden floats, and he had just a mind-boggling collection of bobbers. He had lures also, but the bobbers were really what he collected. People collect what they like. In my case, for example, 90 percent of my collection is lures, but I also have the rods and reels and hooks and bobbers and creels and glass minnow traps and all kinds of things. It’s a broad fishing collection even though most of it is lures.

Collectors Weekly: Did the big five make other tackle too, or just lures?

Yates: Heddon made just about everything I’ve mentioned – rods, reels, hooks, sinkers, floats, the whole ball of wax. Pflueger made a lot of those, particularly the rods and the reels. Shakespeare and South Bend made most. Creek Chub were much more a lure than a tackle company. Then there are makers who did not make lures at all, but made rods or reels or minnow traps or hooks.

What makes a lure rare is how many were made and how many survived. But the fact that something’s rare doesn’t mean it’s desirable, and the fact that something is desirable doesn’t necessarily mean it’s rare. For example Jim Pfeffer made maybe 20 different general types of lures, and within each general type, he might have made one color or 50 colors. Of his lures, he made a lot more of this kind than he did of that kind, and he made a lot more of this color than he made of that color. There are two or three lures he made that are just extremely rare, because he only made 10 or 12 of them in the first place, and of those 10 or 12, some of them got lost. It depends on how many survived.

Most of the colors were made to catch fishermen more than anything else. A lure maker might have a lure on the market, and he had it available in two or three colors, and next year he’d come out with a new color and he’d tell the fishermen, “This is the exciting new color that all the fish are going to just eat up, so you have to come get the new stuff.” It’s just like the stuff you go to the store to buy today that’s new and pretty. Of course, they used colors because they thought they would catch fish, but I think it was more about catching fishermen than catching fish.

Collectors Weekly: What do you look for when you’re collecting lures?

Yates: Things I probably don’t already have, to help round out a collection I have going. And I’m looking for the condition of the lure. I want it to be in as good a condition as possible. It may be very rare; it may be very common. Who knows? A lot of these lures, there are so few of them that you have to take whatever’s available. Maybe it’s in great condition, maybe it’s beat up and bruised, but if that’s all there is and you want a complete collection, then that’s what you have to settle for.

Collectors Weekly: How many variations did the major lure manufacturers make?

Yates: Take for example a lure made by the Creek Chub Company called a Pikey – one of their popular lures, one of the first lures they ever made, and they made it for probably 60 years. They made tens of millions of them. There were certain colors they made every year, year after year, and needless to say those are not nearly as rare as colors that might have been made for only one year or colors that are special-order colors.

They had a deal where you could place a special order with them. You’d say, “I want this lure, but I want it in a special color that I want you to paint just for me,” and as long as you ordered a dozen of them, Creek Chub would paint anything you wanted. So there are examples, literally, where somebody may have ordered a special color, and there were only 12 that were ever made.

Some lures have names marked on them and some don’t. Even within a particular manufacturer, some of their lures are marked with names and some aren’t. Jim Pfeffer, for example, some of his lures say Pfeffer and some of them don’t. It just becomes a question of learning what particular lure makers’ products look like, and that can take years and years of study. Believe me, I don’t recognize every lure I see. I can’t pick every lure up and tell you who made it, when it was made and what it’s called. Probably most of them I can, but there are many, many that I cannot. There are lots of books that have been written about lures in general or books that have been written about specific companies, and most people who get serious about collecting the old lures have a library of books that they can use as reference material.

The book I would recommend you start with would be the one by Carl Luckey. He did six or seven volumes over time, and it’s a general collector guide that’s got pictures of the lures, stories, information about the lure makers and when they were in business, that type of thing. Probably the next best one would be the books by Karl White. By that time you go through those books, you’ll probably decide, well, I’m interested in this company or that company, and at that point, there are specific books about most of the companies that you might want to turn to.

There’s a fellow in Florida, Bill Stuart, who started a project probably 12 years ago, and the thought was to document every known lure maker in the state of Florida. Right now he’s done six volumes of that book, I believe, and there will be at least one more, probably two more volumes that will come out. Each volume typically covers 75 or 80 different Florida lure makers.

Bill is a tireless researcher. He’s always looking. He’s always talking to new people. He’s a great guy, and he’s done an awful lot to document the history of Florida lure making. I have a whole shelf of fishing lure books and I have all six Florida volumes. They’re about the only ones I ever even look at anymore, but I have a whole bunch of other books.

Collectors Weekly: Any big recent trends in collecting fishing lures?

Yates: Yes. They got a whole lot more expensive somewhere along the line. And of course values fluctuate. The Japanese collectors are the best example. Ten to 15 years ago, they were paying a lot higher prices for what they were interested in than they’re paying today, and some of the things they were interested in then, they’re less interested in now. People’s interests, whether they’re foreign or here in America, change over time, and the value of certain lures goes up and comes down. I guess there are a lot of reasons.

Whenever somebody comes out with a book, there tends to be a flurry of interest in whatever the book was written about. Dr. Harold Smith wrote a book about Creek Chub seven or eight years ago, and as soon as that book came out, Creek Chub lures were the hottest lures out there. The number of Creek Chub collectors skyrocketed and the value of Creek Chub lures skyrocketed, and I think it was all because of the book.

It seems like a new book comes out every couple of months. There’s a fellow – I think he’s in Minnesota – his name is Dr. Todd Larson, and he teaches at one of the universities, but he’s also involved in book publishing. He has facilitated the publishing of a lot of small runs of very specialized collector books. I could write a book about something, and he would make it very easy to publish it.

Collectors Weekly: Do you ever encounter fake lures?

Yates: Absolutely. Its a real problem. There are lots of fakes. There are a lot of absolute forgeries, fakes, repaints, total fabrications. Even more so repaints than fakes. You learn over time what colors were made by different makers and what those colors look like and what paint is supposed to look like. But some of the stuff is so well done that it’s very difficult to know the difference between good and bad, particularly if you’re buying from a photograph on the Internet. It’s a lot different buying online than buying at a show where you could hold it in your hand. The key is education: knowing what things look like, what they feel like, just educating yourself of what to look for.

Jim Pfeffer is a good example. His stuff is folky looking, folk art, homemade, hand-carved, hand-painted product, and it would be real easy to fake that, to repaint some of his work or to just totally fabricate it, fake it from the start, a lot easier to do some of his stuff than a mass-produced, factory-made Heddon lure that was done with machines.

I don’t know anybody who, over time, has not been burned by buying a fake or buying a repaint. I have. Everybody I know has at one point or another, and you just chalk it up to experience. It’s buyer beware. If you’re seeing something you’ve never seen before, then maybe it’s real, maybe it’s not. The way I approach it is if I’m seeing something I have never ever seen before, you have to prove to me that it’s real. Demonstrate to me that so-and-so actually made this, or else I just don’t need it.

Collectors Weekly: Any advice for someone new to collecting antique fishing lures?

Yates: Get yourself a good book, read it, study it, and if possible to attend one of the collector club lure shows. Keep your hands in your pockets and walk around before you spend your money. First time I ever went to a show, I couldn’t believe it. There’s this great, big room with I don’t know how many tables, just a huge room full of people and tables of fishing lures. I walked in and my jaw just dropped, and I think I spent all the money I brought with me before I got to the end of the first aisle. Then, of course, years later, I wondered why I was stupid enough to buy any of them in the first place… because I didn’t know any better!

If possible, strike up a friendship with somebody who already collects and use them as a mentor. Join one of the clubs. The national club publishes a magazine and a newsletter with educational information about lures and lure makers, and if you’re serious about learning about the old tackle, that’s the way to go about it. If you just want to start collecting, go to the flea market and buy something and take it home and put it in a display case. I guess it just depends on how deep you want to get into the hobby, but education is the key.

The good thing is that there are a lot of websites about old lures now. When I started my site in 1996 – I think there were two other sites that had anything to do with old fishing tackle. Now there are 100, 200, it’s hard to know. A lot of websites have very good information about old fishing lures and who made them and what they look like and what to look for.

Collectors Weekly: Anything else that you’d like to mention?

Yates: Fishing is more fun than fishing lures. That’s a joke, but, well, I’m probably more than halfway serious. They’re both fun, but I will tell you this: there are a lot of collectors who need to get a life. I might be one of them, I don’t know, but there are a lot of people who take this stuff a lot more seriously than they probably should. Get a life.

If you’re going to collect anything – and I don’t care if it’s fishing lures or stamps or coins or diamonds or whatever it is – the most important thing is to keep it fun. If you can’t enjoy it, then you need to find something else to do. You go to a show and maybe you see something you want and you have to deal with a jerk to get it, and maybe you’re dealing with somebody who wants to rip you off. There are lots of points along the way where it’s not fun, and if you can’t enjoy it, then it’s time to stop, move on, and do something else.

Another thing you can do is to take an old lure and give it to a kid. Get somebody else started. This is a hobby that’s difficult to get started in. There are hundreds of thousands of lures out there. You can buy a lot of junk little lures for a dollar apiece, but the good stuff is expensive. The stuff that people want costs a lot of money, and it’s real tough to get started in this hobby financially anymore. I don’t know how people can even do it. It’s just so expensive to get the better stuff. The best thing you can do is give some lures to the kids, get them started, get them interested and help them along the way. Have fun and support the future of the hobby!

(All images in this article courtesy Joe Yates of Joes Old Lures.)

By Maribeth Keane, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2008)

In this interview, Jim Mamoulides talks about collecting vintage fountain pens, and the various models and styles produced by manufacturers including Sheaffer, Parker, Montblanc, Waterman, and others over the years. Jim can be reached via his website, PenHero.com, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

When I got my first job out of college, I did what a lot of people do: I ran out and bought myself a Montblanc pen and fountain pen set. I kept that pen for years, but in the mid-’90s, I lost the ballpoint at a business meeting. I gave it to somebody to use, and they didn’t give it back, which is the common way people lose pens. It wasn’t like the Montblancs you see today, with the twist cap that everybody has in their pocket. It was actually a special one made out of metal, a push button-type ballpoint that they only made for a few years in the ’70s.

I started calling around to pen stores, trying to find a replacement for it, and I got all these crazy stories about, nobody makes those anymore; you can’t find them; we don’t have them, so I looked on the Internet and I started to notice other pens that were available. Pens from the ’70s started to interest me, and I noticed that there were people that collect pens. I wound up in a pen store in Dallas, Texas looking for this pen, and one of the guys from the store said, “Have you looked at any vintage pens?”

He took me to the back of his store and they had cabinets full of older pens from the ’20s and ’30s and ’40s and ’50s. I was immediately captured by that. I remember as a kid that I tried calligraphy and used a pen my grandfather had. I started buying a couple of these pens and using them, and that’s how I got started. I got interested in pens because I lost a ballpoint.

I’ve been a serious collector now for about 12 years and I focus principally on Sheaffer. That has a lot to do with the history of Sheaffer as an American pen manufacturer and the fact that they were innovative. That appealed to the nerd in me.

The majority of my collection is Sheaffer, but I’m the kind of person that appreciates interesting things. I have a little bit of a magpie in me. For example, Wahl-Eversharp created a lot of interesting pen designs, and there are a number of Parker pens that appeal to me and some Waterman designs. It has to be something that would be considered a landmark or watershed of design in terms of either the pen itself, the nib unit, or the filling system. That’s why Sheaffer became my number one interest because their pens have a bunch of different filling systems and a bunch of different nibs.

Collectors Weekly: What’s a nib?

Mamoulides: In terms of fountain pens, a nib is a piece of metal. It can be made of stainless steel, gold or gold alloy, anything from 9 karat to 18 karat gold. There are even 22 karat gold nibs. Generally speaking, a nib has a diamond shape with a point on one end. It spreads to a wide point, and then it narrows as it goes into the barrel.

Underneath the nib will be a piece of rubber or plastic that will usually have cuts in it like fins. That’s called the feed, and the feed actually provides two purposes: it presses up against the nib and guides the ink through capillary action to the point of the nib, and it also allows air to go back inside the pen so that the air replaces the ink as it comes out and regulates the flow onto the paper.

The most unusual nib available is called the music nib. Music nibs were designed specifically for people who write on music paper, like a composer. It is very wide with a flat end on it and two cuts. Music nibs are very rare, and there are collectors that actually seek them out. If a pen has a music nib on it, it could double its price.

Fountain pens are my specific interest, because up until the turn of the 20th century, there were just a couple of different ways you could write. You could write with a pencil or a pencil-like device or you could write with some form of an ink pen where you either dipped it, or it had some reservoir where it held the ink. All the major designs in writing happened after 1900, and there was tons of innovation in the first half of the 20th century. Every conceivable crazy way to write was tried. What we have today is mostly innovations around a ballpoint, but nobody really had a successful ballpoint design until the 1940s, so much of the early writing instruments were either pencils or fountain pens.

There were fountain pens before 1900, but they had a barrel with the ink and then you would screw the nib unit on. They’re probably the easiest and simplest pens, but nobody had a way to self-fill them. After 1900, a lot of companies like the Conklin Pen Co. came up with a design with a sac inside the pen, and you press a knob on the side that compressed the sac and filled the pen with ink.

Sheaffer came out with the lever fill in 1913, and then other people came up with other designs. Parker came out with a design where you pushed a button on the bottom of the pen to fill it – that’s called a button filler. In the 1930s, there were different kinds of plunger fillers. Filling systems kept developing all the way up to the 1950s when cartridges were invented. Cartridge pens eventually took over because they were the simplest design of all.

Cartridges were actually first tried in the late 1800s. A company called the Eagle Pencil Company came out with a fountain pen that had glass cartridges where you took the wax off a little glass bottle, stuck the bottle onto the end of the nib, then screwed the barrel on. It was sold in packets full of little glass cartridges, but glass is not real reliable, so the pen failed in the market because they broke easily.

Collectors Weekly: How many different types of collectible vintage pens are there?

Mamoulides: There are three main kinds. There’s dip pens, basically a nib on the end of a stick, fountain pens, which have a self-contained ink reservoir, and ballpoint pens. Even though you hear about gel pens and roller balls and all that, every ballpoint pen works the same way. It has a little ball down at the bottom of a tube, and that ball rolls around and it either pulls ink off of a wax container, which is how a typical ballpoint works, or when you press it, ink flows out, and that’s what a roller ball or a gel pen does.

The earliest ballpoint pen designs actually didn’t use a ball at all – they used a rod, and they were called stylographic pens. Those were first invented in the middle of the 1800s, and one of the first manufacturers was a company called A.T. Cross, which is the Cross Pen Company today.

In 1949 or ’50, a guy named Marcel Bich pioneered a very inexpensive ballpoint, which became known as the Bic Crystal. It was a self-contained ballpoint pen that you could throw it away once you used it up. That pen became the genesis of the Bic pen company, which is now one of the largest pen manufacturers in the world. All those zillions and zillions of bags full of Bic pens you see, that design really hasn’t changed much in terms of its basic design since the 1950s.

Bic bought Sheaffer about 10 years ago. Most fountain pen companies are not independent companies anymore – they’re owned by other companies. Parker is part of Newell Rubbermaid, as well as Waterman and a bunch of other brands. Montblanc is part of the Richemont group, a huge company that deals principally in jewelry and high-end products.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the leading pen manufacturers?

Mamoulides: There were four companies that pen collectors in the U.S. call the big four: Sheaffer, Parker, Conklin and Waterman. Conklin is famous because they created the first successful self-filling pens. Even Mark Twain was used in their advertising. He says in one of his ads, “It’s a pen that prevents cussing because it won’t roll off the table.” That was because the filling system used a crescent filler. It had a flat metal curved piece that looked like a button on the side of the pen that you press to fill it with ink, and then if you set it down, because it has this flat thing sticking out of the side, it won’t roll away.

Parker was started by George Parker. He was a salesman selling John Holland pens and decided to make his own. Parker’s big claim to fame was a feed that would not leak. The Parker Lucky Curve came out just after the turn of century, and it had a special design that looked like a little hook inside the pen. It pressed the tail end of the feed up into the side of the barrel to prevent the pen from spitting ink on the paper when you turned it down, which was a common problem in early pens.

Waterman started off selling a lot of overlay pens. Their heyday was in the early part of the 20th century, and they gradually fell apart as a company in the U.S. The Waterman distributor in France actually bought out the remains of the company in the 1950s, and that’s why Waterman today is based out of France.

The Moore Pen Company out of Boston had several innovative pens. One was called a safety pen. You filled it using a syringe, and it had a system whereby if you unscrew and screw on the barrel, the nib actually goes up inside the barrel instead of being screwed off the pin. Then you fill the pin up with ink and screw it the other way and the nib comes back out. Basically the whole idea of the safety pen is it doesn’t leak, and people were concerned about pens leaking at the seam where you unscrewed the nib.

The 1920s was a very prosperous time. There were a lot of pens manufactured, and that’s when plastic pens started out, a lot of colorful hard-rubber pens – before the 1920s, most pens were just black. In the late 1920s, the main innovation was pens that were streamlined shape, led by the Sheaffer Balance.

A lot of the 1920s pens had plunger-type fillers or pneumatic-type fillers. The two big innovative pens in the U.S. were the Sheaffer Vacuum Filler, which has a long plunger that you push it down to fill the pen with ink, and the Parker Vacumatic pen, which has a diaphragm inside where you unscrew the cap and push a button repeatedly to fill the pen. In Europe, a company called Pelikan came out with a piston-filling pen. It had a knob on the end and if you continuously turned it, it would suck ink into the pen. In the U.S., a much less successful piston-filling pen was made by Conklin.

The 1930s became an innovative time, despite the Depression. Pen companies tried to introduce pen brands that were less expensive, so almost every major pen company had a secondary or tertiary line that people could buy in dime stores. Sheaffer had WASP, which is Walter A. Sheaffer Pen Company. Conklin had a line called All American.

In the 1940s, pen designs became more modernized. The pens that ushered in what’s now called the “modern look” were the Parker 50 and the Parker 51 in 1950. Most collectors would say the Parker 51 is the most innovative pen ever made. What’s most interesting about it is you can’t see the nib. The nib is actually inside a sheaf and completely hidden from view, except for the tip – it’s actually a little tubular piece of gold that sits inside of a large feed that is basically a ring of fins. The 51 Vacumatic fillers were made out of a new type of plastic called Lucite.

The other big 1940s innovation was made by two brothers, I believe they were Hungarian. They invented a ballpoint pen that the British used in World War II, and sold their design to the Eversharp Company, which came out with one of the first commercial ballpoint pens. They called it the Eversharp CA for capillary action. Another company, Reynolds, basically ripped off that design without paying any royalty and introduced a pen called the Reynolds Rocket. These two pens were introduced right at the end of the war, and became the first commercial ballpoint pens. They were sold for the same price as a high-end fountain pen and both of them had problems with leaking, so they were both horrible failures.

The Eversharp pen just about broke the company with all the returns. The Reynolds Company went out of business because their pen was so bad. A lot of people felt like ballpoint pens were going to be a failure, but as I said earlier, Marcel Bich came up with the first commercially successful ballpoint late in the ’40s, and in the 1950s every major pen company that wanted to survive had to come out with a ballpoint pen. Sheaffer, Parker, all of them produced ballpoint pens by the mid 1950s.

The big transition in the 1950s was from traditional fountain pens to ballpoints and cartridge pens. By 1960, every pen company that wanted to survive had cartridge pens, and cartridge pens actually became the most popular type of fountain pen. Just about every pen made today is a cartridge pen.

Collectors Weekly: Why were there so many different pen models made?

Mamoulides: In the first half of the 1900s, pens were sold based on two things: they had to write well, and they had to hold more ink and be easier to fill than another pen. The other important thing was style; my pen is cooler than your pen.

From the 1940s to the 1960s, there was a lot of transition. It was, my pen is cleaner filling than your pen, rather than it holds more ink. By the 1960s pens really diverged. Fountain pens and ballpoint pens were either inexpensive writing instruments at a low cost or they became fashion/jewelry items. Parker really led the way on this. In the early 1960s, Parker introduced one of their most collected pens, the Parker 75. From the beginning, it was a solid sterling silver pen with a cross-etched pattern that they designed from a cigarette lighter they saw. The design is called Cisele in French, and it was so popular and powerful that the 75 actually gave birth to many different types of models, including super expensive solid gold models.

Parker changed their whole business model towards manufacturing good quality ballpoints or very nice high-end pens that were in the middle- to high-end price range for the gift market. Pens became more of a gift item than an everyday writing item, so pen companies actually went on the wane in the ’60s and a lot went out of business. The brands that survive today principally exist as gift pens, like the Cross pens.

As time went on, companies got fancier with materials and designs to make their pens more interesting to more people. In the early days, it was like Ford’s Model T – you could have any kind of pen you want as long as it’s black. Nowadays, at minimum they’ll do the same pen in four different colors or get fancy and give it to you plain or engraved or with a special lacquer or finish on it. The Sheaffer Legacy has six different finishes. That’s how pen companies appeal to a broader audience, and also to collectors. Your collector wants every single one. So you have people that collect every single version of the Parker 75, of which there are probably 50 or 60.

The Sheaffer Snorkel has about a dozen different versions, and people who liked that pen are interested in the history and the different variations. They’ll typically try to get all 12 different styles, and each one of those styles might have four or five different colors of plastic on them. I know a collector in Richmond, Virginia who has every single color and every single style that the Snorkel was made in. Collectors like him try to find the best quality, least used, and best-looking versions of each one of those pens.

What usually happens is people will find something that nobody knew about because it wasn’t very successful, it didn’t show up in their catalog, or it didn’t show up in their advertising. Sometimes pen companies would make a special pen that only one store or chain would sell. A good example is the recent Sheaffer Legacy, that has come out in certain colors that nobody knew existed because they only made them for one or two resellers. Levenger, which is a very large office supply store in Delray Beach, Florida, had certain models of Sheaffers manufactured for them that only they sold.

To identify variations, since pens typically don’t have a mark, engraving or a model name written on them, most collectors get their hands on catalogs and sales sheets and advertisements and company memos, and actually gather this type of information. The largest pen collecting society in the U.S. is the Pen Collectors of America, and they warehouse this type of stuff. You can get copies of pen manufacturer paraphernalia from them to help identify at least the standard models of that manufacturer.

And a lot of pen collecting is really the Sherlock Holmes stuff, trying to figure out what it is. You get a hold of a pen and you know by its design or the materials it’s made out of, it has to be manufactured in a certain period of time. Or you look at similar items and make deductions based on those.

Collectors Weekly: Do you collect certain Sheaffer models?

Mamoulides: Yes. The big pen from the 1920s that Sheaffer made was commonly called the Sheaffer Jade. It’s a green marble pen made of plastic, and it was the first plastic pen ever mass-produced. People seek them out because they’re just about indestructible and they’re very high-quality. The next highly collectible pen is the Balance, a torpedo-shaped pen that Sheaffer made for almost 20 years. They made them in a whole array of colors – every color of the rainbow except yellow. They made them in striped colors, in marble colors, and in plain colors. They are gorgeous pens in all different sizes.

In the ’40s Sheaffer made pens that were more formal-looking, by name of either Triumph or Touchdown. In the ’50s, one of their most famous pens was called the Snorkel, a slender pen that’s filled by the Snorkel-filling system. In the late ’50s, they introduced what many collectors think is one of their finest pens, but not one of their most successful. It was called the PFM, which stood for Pen For Men. It was an unusual blocky design that had a more masculine look to it and set the tone for Sheaffer’s look all the way up to today. The current shape, or Legacy model, is designed after the Pen For Men and is one of Sheaffer’s most popular pens. What was most unique about the Pen For Men is that it introduced the inlaid nib, which lays on top of the nib section and looks almost like a gold fingernail. It’s like nothing that anybody has designed since, and many of the Sheaffer designs of the 1960s followed the Pen For Men design in smaller sizes.

The last of the famous Sheaffer pen products was introduced in the 1970s, a pen called the Targa. It goes back to the cylindrical look of the 1920s. It was named after the Targa Florio race and the Porsche car called the Targa. It has been made in almost a hundred different variations, and it’s become very collectible since Sheaffer discontinued it in the 1990s.

Sheaffer’s probably done more different filling systems and more different nib designs than any other pen manufacturer. They did the first commercial lever-fill pen back in the 1910s, that was one of their first patents. They were the first company to mass-produce pens made out of plastic, and the first to produce a pen with a tubular-type nib, one of their more famous designs. They also mass-produced pens with an inlaid nib. This was a company that was built around the question, how do we make a pen better, and that appeals to me in a big way.

Collectors Weekly: How did Sheaffer get started?

Mamoulides: That’s a pretty cool story. Walter Sheaffer sold pens in his jewelry store in Fort Madison, Iowa. He was sick and tired of pens that didn’t work right, these syringe-filling pens that didn’t have any sort of mechanism in them. He tinkered around, since he was a jeweler by trade, and cooked up a method to fill a pen by putting a sac in it. You pull the lever on a little bar which presses the sac, and the pen sucks up the ink. He patented that design and sold his first pen, the Sheaffer lever fill pen, in 1913.

From then on, Sheaffer made pens in the back of his jewelry store. He was a great marketer. He had great salespeople working for him and just kept growing every year, and finally had to build a separate factory to make pens. They went from a backroom shop to a company with hundreds of employees in less than 10 years, and were the largest pen manufacturer in the U.S. in the 1950s. They were still in Fort Madison, Iowa up to the early 2000s when they finally closed their plant.

Sheaffer’s was constantly improving every aspect of the pen – even the ink that went in the pen. They were one of the first companies to make their own ink, which they started doing in the 1920s. That’s important to note, because fountain pen ink has to be water-soluble or it won’t work. Back in those days, a pen would cost $5 to $10, and people couldn’t afford to throw them away, so it had to work and it had to use a kind of ink that wouldn’t clog it. Dip pens used India ink, which includes compounds that dry to a solid, and would clog up a fountain pen.

The fountain pen has a nib, and underneath the nib is what’s called a feed, and the feed actually is like a channel, a piece of rubber or plastic, that the nib goes through. It provides air to the nib inside the pen so that the ink can flow, and if that gets clogged up, the pen won’t write. So Sheaffer actually came up with their own ink.

In the ’20s, Sheaffer came up with the cigar-shaped design for the Balance, which was a big deal because nobody had ever thought to make a pen that looked like a torpedo or a cigar. Everybody wanted this new-looking pen. Then in the 1940s, they invented a new kind of nib called the Triumph nib. It was a wraparound tubular or conical-shaped nib that was like nothing anybody else had, and it enhanced the end of the pen with that torpedo shape. They also introduced a type of filling system which was called a touchdown system. You actually pushed a plunger and it caused the pen to suck up the ink into an ink sac.

In the ‘50s, with all the changeover to ballpoints, people were saying, I don’t want to mess my fingers up with my fountain pen. Why do I have to do that? One of the solutions they came up with was actually the most mechanically complex pen ever made. It was called the Snorkel, and actually extended the tube from the tip of the nib into the ink well, and when you pushed the plunger, it filled the pen without ever getting the nib inky. So you could cleanly fill your pen and never have to wipe it. Sheaffer was constantly introducing stuff like that.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the rarest vintage pens you’ve come across?

Mamoulides: Parker made a famous, unusual pen called the Aztec. It was an eyedropper pen – a pen that you filled up by using a syringe to fill the barrel – and it had Aztec designs impressed on to a metal case around the hard-rubber barrel, including images of faces. It also had a swastika-type design, not like the Nazi swastika, but a three-armed design. They sell them for $50,000 and up, because they’re so unusual. They didn’t make a lot of them and they were super expensive when they were originally sold.

A lot of the really rare pens are early pens that were not made in large quantities. Parker made a pen that was a failure in the 1920s. It was based on one of their most famous designs called the Duofold, which was a traditional tube-shaped pen, but it was made out of a very bright yellow plastic, because George Parker went to the Far East and saw that that kind of yellow was popular. But Americans just didn’t get it, so it was a flop. The plastic was so brittle that they broke easily, so finding one in good condition is hard. So the Mandarin yellow pen became a very highly sought-out pen.

Waterman made a wonderful series of pens in the 1930s called the Patricia, which was their top-of-the-line pen. They were very expensive pens that didn’t sell very well at the time, but they were so beautiful that collectors really love them.

Rarity is not always the main driver of a pen’s value. Sometimes it’s the story behind it. The Moore Fingertip was an unusual pen failure. It was a response to the Parker 51, and it had almost a stainless steel bullet-shaped tip. Moore stuck a long gold-plated nib on top of that stainless steel end. Moore was in their last days when they came out with this pen, and it wasn’t a success, but they’re so unusual and cool-looking that a lot of collectors really like them and they command a pretty high dollar.

I go to antique stores in unusual places to look for pens. Older people die and their family doesn’t know what to do with all their junk, so the antique people go to the auctions and buy all their stuff, and a lot of these people have a lot of pens. Collectors scour antique malls, antique stores, and auctions. You won’t find a lot of pens by putting an ad in a paper saying, “Do you want to sell me your pen?” You might find them from relatives, but the place to really hunt for them is these little nook-and-cranny antique stores. I develop a relationship with the store people so they know what you’re looking for.

Most collectors these days buy on the Internet or at pen shows. Pen shows really started about 20-25 years ago and they’re in all the major cities. Chicago has one. Washington has the biggest in the world. There’s one in Miami, in Raleigh, and in Los Angeles. People get together and swap pens, buy pens, get their stuff repaired, and get help valuing stuff. You see all sorts of stuff at pen shows that you might never see ever again in your life.

Collectors Weekly: Are there a lot of vintage pen collectors?

Mamoulides: Yes. The Pen Collectors of America’s membership is a couple of thousand, and I know the Writing Equipment Society has a couple of thousand members also. The Fountain Pen Network, which is a chat-type website, has about 15,000 members. It’s a smaller group of people than watch collectors, but very interested in all aspects of pen collecting. They all have different interests – technical, design, brands, history - and yet they’re all interested in writing with fountain pens.  They want to write with something that puts ink on paper as opposed to typing on a screen.

Just about every country and every part of the U.S. has pen collectors. They tend to be older white guys, but I have noticed that there are more people now collecting from other ethnic groups in this country. There are a lot of pen collectors in the U.K., because the U.K. had a lot of pen manufacturing. There’s a good number in Paris and in France, and a lot in Japan and China, especially Hong Kong.

There are collectors who look for pens because of their design, their filling system, the kind of nib, the materials it’s made out of. People that collect only gold pens, pens made of 9 or 14 or 18 karat gold. People who collect pens that are only hard rubber. The earliest pens were all made up of hard rubber, and they have overlays of gold or sterling silver or aluminum. At the turn of the century, aluminum was actually an expensive rare metal, so some very rare pens have had aluminum overlays on them.

Collectors buy pens for a variety of reasons. There’s what I call the Franklin Mint market, which is people who buy pens that have some unique quality. There’s a company called Krone which makes pens with DNA of famous people in them or little slivers of stuff or other things that make that pen somehow unique, aimed specifically at collectors. Almost every pen company makes limited-edition pens where they pull out all the stops in terms of the special engraving on the barrel, or special painting. There are pens that are literally encrusted with diamonds.

Probably the most expensive pens not made of precious metals are pens that are hand-painted in Japan with a gold and lacquer process known as Maki-e pens. A Maki-e pen is an urushi lacquer object with really exotic extraordinary designs. Pilot Namiki is one of the most famous companies to produce these pens. They’re incredibly exotic, and they can cost anywhere from a few thousand dollars to $25,000 or $50,000.

Collectors Weekly: Where do you do most of your research?

Mamoulides: I have books, but mostly it’s people swapping information amongst themselves, plus pen-focused magazines. The Pen Collectors of America has magazine called the Pennant – and the Writing Equipment Society of the U.K. has an excellent magazine.

The Internet has good stuff and a lot of dubious stuff.  There are some excellent Internet resources like The Fountain Pen Network and Pen Trace. A lot of very knowledgeable collectors hold court in these places and help the newbies understand more about what they bought and draw them in. Also, a lot of places have pen clubs that meet regularly. Here in Raleigh we have a pen club that meets every six weeks or so, the Triangle Pen Club.

Collectors Weekly: Any advice for someone who is new to collecting pens?

Mamoulides: The first thing is, do you want to write with a pen? One of the aspects of a fountain pen that’s so different than a ballpoint is that you don’t press when you write with a fountain pen. Ballpoints have taught people that you have to press down in order to get it to put ink on paper. The main difference between a fountain pen and a ballpoint is when you touch the nib to the paper, ink goes on immediately, so your writing does not involve pressure in your hand. You can write just by gliding your hand across the paper, with the pen just touching the paper.

So first decide how you like to write and then find a pen that will write that way. The second thing is, do you like to write with a lot of different colors? Some people like to change colors or even mix colors to get new colors when they write. Some may want to try calligraphy and write with a very fancy writing style, and a fountain pen could be a way to get started on that.

I would actually put different kinds of pens in your hand and write with them. Don’t look at the pen. Don’t worry about what it looks like. Write with it and tell me what it’s like to write with it. Is it too heavy? Too light? Then we can talk about looks. Do you want something more modern looking? More classic looking? Something really gaudy and expensive? Or cheap so you don’t worry about breaking it? But do you like writing with it, that’s the key.

Collectors Weekly: Have you noticed any big changes in pen collecting since you’ve started?

Mamoulides: The Internet has done more to introduce people to vintage pens than any other thing. Twenty years ago, pen collectors knew each other from pen shows and magazines and newsletters. In the mid ’90s, some collectors got on the original Usenet in a newsgroup called Collecting Pencils, and started chatting with each other. Then when eBay got started, they realized, there’s a lot more stuff out there than I even knew existed. So a whole wave of new people have come into pen collecting, who didn’t even know it existed before the Internet.

A lot of collectors sell pens partly to make money, but partly because they love what they sell. They want more people to enjoy pens. A lot of Internet pen sellers actually started off as collectors.

You don’t need 50,000 pens to enjoy pen collecting. You can have five or 10 really landmark pens that represent just about all the most interesting pens that have ever come out. A really interesting 10-pen collection might include a Conklin crescent filler, a Parker Duofold from the 1920s, a Sheaffer Balance from the 1930s, a Parker 51, a Wahl-Eversharp engraved pen from the 1920s, a Sheaffer Snorkel, a Parker 75, a Parker Vacumatic from the 1930s and a Waterman from the 1920s. There are a lot of different choices there.

You could have those 10 representative pens and not spend mega bucks. That’s something that appeals to pen collectors: you don’t have to get into major house mortgage-type money in order to collect things and enjoy it. Also, you can use the pens every day. Probably the only thing similar would be collecting watches.

Finally, fountain pens have a vintage aspect to them, that really helps slow you down from the kind of world we have today. You have to think more when you’re writing with a fountain pen. You’re a lot more involved with the paper and with your thoughts with a fountain pen. By taking a step back in time, it helps you collect where your thoughts are and where your focus is better than the super-fast typing, clicking kind of world. That’s the appeal.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you very much for taking the time to talk to us today Jim.

(All images in this article courtesy Jim Mamoulides of PenHero.com.)

By Maribeth Keane, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2008)

In this interview, Jef Beck talks about collecting vintage Ken dolls, and the evolution of Ken as part of the Mattel Barbie franchise through various styles and eras. Jef can be reached via his website, Keeping Ken, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

I always wondered if starting a hobby in my free time was a good idea, and then I remembered Ken. He was a gift to my older sister Brenda in Christmas of 1970 when I was living in Independence, Missouri. I was only 6 years old at that time, but I remember so many details about it. I was fascinated by it. The name of the doll was “New Good Lookin’ Ken.” I just vividly remember everything about that Christmas. It was my favorite gift.

My sisters Missy and Brenda got Barbies. I think they even got a Dream House and everything that year, plus the Ken. It was quite a haul. That was my first recollection of the fantasy world that Barbie can take you into, and I was just real envious of it.

Ken became my toy that year, but he also became a bridge between me and my two older sisters – a world that I secretly admired, but I wasn’t supposed to be included in. I played with Ken and Barbie with my sisters, my cousin and the neighbor girls. Back in that time, it wasn’t probably very appropriate, but my mother never questioned anything. It was just that whole feeling of being included in their playtime; I think that’s why I love him so much.

Then fast forward 25 years later, here in Cedar Rapids. I collect him because it helps me recapture my youth a little bit. It was different for me as a kid to break that taboo at such a young age – that Ken could be for boys, too. I started collecting in 1998.

The Barbie 40th anniversary is what started my collecting. It made me reflect back on having Ken dolls as a little boy and it triggered something inside of me to recapture those memories. I thought to myself, well, why does Barbie get all the attention? Ken’s had great careers and he’s put in almost as much time as Barbie; he was only created two years later. Really, he was just considered an accessory, so I just figured that he needed a little bit more attention.

I started my website just to keep track of my collection. I never realized it would turn into this huge thing where other collectors say, I collected Ken, so then I turned it into more of a collector resource.

Collectors Weekly: When did Ken first appear on the shelves?

Beck: 1961 was when he was first introduced to a toy fair in New York. He was obviously very heavily marketed as Barbie’s boyfriend. I think it was in the ’80s that Mattel dropped all of that out of their advertising for him. Out of all of the characters that Mattel created as friends and family for Barbie, Ken’s been there every single year except for one year – 1968 – when they changed his image and his body mold and everything.

Actually, that 1968 stamp is still on his body mold. That’s really the only time they made a major change. Before the change, he was very boy-next-door, pretty much like vintage is very boy-next-door, that very elegant time where everyone was polite and everyone dressed very nicely. The clothing for the vintage era is very meticulous; very, very well done, just scaled down perfectly. In the mod era, the clothes were still very well made, but they get a little crazier with really vibrant colors. That’s what attracted me to them.

Into the ’80s, Mattel started using not-as-great fabrics, a lot of polyester and stuff like that. So that era’s not as popular, but I have a feeling that will just boom in the coming years once people get older and remember