Ivor Abadi, founder of The Twisted Wheel, talks about the Manchester club’s role in the birth of the British northern soul music-and-dance movement during the 1960s. Memorabilia from the club and information about its history can be found at thetwistedwheel.com.

Northern soul is basically American soul music that became the popular soul music of Northern England. The Twisted Wheel opened in 1963 in Manchester, and what might be termed “soul music” probably started to come around about the same time. It wasn’t actually called northern soul in the early ’60s, but that’s really the start of it.

Betty Everett's first hit was "You're No Good" in 1964. This 45 is from 1970.

The inspiration for the club was that young people needed a place to meet, listen to music, and dance. There were coffee bars in England at that time where people would meet, and they had music but no dancing. So we called our place a coffee dance club because there was no alcohol. We predominantly attracted a young crowd, say 16 to 22, though some were as old as 30.

We were five brothers. My older brother Jack came back to England in ’62 after being in the States and the Philippines. We found a place in the center of Manchester and decided on wheels as the theme. That involved collecting all kinds of wheels—from cartwheels to bicycle wheels. We even had a ship’s wheel from Paris. That formed the club’s décor. It was just brick walls painted black, white, and red in a basement, with lots of little, cavernous rooms. It really had a character all its own.

We had two distinct sessions at the club: the ordinary session—four nights a week on Tuesday, Thursday, Friday and Saturday, when it would be open from 7:30 p.m. until midnight—and then the all-night session on Saturday, which drew people from a much wider area. They’d come from 100 miles away. This is the scene that ultimately developed into what we now call northern soul.

I think we were at the right place at the right time when we opened because the Beatles had just started to hit. This was the baby-boom generation—people born in 1946, ‘47. There were a lot of young people, and they wanted something different.

Musically, we started with jazz and blues, which slowly became rhythm and blues, which became soul music, and then, eventually, northern soul. We didn’t want to be as commercial as everybody else. So we were playing different music even in the early days. It wasn’t pop-based.

Collectors Weekly: Who coined the term northern soul?

Abadi: Dave Godin, the editor of “Blues and Soul” magazine in London, visited The Twisted Wheel and heard the soul music we were playing at an all-night session. He wrote an article in which I think he said, “This is northern soul.” In other words, it wasn’t what they were playing in the south of England.

In London they had a lot of jazz clubs, and even in the late ’60s they weren’t listening to the faster dance music that inspired the unconventional dancing at The Twisted Wheel. There were no other clubs at the time where people were dancing like this.

Collectors Weekly: Was the club popular right away?

Abadi: Absolutely. I knew we wanted to have nonstop music. I didn’t want interruptions from the DJs, who always wanted to talk. I wanted musical continuity. You have two turntables, and when one record is finishing, you blend it into the next one. We always wanted that. It was like magic, and we’re not quite sure how that happened, but it was a big hit from the very beginning.

The club’s first location was in the center of Manchester, where we stayed from January 1963 until September 1965. When the lease was up we moved across town and did business out of our second location from September ‘65 until about January ‘71.

Collectors Weekly: What were the other defining elements of northern soul besides music and dancing?

Abadi: I think the clothes. They were very smart and different. The girls used to wear duffle coats, which were very popular. And there was a period when they wore long gloves, which were very trendy and fashionable. The style of the people who came to the club was a bit exaggerated and unconventional.

They would also make their own badges uniting themselves to each other. We sell badges now as memorabilia, but we didn’t have them then. They would come in with bags and have a change of clothes and shoes because it was an all-night session. The people who came to the club created its atmosphere. I think our very friendly atmosphere and the dancing were the most important things to our customers.

Collectors Weekly: What sorts of collectible memorabilia from The Twisted Wheel are popular?

Abadi: The original membership cards are the most coveted. They’re available and not expensive. I still have a huge collection of different membership cards from the ’60s—they go for about 5 pounds each. Original leaflets and posters are also very collectible. We did have pens with the club name on the side, just cheap pens. Nowadays we’ve also got new memorabilia—T-shirts, key fobs, badges, a few other bits and pieces—but all the original wheels that decorated the club are certainly collector’s items.

Collectors Weekly: Can you describe a typical all-nighter?

"Twine Time" by Alvin Cash & the Crawlers was an immediate hit on the northern soul circuit.

Abadi: There would always be a queue outside because we’d have to empty the club from the early session. We’d let them in usually about midnight. They’d pay their money, take off their coats, and there’d be a coffee bar on the ground floor area. They’d meet up there, hoping to run into friends from all over the place, and they’d have a coffee. Then they’d take their bags to the clubroom, and maybe at that stage they might start exchanging records, which was a popular thing to do at the club.

We had three different rooms in those days, including two big rooms downstairs where records were playing. A live band would play in one area, but we’d have records playing in another. If the group was very popular, then we’d feed the sound all the way around the club.

The atmosphere was really charged, with lots of people dancing. We never had any flashing lights in the club. The lighting was situated behind the wheels, so some of the light came through bicycle spokes. It was all hidden lighting.

We were very strict about who we let into the club. We only wanted nice people. We never had any trouble, and the young people appreciated that. They came from all walks of life, and they all got on, which was strange. Usually people were cliquish and stuck to their own sort. But here they enjoyed something in common.

Collectors Weekly: And there was no alcohol, right?

Abadi: None at all. That was becoming very unusual as we got to the late ’60s. Other clubs that served could only stay open until 2:00 a.m. But we were able to stay open all night because we didn’t have alcohol.

When we first started doing all-night sessions, we used to close at about 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning. But because a lot of people came on public transport, they had nowhere to go until their public transport started again. So the local police came to us and asked us if we’d stay open a little later so that people weren’t wandering the streets. The police weren’t pleased that people were coming from other towns and cities.

We got blamed for everything that happened because we attracted all the people. And of course there was a little pep-pill scene in the ’60s—amphetamines—and obviously some of them took pills, but not everybody. We got blamed for something that was happening all over the place, including schools and universities. Suddenly the pep-pill scene was portrayed as something we’d created, but that’s another story.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the best-known northern soul DJs, and what did they play?

Abadi: Brian Rae was one, and he’s still playing northern soul music today. Roger Eagle worked with us, but he’s passed away. If anything, he was a little too way out. He was more interested in the purity of the music and was happy for everybody just to sit and listen. But that’s not what the crowd wanted, or what we wanted, for that matter. Brian Phillips was another great DJ. I don’t know where they all are today. Hopefully most of them are still alive.

Records on the Tamla Motown label were among the most played 45s at The Twisted Wheel.

The records they played came predominately from the States, in particular Chicago, New Orleans, and Detroit. They were imported by ship or plane. Of course these importers got to know us, and they sent records directly to the club, so we’d get all the new releases.

We also got a lot of records from the U.S. Air Force bases in England. There was one not too far away. The DJs used to communicate with airmen, and we would get the music they were playing, some of which became northern soul. Manchester also had Jamaican music shops. So we had this mix of Jamaican-style music, soul, and blues to produce a new overall sound.

Northern soul music is typically fast and very danceable. The dancing itself is also fast. The young people, especially the boys, would do acrobatic-type dancing, so they’d need a lot of space to do it. Sometimes one or two of the boys would take over the whole dance floor to the detriment of other people dancing. They wouldn’t quite be doing somersaults, but you’d see them spin around on the floor.

I think the popularity of the records depended more on the sound and the tune. As long as the beat was there and it was danceable, it didn’t really matter who the artist was. You could tell straight away if a song was a hit: You’d put on a record and watch the dance floor fill up, or vice versa.

Generally an artist would only have one popular northern soul record. There weren’t too many artists with two or three. A few examples off the top of my head—these are all American artists—are Bobby Sheen, who made a record called “Dr. Love.” The Invitations had “What’s Wrong With Me Baby.” Other popular tunes were “There’s Nothing Else to Say Baby” by The Incredibles and “A Lil Lovin’ Sometimes” by Alexander Patten. They were mainly Motown-based artists on the Tamla Motown label.

Collectors Weekly: Were the records 45s or LPs?

Abadi: Mostly 45s, the singles. But we had LPs for very popular artists, and we also played 10-inch records. We actually had our whole record collection stolen when we first opened at the second venue in 1965. We marked our records by punching a hole in the center label of the 45. When they were stolen, we knew they’d end up in other clubs. But even when we went down to the other clubs and found our records with the little hole punched in the middle, the police said, “It’s circumstantial. It doesn’t prove anything.”

Fortunately, we didn’t have to start from scratch because that’s when the DJs started to bring in their own records. Obviously we built our own collection alongside theirs.

Collectors Weekly: How big was The Twisted Wheel’s record collection?

Abadi: We had maybe 5,000 records prior to them being stolen. We probably bought 50 records a week, but if the records were widely available in the shops, then it wasn’t what we were looking for because our clientele was looking for something different. The artists we played were on labels like Groovesville out of Detroit. There were also New York labels like Scepter and Wand, all the major American labels (Capitol, ABC, Columbia), and obviously the Motown record labels.

The Twisted Wheel would punch a small hole in its 45s, as seen in this single by The Sharpees.

Although it was U.S. soul music, the records were usually not that well known in the States. I think when we were importing records our suppliers didn’t realize the discs they were sending us were such hot properties in England. From our point of view, it was simply cheaper to import the records from the States than to buy them from retailers in the U.K.

We also played a lot of music that wouldn’t be considered northern soul, such as records by Ritchie Barrett, who did “Some Other Guy.” We played Chuck Berry, Bobby Bland, and Bo Diddley. His records were very popular, even though they were pure R&B, because the music was fairly fast. We played Booker T and the MGs, James Brown, Alvin Cash, the Castaways, the Toasters, Fats Domino, the Impressions, and Poison Ivy. “Shake” by Sam Cooke was a popular number.

There were a lot of popular English acts as well, including Cyril Davies’ R&B All Stars, the Spencer Davis Group, the Dominoes, the Kinks, and Betty Everett. There are so many: Doris Troy, Sugar Pie DeSanto, Sonny Boy Williamson, Gene Chandler, Chubby Checker. Arthur Conley’s popular song was “Sweet Soul Music,” Don Covay’s was “See-Saw.”

We brought over a lot of acts from the States for two- or three-week tours. Every Friday and Saturday night we’d have a group on. We had to have English groups because there weren’t always American groups around. Even though we opened in January of ‘63, didn’t host any American groups until probably September or October when we started the all-night sessions.

Frequently, we’d book the bands we’d brought over into other clubs. We had Fontella Bass, Bob and Earl (their hit was “Harlem Shuffle”), Alvin Cash & the Crawlers.

The marvelous thing about the American groups as opposed to the early English groups is that when they performed live they all sounded exactly like their records. But three groups stood out by a mile: Jr. Walker and the All Stars, the original Drifters, and the Ike and Tina Turner revue, which had The Ikettes, who were absolutely fantastic on stage.

Collectors Weekly: Over the years, did your club remain popular?

Abadi: No question about it. We still captured they crowd even when new clubs started running competing all-night sessions. We had the atmosphere. I’m not saying that we weren’t affected from time to time, but by and large the people stayed with us. Toward ‘69 or ‘70 it got a little more difficult because we didn’t have an alcohol license and everyone else was getting them. Things perhaps waned slightly at the end, but we still had a very good following, and we were still bringing American groups over.

Collectors Weekly: Why did you close the club in 1971?

The instrumental "Green Onions" by Booker T. & the M.G.s was a huge hit in northern soul clubs.

Abadi: It’s ironic. The police didn’t want us to have an alcohol license because they didn’t want us to have all-night sessions. They were worried about the potential mix of alcohol and pills, which was nonsense, really, because we probably would’ve ceased the all-night sessions if we’d been granted a license.

We got turned down every time we applied for a license. So we carried on with the all-night sessions, and they continued to be popular, much to the annoyance of the authorities.

Finally, in 1971 we got an alcohol license. We closed The Twisted Wheel and opened a new club on the same premises called Placemate 7, which was a completely different club with a different crowd. It was a commercial decision. By this time there were other clubs playing northern soul, although none were as popular as The Twisted Wheel. It was time to do something different. I suppose Wigan Casino became the club that took northern soul into the next dimension.

Collectors Weekly: Is the northern soul scene still going strong?

Abadi: It’s very big now. A lot of people have little northern-soul gatherings. Today, northern soul can be found almost anywhere in the U.K. It has stuck as a type of music.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Ivor, for speaking with us today about the roots of northern soul.

(All images in this article courtesy of Soulbot)

In this interview, Kim Casamassima discusses the rockabilly fashions of the 1950s and explains how the vintage rockabilly look has been revived and adapted over the years. She also discusses the stylistic clichés and misperception that often stand in the way of an accurate understanding of the decade, a time when even tough guys wore penny loafers and pompadours were the exception rather than the rule. Read her vintage-clothing blog, The Girl Can’t Help It.

Jayne Mansfield is buried in my hometown. You could drive past the cemetery and see her heart-shaped headstone from the road. We had our own historical society, a tiny little museum, if you can even call it that. I remember going on a class trip there once. Some of her things were displayed, like long sequined cocktail dresses and some of her little personal effects. That stayed with me into my adult years: “Wow, as cheesy as my little hick town is, Jayne Mansfield is buried there.”

Two-tone rayon gaucho pullovers like this one (note the asymmetrical pocket) were made in the 1940s but came into their own in the 1950s.

My parents were hippies who refinished and sold Art Deco furniture. So I’ve had an appreciation for old things since I was a kid. I’ve been around antiques and vintage pieces my whole life.

I think the first classic 1950s movie I saw—I was maybe 17—was “Where the Boys Are.” I loved the campiness and the clothes. It struck me like, “Oh God, I love those dresses.” It was a relatively short hop from wearing them to eventually selling them.

About three years ago I quit my “real job” in retail and started selling online fulltime. When you first start out, you assume the thrift stores are going to be a goldmine for vintage, but you end up buying things that don’t sell. So you move on. I’m at the point now where I place newspaper ads to buy vintage. I go to church rummage sales, hand out business cards and say, “This is what I love. Give me a call.”

In fact, I’m going on a vintage-clothes buying call this week. A woman said she had a cedar chest full of her grandmother’s clothes. That’s how I do business now, but you never know what you’re going to find when somebody claims to have old clothes. It could mean bad polyester from the ’70s, or really great stuff.

Collectors Weekly: What styles are you particularly drawn to within 1950s fashion?

Casamassima: My whole shtick is the rockabilly, bad girl/bad guy thing. It starts with the B-movies, the rock-and-roll movies, the hot rod and juvenile delinquent movies from the ’50s. The characters are always teenagers. They listen to rock and roll and tick off their parents by driving fast, smoking cigarettes, and wearing their clothes a little too tight.

It wasn’t called rockabilly in the ’50s. It wasn’t even necessarily a lifestyle. The word rockabilly describes the lifestyle as we see it now. Back then, it was just teens being teens.

Collectors Weekly: When was the term rockabilly coined?

Novelty prints were very popular in the 1950s. This foldover-collar blouse features bowling pins with the numbers 1, 3, 5 or 6 on them.

Casamassima: It comes from the combination of rock and roll and hillbilly music. I think the first time it showed up in a song was around 1955 with “Rockabilly Boogie” by Johnny Burnette. It wasn’t really a word that was thrown around a lot back then. Rockabilly music as a genre never really took off, but there are a few very famous exceptions, namely Elvis and Jerry Lee Lewis. But even their rockabilly heyday only lasted for a few years.

The word was revived in the ’70s. People were reacting against disco and some of the other musical genres of that time. They just wanted to get back to classic rock and roll. There was a ’50s revival then, and a lot of rockabilly bands started—Levi Dexter, the Polecats. In the ’80s, of course, we had the Stray Cats. They’re probably the most famous rockabilly-revival band.

The look really blew up again in the ’90s, thanks to Brian Setzer and his swing orchestra. That jumpstarted the interest in 1940s and ’50s swing fashion, and it hasn’t died down since. It’s not even a subculture anymore because it’s pretty much everywhere. You can go into Hot Topic now and buy a strapless dress with cherries on it, and it’s called rockabilly. But it’s really been bastardized when you start selling the clichéd ’50s looks like the cherries and flames. It’s sort of a mockery of what ’50s fashion really was.

Fifties purists aren’t into the clichés like driving a pink Cadillac and sipping a milkshake at a diner. They’d much rather just wear their ’50s clothes, drive their ’50s cars, and listen to the original bands over any neo-rockabilly group. I don’t really want to put a label on anyone, but there’s the modern rockabilly crowd that’s all about the flames, cherries, and buying repro bowling shirts. Then there’s group B, who are into the classic, pure ’50s vintage gear and music.

Collectors Weekly: Do ’50s purists collect the cars?

Casamassima: Absolutely. They definitely go after the classic ’50s cars. They want a Mid-Century Modern home built in the 1950s or ’60s, and they’ll completely redecorate their house period-correct 1950s. Some people won’t buy microwaves or cell phones. I think that’s pushing it. But the purists are very much about getting back to this romanticized, classic era of living.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the key clothes for the classic rockabilly look?

Casamassima: For women, pencil skirts and cardigan sweaters, always on the tight side. You see that classic outfit in just about every ’50s juvenile-delinquent movie; the tighter the better. Towards the end of the era, when the country was starting to see more beatniks, the women were wearing oversized cowl-neck sweaters and tight, black stirrup pants. That’s almost an entirely different subculture than the bad girls and guys. The “good girls” wore the full skirts and full dresses.

The wiggle dress was a 1950s classic. This atomic-print version is made out of lightweight Celanese acetate and features a pattern of abstracted squares.

Nobody really walked around looking like the Fonz or one of the T-Birds from “Grease.” That’s another cliché. The leather jacket and cuffed jeans were born not so much as a fashion statement, but out of necessity with the emergence of the California hot-rod culture. It was a blend of that and Southern moonshine runners. The black leather jackets and engineer boots were almost like their uniform. They served a purpose.

Cuffed Levi’s jeans have always been the choice for anybody on the rockabilly scene. But these weren’t worn to make a statement either. For example, you see “Leave It to Beaver,” and even Beaver’s wearing cuffed jeans. Clothes were passed down in families from one brother to the next. A lot of times if the clothes didn’t fit, you cuffed them up.

The modern rockabilly guy, though, wears the leather jacket, the cuffed jeans, and Converse sneakers. They were worn to play basketball, too, in gym, but somehow that’s also been bastardized over the years as the uniform of the rockabilly guy.

Men who are into the ’50s also always go for the classic Ricky jackets, which got their name from Ricky Ricardo and “I Love Lucy.” Ricky was seen wearing one of those jackets a couple of times, and that became the uniform. But the gabardine jackets he wore were really just laidback weekend jackets. If you were going camping, that’s the kind of jacket you wore.

Now everybody covets them because they’re cool. They’re two-toned. Sometimes they have wild designs. They’re not easy to find in good shape because they were worn outdoors. They’re like a holy grail of sorts if you can find a good one in a large size with a great pattern or two-tones. That’s something people go crazy for. I love them. I’d love to find some.

For shoes, believe it or not, a lot of men wore penny loafers. We always assume it was either engineer boots or a pair of Converse, a pair of Chucks. But they wore penny loafers or dress shoes because that’s what they had and because they were leather. Like a leather jacket, they took a beating and lasted a long time. It’s kind of funny to think of a tough guy wearing penny loafers.

Collectors Weekly: Where did “the Fonz” style come from?

Casamassima: There was a lot of ’50s nostalgia in the ’70s. I think the creators of “Happy Days” took the Fonz character from Marlon Brando’s in “The Wild One”—the bad-guy biker wearing a black leather jacket, white T-shirt, and jeans. After the show’s first couple of seasons—the Fonz’s original persona was deemed too threatening for ’70s audiences—he became less tough, more like a buddy, and a little more lighthearted.

In the ’50s, bikers were portrayed as booze hounds. They started fights. They were threatening. They were scary in the ’50s movies. By the early ’60s, all the campy beach movies like “Beach Blanket Bingo” also had a biker gang in them, but they weren’t tough and threatening. They were goofy. They were like bikers on “Gilligan’s Island.” Everything was a lot more lighthearted at that time. Of course, by the late ’60s, things got much more serious.

Collectors Weekly: What patterns and colors are prominent in the rockabilly look?

Casamassima: Pink and black shirts for men seem to be coveted. It’s funny because “real men” didn’t wear pink in the ’50s. A man was a man and a woman was a woman. They wore cotton, button-down leisure shirts. Labels like Campus and McGregor came out with a lot of plaids. There were atomic prints. By the mid- to late ’60s, you saw a lot of gold lamé in men’s shirts. In the ’50s, most teenagers and men in their 20s dressed the same way—a pair of dress slacks and a plaid shirt.

The difference between the high school football player wearing an outfit like that and the bad guy was simply in the details of how it was worn. Guys didn’t walk around with a pompadour and sideburns and cuffed jeans and a leather jacket. There was a strong dress policy in most schools. They would’ve been kicked out.

To show that you were a tough guy, you’d do little things like roll up your sleeve cuffs, turn your belt to the left and the buckle over to the side, peg your pants, roll them up and cuff the bottoms. That was their way of saying, “Don’t confuse me with Joe Schmo the football player.” It wasn’t pompadours and sideburns, no way.

Collectors Weekly: Did women and girls have different looks?

This angora sweater made by Peacock Sweaters in the early 1960s has a '50s feel to it thanks to the beaded-vine pattern and beaded sewn-closed buttonholes.

Casamassima: It really was the tighter clothing. A girl would cause a sensation by showing up at school wearing a tight sweater with a bullet bra underneath. I remember my mom telling me that between ’59 and ’62, when she was 18 to 20 years old, she ran with the bikers, not the hot-rod groups. She said she and her other girlfriends would wear their skirts so tight that they couldn’t even sit down in school. So they would end up getting detention.

A bad girl who wanted to get by without causing a stir in school would go along and wear button-down shirt dresses, full-circle skirts with a blouse and maybe a patent leather belt to go with it.

Rock and roll was seen as a threat in a lot of areas. You saw a little bit of it in “Great Balls of Fire,” that movie about Jerry Lee Lewis. Elvis came on screen, did his dance, and it was mayhem. So I think a lot of teenagers knew better than to go to school dressed a certain way. I think most of them stuck to the rules. The tight stuff came out after school and on weekends. That’s when they really rebelled.

Where these clothes were worn varied across the country. For example, the hot-rod clubs of the ’50s originated in California, not so much here in the northeast. Here, going to drive-ins or the cliché diners was the thing to do. Maybe out West or in the South you’d go drag racing, kind of like what you see in “Rebel Without a Cause.” That movie created a spike in Hanes and BVD white T-shirt sales because James Dean wore one. Who would’ve thought?

Collectors Weekly: Did fashion differ regionally?

Casamassima: I think it was pretty much the same across the U.S. The fashion, music, movies, and whole subculture also made it to England. England is kind of like our sister country when it comes to interest in the ’50s, even with the resurgence in the ’70s of the Teddy Boys, or the Teds. The Teds were into rock and roll and that whole scene, but their fashion was completely different. That’s one major difference among the ’50s subcultures of the U.S. and England.

Here, a guy might wear his buttoned-down shirt rolled up and his jeans cuffed. The Teddy Boys were a lot more polished. They had their clothes tailored, and they were pricey. They wore long, draped jackets with a velvet collar and high-waisted trousers, or drainpipe trousers as they were called.

That’s also where creepers were born. They were suede, crepe-soled shoes. They were actually leftover military surplus after World War II. England was a wreck, so men took these creepers because that’s what was available. Creepers have changed over the years, but that’s their origin.

Collectors Weekly: Were there Teddy Boys in the ’50s?

Casamassima: Yes, in the ’50s and again in the ’70s. There were Teddy Girls, too, just like we had bad girls. They also wore pencil skirts. I believe oversized sweaters were their thing. I’m not as knowledgeable about Teds’ culture as I am the American version. But Teddy Boys and Teddy Girls were a lot like the so-called greasers or bad girls or JDs in the U.S.

In England they were pretty much called Teds throughout the country. But in America, the name depended on where you lived. If you were in the Baltimore area, you were called a drape. In another part of the country, you would’ve been called a hood, short for hoodlum.

In fact, in John Waters’ film “Cry-Baby,” which is set in Baltimore in the ’50s, the bad guys are called drapes. As a kid growing up in the ’50s, Waters looked up to the bad boys and bad girls and loved rock and roll. So he likes making movies that reflect that part of his life, the exciting and dangerous aspects of that culture.

Back then it wasn’t like you could just walk into the mall and pick out your exact waist measurement. Sizing was a lot different then. Before the birth of the mall, there were dress shops. Even small towns had them.

I don’t deal in couture as much because the rockabilly scene is very blue collar. The things I come into are the kinds of clothes sold at your neighborhood dress shop—basic labels like Fruit of the Loom. Most people associate Fruit of the Loom with men’s underwear and T-shirts, but they made some really cute dresses with fabulous novelty prints and rhinestones. Fruit of the Loom was a great middle-of-the-road brand. Most of America wasn’t buying Dior, Balenciaga, or anything like that. The lower- to upper-middle class was going to a dress shop and buying a basic cotton day dress.

Collectors Weekly: So designers weren’t a big part of rockabilly?

In the 1950s, even day dresses came in two tones, as seen in this rayon linen button-up.

Casamassima: Not at all, heck no. The rockabilly scene was working class. The guys would have to get an after-school job, maybe working with a local mechanic. A lot of the teenagers in the ’50s drove cars from the ’40s or earlier because they had to work for it. That’s partly where the engineer boots and cuffed jeans come from. You’re not going to wear your dress pants and penny loafers when you had to work on your old car.

Hairstyles for women also changed between the beginning of the decade and the end. Towards the end of the 1950s you saw a lot of backcombing, and the beehive came along by the early ’60s. Men’s hairstyles didn’t really change much. If you were to open up a high school yearbook and look at a picture of a guy from 1945, he wouldn’t look any different than a guy from 1955. Hairstyles for men really didn’t start changing until the late ’60s when longer hair came in vogue, thanks to the Beatles.

The pompadour with sideburns is also a cliché. Sideburns weren’t allowed in high schools in the ’50s. That was not something your average 18-year-old would be wearing to high school. That’s more like the outfit of the modern rockabilly guy.

It’s like tattoos now. A ’50s purist would know that you don’t get a sleeve of tattoos. That was not at all common. Returning sailors from World War II would come back with an anchor tattoo. So tattoos are definitely a modern spin on the ’50s. Tattoos were generally reserved for military men.

Collectors Weekly: How did the pompadour become a part of rockabilly in he first place?

Casamassima: Elvis had a pompadour, of sorts. It wasn’t a big quiff like the Teddy Boys wore. It wasn’t all hair-sprayed, backcombed, and teased. Elvis had a very conservative pompadour and slight sideburns if you look at a lot of photographs from the ’50s. Tony Curtis was Elvis’s inspiration more than James Dean. The huge, pork chop sideburns were Elvis’s fashion in the ’70s. I think the sideburns of the ’70s rockabilly revival took their cue from Elvis’s sideburns at the time.

It’s important to remember that the amin audience for all of this were 14- to 20-year olds. That was the dominant age group. They were the ones who went to see the cheesy sci-fi movies or the rock-and-roll flicks with Little Richard and Bill Haley. Actually, Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” is the first rock and roll song ever heard in a movie, “Blackboard Jungle” from 1955. That’s really what started it.

When the song started playing in the movie, teenagers started dancing in the aisles. It was the music of their generation in a movie playing right in front of them. It drove them crazy, in a good way.

These days, rockabilly seems to keep getting trendier and trendier. It’s never really gone away since the ’80s. The newer generations are maybe in their early 20s. A lot of them get started with the repro stuff, but they eventually get into vintage.

The cool thing about vintage is that you can like any era. You can wear something from the ’70s with something from the ’50s and make it look modern and really cool. You can mix it up.

The people who buy the vintage clothes I sell want to wear it, not collect it. They love the style. When they get it, they wear it.

Collectors Weekly: Are certain pieces of clothing more popular than others?

Casamassima: As far my own collection, I’m a sweater girl. I buy ’50s and ’60s cardigan sweaters. That’s my thing. That love is reflected in what I sell as well. I try to always have a lot of sweaters for sale at my website.

Vintage seems to be seasonal. In the springtime, people are looking ahead to summer. More swimsuits and basic cotton dresses are sold. Before the holidays, I sell more formal party dresses, with taffeta and rhinestones. But really, if a vintage buyer sees a swimsuit she likes in the dead of winter, she’ll buy it. It might not be there next time.

I also have a lot of ’50s cotton dresses. So my standard outfit in the spring and summer would probably be a novelty print dress. I have one that has a city skyline on the bottom. It’s one of my favorites. I’ll usually pair that with a cardigan and flats. I’m really tall so I stay away from heels because I feel like a giant already. I like pencil skirts with a cardigan and a patent leather belt. It’s comfortable and sexy, but not too sexy. It’s like ’50s sexy. It’s not showing off anything.

Collectors Weekly: Since this was a youth-driven fashion, what were other people wearing in the ’50s?

Casamassima: For older men, professional men, towards the end of the ’50s and into the ’60s, they’d wear clothes like what we see on “Mad Men,” although I’m really getting sick of “Mad Men” being used as a phrase to describe ‘things that don’t fit properly’. In general, the standard suit of the working businessman included a skinny lapel, skinny tie, cufflinks, and a skinny belt.

The killer rockabilly jacket was made of wool, featured a notched collar and padded shoulders, and was dotted with silver flecks.

The common housewife would wear a cotton button-down day dress. The difference between, say, a 30-year-old housewife’s cotton dress and a 15-year-old’s would be the cutesy things like ballerinas and poodles on the teen dresses. I love novelty prints, really crazy and bizarre ones. A 30-year-old at that time probably wouldn’t have been walking around wearing a dress with bunnies on it. But I would.

By the end of the ’40s and into the ’50s, consumerism was booming. There was no shortage of fabrics. It was a happier and lighter time. People were getting jobs and making money. Women’s fashion during the war years tended to be a little more masculine, as seen in the jackets with big shoulders. Women’s clothing became more feminine in the ’50s.

Dior is credited with the New Look era starting in ’47 and going into the ’50s. He was renowned for using up to 50 yards of fabric in a dress, which was unheard of in the ’40s. So you’d see longer dresses, a lot more fabric, and full-circle skirts. That would’ve been a no-no in the ’40s when you had more of an A-line dress style to conserve fabric. In the 1950s, you saw fuller skirts and actual full-circle skirts. Dior had calf-length or longer dresses and party dresses. Around 1956 you saw a lot of draping in women’s cocktail dresses, like the swag that would hang from the hip.

Collectors Weekly: Did trends change over the course of the decade?

Casamassima: By the end of the ’50s there were fewer of the full skirts and full dresses. You’d see more fitted suit jackets and A-line tweed skirts. The fabrics weren’t as big and flowing. Things got a little more streamlined in men’s lapels, and ties got slimmer. The ’60s, of course, was just a completely different story altogether, especially by the mid-’60s, the Mod era.

This Carolyn Schnurer strapless and boned party dress from the 1950s is made of medium weight Everglaze cotton.

In the 1950s, two-tones were also pretty big. Two-tone colors were popular in cars. Men’s shoes would be made out of black leather, but then they have a white leather top, sometimes in a snakeskin pattern. That also comes from Ricky Ricardo. Men and women alike wore black-and-white saddle shoes. Sometimes they were yellow and white, maroon and white.

Men’s gabardine jackets were cropped and zipped up the front. A lot of times, it would be one color around the top yoke and shoulders, then the sleeves and the rest of the jacket would be another color. Or the top might be a pattern, and the rest of the shirt would be a solid color. That was popular in the ’40s as well.

A lot of these clothes were made out of rayon, the cold rayon, around toward the beginning of the decade. Eventually that turned into slubbed silk and tweeds. Slubbed silk is a lot like tweed. Dacron was an early version of the polyester that was used in the late ’50s and early ’60s. It had been in development since the ’40s as an alternative to cotton and silk, which were rationed fabrics during World War II. Rayon was also born because of rationing. They needed an easy-to-produce manmade fabric. So that’s where rayon and Dacron came from, which, as we know, turned into regular, gross polyester.

I generally don’t sell anything much past the ’60s, but if I have something from the ’70s, it won’t be polyester. It doesn’t sell. It’s just not cute. Once polyester gets a smell in it, it never goes away. But it takes a beating and doesn’t shrink.

Collectors Weekly: Were there any particular design themes or motifs for the 1950s prints?

Casamassima: There were novelty prints in regular cotton, button-down shirts for teenage boys and men in their 20s. Atomic prints were popular because it was the atomic age and all. The standard checked shirt was popular. There were shirts with cowboys and Indians on them. You name it.

Whatever was popular at the time would show up on a shirt. In fact, I have a shirt for sale right now that’s got a Davy Crockett print on the collar. Prints were very playful despite it being such a conservative decade. Men rocked a lot of crazy prints. Of course, we covet them now. They’re not easy to come by.

Labels like McGregor, Campus, and Sir Guy were renowned for making fun novelty prints. One problem is that men are larger now than they were in the ’50s, so the larger sizes are really sought after. An extra-large shirt in really good shape is going to be expensive.

A cool print ’50s men’s shirt or a ’40s rayon men’s shirt are always good sellers. The older Hawaiian shirts from the ’40s are always in demand. The Hollywood jackets from the ’40s and ’50s and the gabardine jackets sell well. The classic modern, period-correct rockabilly look is the gabardine jacket, button-down shirt with a cool print or longer-belted Hollywood jacket from the ’40s, with a high-waisted pleated pant.

Collectors Weekly: What types of accessories go with the rockabilly look?

Lurex was a metallic yarn that was widely used in the late '50s and early '60s in blouses such as this gold rockabilly pullover.

Casamassima: Colorful plastics like Lucite bangles and bracelets. Charm bracelets are classic. For women in their 20s or 30s with a bit more money to spare, you’d see whole matching earrings, bracelet, and necklace sets. But for your typical blue-collar 18-year-old, it would just be a charm bracelet or plastic bangles. In the current rockabilly scene, you see a lot of cherries. I don’t think I’ve ever come across cherries in any real ’50s accessories. From the ’30s and ’40s, you might find a celluloid pin with cherries or possibly a Bakelite costume jewelry necklace with cherries, but not in the 1950s.

For myself, I like the cheap plastic stuff. I’m not about diamonds and gold. I like the campy, novelty jewelry. I like costume jewelry. I love plastics. I love charm bracelets. I have a lot of those. You can still buy them fairly cheap. They’re easy to obtain.

Married women or professional women were buying the snakeskin and the lizard handbags with the matching shoes, but your average teenager might just carry a basic leather or patent leather purse. Patent leather was cheap and available in different colors. The bag often came with matching shoes as well, stilettos or heels. Patent leather clutch handbags came in jewel tones. You can find them in pastel candy colors like light pink and light aqua.

Collectors Weekly: What other aspects of the 1950s are you attracted to?

Casamassima: I love the rockabilly music of the ’50s and the bad B-movies. “Don’t Knock the Rock” is one of my favorites. A lot of doo-wop groups showed up in these rock and roll movies. People like Little Richard, Jean Vincent, and Eddie Cochran would be in them sometimes.

“The Girl Can’t Help It” from 1956 is a classic. My blog’s name is taken from that Jayne Mansfield movie. Little Richard was in that. The hot-rod movies like “Dragstrip Girl” and “Girl Gang” are pretty funny. The plots are ridiculous. Usually the moral of all of these movies is something along the lines of, “If you’re bad, you’re going to get into a car crash.”

Collectors Weekly: You basically live in the 1950s. Is your house all 1950s?

Casamassima: Yes, I’m a purist. The house I live in is mint green on the outside. It was built in 1950. It’s a ranch. For the past 10 years, I’ve been decorating the lamps with fiberglass lampshades, putting starburst clocks on the walls above sectional sofas I’ve collected. I’m really trying to go period-correct, era-correct. I just love it.

But in my blog, The Girl Can’t Help It, where I talk about vintage, I think a lot of my readers enjoy that I don’t take a reverential tone. You can be playful. It doesn’t have to be serious. You can mix things up.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Kim, for taking the time to talk with us today about 1950s fashions.

(All images in this article courtesy Kim Casamassima from her store Fast Eddie’s Retro Rags)

Gary Sullivan is a clock and furniture dealer, as well as an appraiser for “Antiques Roadshow.” In this scholarly interview, Sullivan explains the differences between early American tall-case, banjo, and dwarf clocks and offers tips on what to watch out for when buying these popular antiques. Sullivan’s book, “Harbor and Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710-1850,” was published last year. He can be reached via his website, www.garysullivanantiques.com.

As a teenager, I got into repairing the old furniture in our attic. One day, I wandered into a local antiques shop and asked the guy there if he had anything that needed to be repaired. He gave me a few things to do. It just happened that he was a clock specialist, and he introduced me to other clock dealers. So from a pretty young age, I was repairing and refinishing clock cases. I very quickly transitioned from repairing to buying and selling.

I’ve been doing appraisal work for probably 25 years and have been a fulltime antiques dealer since 1975. I’ve survived, and that hasn’t been easy. I learned by making mistakes. I did minor repairs and refinishing for Boston-area dealers. But I quickly moved into buying, fixing, and selling. Now I just buy and sell.

A fine tall-case clock by Joshua Wilder, Hingham, circa 1820.

I specialize in early American clocks because, for one, I think they’re beautiful. They’re more interesting than their European counterparts. English and Scottish clocks are pretty similar, and the cases are not that well made. They didn’t have access to the secondary wood we did here. They’re made of very thin wood. There’s more variety in the American clocks.

I deal in a very high-end market for both furniture and clocks. The American clocks, for the most part, are in a different price range than the more common English and Scottish clocks. There are very high-end English clocks, but I don’t handle many.

My book, “Harbor and Home: Furniture of Southeastern Massachusetts, 1710-1850,” came out last year. I wrote it with Brock Jobe, a highly regarded author who’s associated with Winterthur Museum, and Jack O’Brien. I contributed to the furniture section of the book and wrote the clock section, which is almost a third of the book. Clockmaking was a significant industry in southeastern Massachusetts in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. They made some really wonderful clocks there.

Although, I handle clocks from all over the country, I specialize in ones from New England, with an emphasis on clocks from Massachusetts. Before 1825, most of the clocks were made in New England and the Mid-Atlantic States.

I’m particularly interested in collecting clocks of southeastern Massachusetts. Some people call them south shore clocks because they were made south of Boston. I’ve been interested in collecting clocks from that region for many years. But I don’t have a tremendous collection of my own. I’m still putting kids through college.

Collectors Weekly: When did U.S. clock manufacturing begin?

Sullivan: It began in the colonies in the mid-18th century. Prior to about 1785, few clocks were made in this country. Probably less than 10 percent of the households had a clock of any kind. Around 1800, clockmaking began to take off, and they became a little bit cheaper. The economy improved, so a few more people could afford clocks.

The early American clockmakers did other things besides making clocks. For example, the account book of Calvin Bailey, a clockmaker from southeastern Massachusetts, is a treasure trove of information on how business was conducted in the late 18th and early 19th centuries.

Clockmakers of this period lived in an agrarian society in which work ebbed and flowed according to the seasons. Many were farmers in addition to being clockmakers, so they would concentrate the majority of their clockwork into the winter season and farm during the warmer months.

At that time, very little cash changed hands in the colonies. People kept account books, and they used the barter system. For example, in Calvin Bailey’s account book, there are very few entries in which someone actually paid him for a clock. It would usually go on that person’s account.

Bailey bartered clocks for all kinds of things. He bartered a set of clockworks to a local carpenter, who then built the frame for his house. People carried accounts for years and would make entries for the smallest things—making a delivery for somebody, loaning them your oxen for a day, cutting hay in their field.

Around 1815, less expensive clocks with wooden works and gears began being mass-produced in Connecticut. They were cheaper than the earlier brass works clocks made by individuals, which are the ones I handle.

Collectors Weekly: Why did the clockmakers set up shop in Connecticut?

Sullivan: A group of clockmakers developed the methods for mass-producing wooden clockworks because brass was very expensive. When they began making them in large factories later in the 19th century, the individual clockmakers couldn’t compete because the clocks were being made so cheaply.

An important banjo clock by Simon Willard, Roxbury, circa 1807.

In the early 19th century, a tall-case clock or grandfather clock—we call them tall-case clocks in the business—cost about $70. For many people, that was equivalent to a year’s pay. But by about 1850, you could buy a clock for $2. So in a relatively short period, you went from very few households having a clock to just about anyone having an inexpensive one. They were quite common.

There were a number of clockmakers in Boston, up into Maine, and in New Hampshire, as well as in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. I guess Massachusetts, Connecticut, Pennsylvania, and New Jersey produced the greatest numbers.

The early 18th-century clocks had brass dials—we refer to the face of the clock as the dial. The case might be very elaborate depending on where it was made. But most of the very first clocks made in this country had relatively simple cases.

At that time, tall-case clocks were the only clocks being made in this country. Later in the 18th century, bracket clocks began being imported from England. They were small, spring-driven table clocks as opposed to a weight-driven tall-case clock. A tall-case clock needs the cabinet height to house the pendulum, which is about 3 feet long. The weights need several feet of drop to run the clock for a week. You wind them up once a week, and then they fall almost to the floor, and you wind it up again. That was the technology at the time.

Later, clockmakers learned how to make a clock run for a week with a shorter drop of the weight. Simon Willard in Roxbury, Massachusetts, patented the banjo clock, or the patent timepiece, in 1802. That was a much smaller clock and a little less expensive.

Tall-case clocks were made in different sizes based on the stylistic preferences of the region. Some very early Massachusetts clocks had relatively short cases of maybe 6 1/2 feet tall. A few years later, elaborate 9-foot-tall cases were made in Philadelphia. But the average tall-case clock was about 7 1/2 to 8 feet tall.

Collectors Weekly: Did European craftsmen influence American clock design?

Sullivan: Yes, because many of the clockmakers here were trained in Europe. The clock movements—the brass components that actually run the clock—were virtually identical to what was being made in England. The clock movements or clockworks made here around 1800 are indistinguishable from those being made in London except for occasional minor stylistic differences.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the earliest clockmakers in America?

Sullivan: The Blaisdells of Amesbury, Massachusetts, were a family of blacksmiths who made crude iron and brass clock movements. They were among the earliest makers in this country. The most significant clockmakers were arguably the Willard family of Grafton and Roxbury, Massachusetts. Simon Willard was the granddaddy of American clockmakers. He started work in Grafton, moved to Boston, and with his brother Aaron produced thousands of clocks there.

They were very successful, and their work is highly sought after because of the craftsmanship and the beauty of the cases. They produced Roxbury tall-case clocks, which are beautifully proportioned and very well executed. The Roxbury cases were fashioned after the clocks being made in London. They’re similar, but the Roxbury cases had their own American twist.

Simon had two other brothers, Benjamin and Ephraim. They were also important makers.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the other prolific clockmakers?

Sullivan: The Mulliken family of clockmakers worked in various towns—Lexington, Concord. They were significant makers. A man named David Wood in Newburyport, Massachusetts, produced very fine clocks, including many of a style know as the Massachusetts shelf clock, which are much shorter. They stand about 3 1/2 feet high and are designed to sit on a piece of furniture, a mantel, or a shelf. They’re highly sought after. He made some beautiful scaled-down versions of a tall-case clock.

A tall-case clock by Aaron Willard, Boston, circa 1800.

Another prolific maker was Joshua Wilder who worked in Hingham, Massachusetts. He was one of the makers that I studied for “Harbor and Home.” He produced a lot of dwarf clocks, which are exact miniatures of tall-case clocks. They have the same design and proportions, but they’re about half the size, usually about 4 feet tall. They’re highly prized by collectors and often sell for much more than a full-size version.

They were made in relatively small numbers, and they’re very attractive clocks. They’re unusual, interesting, and they tell a story. The Bailey family of Hanover—brothers John and Calvin were the most important clockmakers south of Boston—first developed the dwarf clock. They didn’t make that many, but Joshua Wilder, who was an apprentice of John Bailey, produced them in much larger numbers. His apprentice Reuben Tower did as well.

They developed dwarf clocks in southeastern Massachusetts because Simon Willard patented the banjo clock in 1802. It was much smaller, obviously, than a tall-case clock and less expensive. The banjo clock cost only $55 when it came out, compared to $70 for a tall-case clock. Over the next several years, the price dropped to about $20 for a banjo clock. This put pressure on the southeastern Massachusetts makers because Willard allowed his associates and apprentices to make banjo clocks fashioned after his patent, but did not allow southeastern Massachusetts makers to produce them. So a lot of banjo clocks were being produced in the Boston area.

By about 1812, there were very few tall-case clocks being produced in Boston because cheaper clocks had largely replaced them. That’s when dwarf clocks became popular in the Hingham and Hanover area because they were smaller and less expensive to produce. Instead of costing $65 or $70, they were $35 to $45.

Collectors Weekly: Did the tall-case clockmakers start making dwarf clocks?

Sullivan: No. Most of the dwarf clocks were produced in the Hingham and Hanover area of Massachusetts. A few were made in other places, like Maine. But the Baileys and their apprentices produced almost all of them. Being so close to Boston, their clientele had the option of buying a banjo clock instead of an expensive tall-case clock.

Farther away from Boston, up into Maine or New Hampshire, they kept making tall-case clocks because their clientele didn’t have easy access to the cheaper banjo clocks. They probably didn’t even know about them, with some exceptions. Clockmakers continued making a lot of tall-case clocks in New Jersey and Pennsylvania for many years after they stopped making them in Boston.

Collectors Weekly: What did the Boston clockmakers do after they stopped making tall-case clocks?

Sullivan: They made banjo clocks instead. By 1820, the clocks coming out of Connecticut were changing the market. Many of the traditional clockmakers branched out and started doing other work because making clock movements one at a time was no longer profitable. They started making, selling, and repairing jewelry. A lot of them became jewelers and clock repairmen.

A lot of the less expensive clocks produced in Connecticut needed people to work on them and keep them running. So the traditional clockmakers became repairmen. More people were also carrying pocket watches, so they repaired and sold those. Many of the clockmakers became silversmiths and goldsmiths. They were often jacks-of-all-trades. They would also do gunsmithing and metalwork for jewelry.

Collectors Weekly: Was clockmaking mostly a family business?

Sullivan: The clockmakers would often train their sons or relatives. In southeastern Massachusetts, a lot of clockmakers were Quakers. A Quaker clockmaker would be more likely to take on the child of one of his Quaker associates as an apprentice than someone unknown. So a lot of the apprentices were Quakers, too. That was also true in cabinetmaking in southeastern Massachusetts.

A very rare Bride’s model stenciled and eglomisé “Massachusetts Shelf Clock” by Ezekiel Jones, Boston, circa 1820.

A lot of people don’t really understand that clockmakers only made the inner workings for the clocks, not the cases. Simon Willard, for example, made the part of the clock that you can’t see—the works behind the dial. He was the clockmaker. You had to be trained in that field. In almost every case, different people made the clockworks and the case. Only in very rare cases in rural areas would the same maker produce both, Long Island being one of the exceptions. The Dominy family made the clockworks and the cases there.

The dial would be produced by a dial maker who was an ornamental artist. So they would create or purchase the iron plate for the dial, paint it, and decorate it with the face of the clock. That was another industry and another craftsman involved in making a tall-case clock. Before they made dials here, they were ordered from Birmingham, England. But by about 1805, most of the dials used in this country were made in Boston.

So Willard may not have done everything, but what he did do was very significant. And Willard’s greatest contribution to clockmaking was clearly the patent timepiece or banjo clock. Condensing a weight-driven clock into a small device that hangs on the wall was a tremendous innovation. Another important development was the Connecticut clockmakers’ system for producing large numbers of clock movements at a lower price.

Because Connecticut clocks are easier to find, there are probably more collectors of Connecticut-production, mid-19th-century clocks than collectors of the earlier tall-case clocks. Some are very beautiful, rare, and highly sought after. But, for the most part, they’re not nearly as valuable as the tall-case clocks.

Among the early Connecticut manufacturers, the Seth Thomas Company survived well into the 20th century. Silas Hoadley was another early maker. Initially they made wooden movements for tall-case clocks and shipped them all over the country. They would make the movement and the dial in Connecticut, and then it could be shipped anywhere. The local merchant or person who bought it could have a case made locally for the set of works.

Collectors Weekly: What kind of wood was used to make the cabinets?

Sullivan: The clocks made along the New England coast were primarily made of mahogany. Clocks made farther inland would be made of cherry, which was mainly used in Connecticut. They could be maple or birch. In New England, secondary wood was generally white pine.

Collectors Weekly: Do collectors prefer a certain type of wood?

Sullivan: It depends on the region. In Pennsylvania, it’s walnut. Connecticut collectors like cherry. There are so many variables in clockmaking that for every question, I almost have to say, “What region and year are you talking about?” They were doing different things in different places.

Collectors Weekly: Do clockmakers still make tall-case clocks today?

Sullivan: You can buy brand new tall-case clocks. I don’t really don’t understand why anyone would buy one because as soon as you take it out of the store, it’s worth a fraction of what you just paid for it. But if you buy an antique, it’s likely to appreciate in value.

A rare tall-case clock by Calvin Bailey, Hanover, circa 1805.

I should mention that antique tall-case clocks are prone to significant alteration and condition problems. They were relatively tall when they were originally made. So very often an individual purchased or inherited a clock and wanted to move it to a house with lower ceilings. They’d either remove or cut down the feet or the fretwork on the top. Mid-Atlantic clocks have a scroll pediment that might be cut off. That’s very common.

New England clocks typically have delicate, pierced fretwork on the top. It can break if mishandled. So it’s often broken or it’s been repaired or replaced. Through the second half of the 19th century, they were just old clocks with very little value. If one clock movement stopped working properly, they might take that set of works—the dial is connected to the works—out of the case and substitute it for another one. We call that a marriage, which is a common problem in clocks.

Another common problem is that the paint on the dials can deteriorate. They’re often heavily restored or repainted. So there are several common condition problems. I’d say only about 10 percent of the surviving tall-case clocks are largely original—original feet, fretwork, not married, original paint on the dial.

Because originals are hard to find they’re expensive. A novice collector looking through auction catalogs is really going to be confused by the variety of prices. Unless you have a complete understanding of what’s original and what isn’t, it’s difficult to get a handle on what the market is. It’s not unusual to see a clock made by Simon or Aaron Willard sell for $10,000 to $20,000 at auction. That would be a lesser one. At $10,000 to $20,000 there’s something wrong with it. It has replaced feet or fretwork or both.

You might look in a different auction catalogue and see a clock that looks just like it selling for $100,000. You may not be able to see any difference between the two photos. But the one selling for $100,000 or more is perfect. It has all of its original components with no alterations. The collectors want originality, and they will pay for it.

Collectors Weekly: Did the clockmakers mark their clocks in some way?

Sullivan: Most makers put their name on the dial. An Aaron Willard clock says “Aaron Willard, Boston” right on the face. But they didn’t always put their names on them. A lot of beautiful American clocks have no name on the dial.

I often wondered why the clockmaker wouldn’t put his name on the face after putting all that effort into making the movement. But I found that in some cases the clocks were being sold to the retail consumer by the cabinetmaker instead of the clockmaker. This is contrary to the way we originally thought business was done, which was that the clockmaker would purchase the dial, make the movement, buy a case from the cabinetmaker, put them together, and then sell the clock to the end user.

Collectors Weekly: How do you determine where the different components came from?

An early “Massachusetts Shelf Clock” by Aaron Willard, Boston, circa 1800.

Sullivan: There are regional characteristics to the cases. Clock scholars can almost always identify the region where a case was made. You occasionally see a generic case from rural areas: It could be New Hampshire, Maine, or western Massachusetts. But generally speaking we can identify the region based on the style of the fretwork and the feet, the proportions of the case, the types of wood used. There are many variables.

Also, specific patterns tend to be associated with particular craftsmen. The Roxbury cases used by the Willards generally have two or three different styles of fretwork on the cases. You can find certain common patterns and fretwork in southeastern Massachusetts even among different cabinetmakers. For example, certain patterns would be more particular to coastal Maine.

As far as the dials went, the manufacturers usually marked the imported Birmingham dials with “Birmingham” on the back. The American ones, most of which were made in Boston, bear motifs associated with Boston that make them easy to identify.

Samuel Curtis, a prolific Boston dial maker, left Massachusetts as the tall-case clock business was waning there and moved to Philadelphia, where they were still making a lot of them. There were also dial makers with their own regional characteristics in places like Western Massachusetts, Maine, and Philadelphia—though I wouldn’t include Curtis. I consider him to be a Boston maker.

Fans in the corners or shields were popular motifs on Boston dials. Some of the dials are moon-faced. They have a revolving moon disc in the top. Painted scenes at the top are another motif. Some depict naval engagements, and those are very popular with collectors.

Collectors Weekly: How did the term grandfather become associated with tall-case clocks?

Sullivan: I have no idea. It’s only speculation that the clocks were called that because they were passed down from previous generations. At the time they were originally made, they were referred to as a clock-and-case. In the period account books, if they say clock, that refers to just the works, the movement and the dial. If it’s complete, it’s called a clock-and-case. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, they tended to call them hall clocks.

Dwarf clocks are commonly referred to as grandmother clocks. I think the term is less common than it used to be. It’s kind of a layman’s term. We don’t call them grandmother clocks in the business.

Collectors Weekly: Who typically bought a tall-case clock?

Sullivan: The wealthiest members of society. Exactly what they did, I don’t know. Not everyone had a clock in the home. Time wasn’t the important commodity it is today. You had a sundial maybe, which was less expensive, or you relied on the clock in the center of town to tell you when it was time to go to services. Many people didn’t really need to know what time it was. They didn’t have a watch either. Sometimes you wish you could go back to the way it was then.

Collectors Weekly: How many people would typically be involved in building a tall-case clock?

A tall-case clock movement by William Cummens, Roxbury, circa 1810.

Sullivan: There’s the movement, which was made by individual clockmakers—the ones I deal in are made of brass. There was the dial maker. The earlier dials could be made of brass or painted on in the later ones. A cabinetmaker made the case, and separate artisans built its various components. For example, the brass components would’ve been made by a founder, and the glass in the door would’ve been made by a glassmaker.

Sometimes the finish was done by the cabinetmaker, but in many cases it would be done by a separate finisher. The clock was powered by weights, which were often made of iron. They would’ve been produced in a foundry.

Also, if the case has inlay, a stringer or an inlay maker might have produced it. Some cabinetmakers made their own inlay, but others purchased it. You could buy imported inlay from England or you could buy it in the cities, locally made.

Collectors Weekly: What’s the rarest clock you’ve ever appraised?

Sullivan: Some of the rarest and most interesting ones I’ve appraised have been Simon Willard lighthouse clocks. They resemble a lighthouse. They have a wooden base with the clock movement resting on it, covered by a glass dome. I’ve appraised a number of them, and they’re among my favorites.

I’m helping the Willard Museum in North Grafton locate privately held lighthouse clocks to be included in a catalog they’re sponsoring. Paul Foley, who wrote a fantastic book on banjo clocks, is writing it. There are still lighthouse clocks out there in private hands that we haven’t documented for our research. So we are trying to track them down.

Collectors Weekly: Have you ever not been able to figure out where a tall-case clock came from?

Sullivan: Oh sure, although we can usually narrow it down. In the worst cases we say “generic New England.” That refers to a very plain clock. It just doesn’t have the form cues that we need to place it in a specific town or area. But the high-style clocks, they’re pretty easy to place.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for someone who is new to clock collecting?

Sullivan: The first thing to do is to take advantage of the resources that are out there. For very high-end clocks, you can see more examples on my website than on any other. There are also a number of clocks at Delaney Antique Clocks.

Very fine and rare Lighthouse clock by Simon Willard, circa 1825.

The best book on American clocks is “Willard’s Patent Timepieces” by Paul Foley. Although it masquerades as a book on banjo clocks, it actually has a lot of information on clockmakers and clockmaking in general. I refer to it every day.

Another resource for people interested in clocks or collecting is the website for the National Association of Watch and Clock Collectors. They have message boards where people share their knowledge so you can ask questions and communicate with other people who are interested in clocks.

As far as early American clocks, my advice would be to work with a reputable dealer, someone who is going to guarantee what they sell. You can make tremendous mistakes by buying a clock from someone who’s not a clock specialist. They may have the best intentions, but they lack detailed knowledge of what they are selling.

You can also make big mistakes at auctions because auction houses seldom have a true clock specialist on staff. The furniture specialist is often the one who catalogs the clocks, but he or she may not know everything there is to know about clocks. That’s why I’ve been called in as an expert to help with cataloging at both Christie’s and Sotheby’s in New York. They’ve called upon me to help them with esoteric clocks.

In general, I’d urge collectors to buy quality, not quantity. Buy one clock rather than 10. You want to buy clocks that have the best form and original components. Don’t buy clocks with problems. Collectors are far more sophisticated than they used to be, and they insist on quality and originality. For example, never buy a clock that has a repainted dial. I can’t sell one in my world. That’s the death of a clock. But I see them all the time. A clock with a repainted dial has very little antique value. It’s strictly an item for decoration.

Collectors Weekly: How can you tell if a dial has been repainted?

Sullivan: A clock specialist should be able to detect if a dial has been repainted or not. But some of them were repainted 50 or 75 years ago and they look pretty good, so it can be hard to tell. Early American clocks should have a fine crackle pattern running through the paint on the entire dial. These clocks were painted on iron, and the paint expands and contracts through the years. If you look closely and see that the paint is perfectly smooth and doesn’t have that fine crackle pattern, it’s not original paint. Don’t buy it.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Gary, for taking all this time to talk with us today about tall-case clocks.

For more about 18th- and 19th-century tall-case clocks, check out English Clocks in American Cases from December 1940, part of our American Collector archive.

(All images in this article courtesy Gary Sullivan of www.garysullivanantiques.com)

In this interview, Dave Rasmussen talks about show rod model car designers Tom Daniel and Ed Roth and such classic creations as the Tijuana Taxi and Rommel’s Rod. He also touches on the genre’s fascination with skeletons and laments how young show rod enthusiasts of the ’60s and ’70s deprived themselves of valuable future collections by blowing their cars up for kicks in their backyards. Rasmussen can be reached via his website, Dave’s Show Rod Rally, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

I got interested in show rods as a boy in the late 1960s. We all built models back then. There was no Nintendo and only three or four TV channels. So kids did a lot of active stuff—playing outside—as well as doing things with their hands.

The Chuck Wagon was released in 1970 by MPC. David Wilbanks stained the plastic wood on this beauty in antique maple.

Building models was primarily a male activity. I don’t think too many girls did it. It had a heavy post-World War II influence, with models of planes, ships, tanks, armor, and things like that. From the ’50s on there were also a lot of neat cars because the post-World War II boom included automobiles, too.

Most of us built all kinds of models. We didn’t center on one thing. We built World War II planes and ships, but we also built a lot of cars. The muscle car craze started growing in the 1960s, so model cars followed. It was pretty exciting for a preteen boy to be able to build a scale model of a muscle car.

In the late ’60s, when psychedelic pop culture was big, auto artists started creating fantasy designs for cars that exaggerated the engines and chrome. They built them into wild and crazy themes. This lasted from roughly 1965 to 1975 and pretty much mirrored the whole muscle car thing happening at the same time.

My favorite model cars to build were the show rods. They had the overblown amped-up engines, big pipes, superchargers, and all those fun things. They also had a lot of cool little details. Tom Daniel was probably the most prolific designer of the era for crazy themes. He created more than 80 designs in that 10-year period.

In addition to models, I love classic cars and muscle cars. I own a 1973 Pontiac GTO, and I’m the president of the Original GTO Club in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. So I like the full-size stuff, too. At that size, though, you can’t own them all, but you can have a lot of fun assembling the scale models. With the demands of my job and other things in my life, I’m not able to build as many as I want. But I still build, and plan on doing so until, well, I can’t see anymore.

Collectors Weekly: How big is your collection?

Rasmussen: At one time I had 275 show rods. I think it was pretty much every show rod—the concept-type of show rod car—ever created. Today that number is probably down to about 60 or 70 because I sold off a lot of my collection. I was never going to build them all.

I started selling them to people who really wanted them. A number of people who come to my Show Rod Rally website have built the ones I sold them. They’re up on the Guest Gallery, which is a section of the site that highlights models people build and explains why the build was important to them, or if they did anything special with it beyond the straight box build.

Collectors Weekly: Are show rod model cars the most popular activity for model makers?

Rasmussen: Not really. It’s a very niche part of the model-making world. Some people in the modeling community tend to look down on it a little bit because the cars are so cartoonish. They see it as childish, which I find that ironic since all models are toys anyway, right?

The guys who do World War II armor or World War II airplanes take themselves pretty seriously because there’s a lot of history behind their models. There are entire books that describe a particular set of planes, the pilots who flew them, the markings on the planes, and all that kind of stuff. It’s almost like they’re junior historians. So they look at our cars and laugh because they are so over-the-top cartoony.

Collectors Weekly: How did your website get started?

Rasmussen: I didn’t set out to make Dave’s Show Rod Rally a show rods site for the world. I travel so much because of my job that I was rarely home to enjoy my collection. So I started taking pictures of it, and I built the site just so I could look at my collection at night whenever I was feeling down and needed a pick-me-up. Pretty soon people started finding my site and writing me. The next thing you know, it’s the official show rod site of the free world.

Fred Mellini built this Rommel's Rod, with its skeleton driver and passenger, from a clean, 1969 kit.

The “rally” part of the site’s name is just a metaphor. It’s a rallying place, if you will, online. Some of our members from England —I call them members—have come to the States. People have gotten together and formed face-to-face friendships as a result of meeting online. It’s always fun to meet people who share your passion.

Most of our members are in the States, but we have members is Denmark, Australia, Sweden, Norway, and other places. American car influence was particularly heavy in Europe as far back as the ’60s. They didn’t make that kind of stuff over there. Either the models were distributed through the modeling companies in Europe or collectors waited until relatives went to the States. Then they’d have them buy the models and ship them back.

Collectors Weekly: Do people collect assembled models?

Rasmussen: Rarely. Some collectors like to collect models to assemble, and some like to collect the model in its sealed box. I have some of those kits unopened in the original cellophane. They’re quite valuable. Other collectors, like me, collect the sealed kits, but also a kit to make and display in front of an unopened one.

We have a lot of auctions because Revell/Monogram and other companies have reissued a lot of these show rods. They started reissuing them in the mid-’90s with some of Tom Daniel’s kits. Probably 30 to 40 show rods have been reissued since then. That’s been a boon to our membership because they don’t have to pay exorbitant prices on eBay to rebuild a model they built as a kid.

A significant amount of model building is going on today, primarily by us old guys. A lot of people are also into diecast. Diecast replicas of show rods have been made in 1/64th scale, which is Hot Wheels size, all the way up to 1/18th scale, which is pretty big. A few companies did that for a while and are still doing it. There are examples of that on eBay from companies that are out of business, like Toy Zone.

It’s neat to be able to buy a diecast and plop it on your shelf. Not all of us have the skills to do the painting or the intricate work. So diecast is a significant collector’s deal today at all scales.

Collectors Weekly: What comes in a typical show rod model kit?

Rasmussen: There are primarily three things in the box: the model parts themselves, which are layered in the box on plastic injection molded trees or sprues, as they call it; a set of instructions; and a little decal sheet. They’re called waterslide decals. You dress up your model with them.

Nearly all of these models were molded in a particular color. If you didn’t have the painting skills as a kid, you could just paint some of the details by hand with those little Testors jars of paint from the hobby store. You wouldn’t have to spray paint it because it was molded in color. Slap some decals on, and you had a pretty good-looking model for a 10-year-old kid.

A lot of people use airbrushes today. There are all sorts of airbrush techniques and paints. Painting the models can get quite arcane and scientific. But a lot of us still just take an old rattle can of aerosol paint designed for that purpose—you warm it up a little to make sure it flows—and put some layers on there. As you might expect, there are books on how to paint models.

Collectors Weekly: So heyday for show rods was 1965 to 1975?

Rasmussen: I would say so. Probably 90 percent of them were made in that 10-year period. There was a burst of creativity drawn from two major influences: the rise in horsepower in muscle cars on the American scene, and the psychedelia of the late ’60s and early ’70 that I mentioned earlier.

Tom Daniel drew all the box art for his cars. His Tijuana Taxi is from 1969.

Quite a few of the full-size show rods were built and went on the tour back then. I used to go to the big show rod show at the Wisconsin State Fair Park in West Allis, Wisconsin, with my brother every year. You’d see these big one-to-one scale models. Some of them didn’t even run. They were just props, but they looked like they could run. As a kid it was fantastic to see these crazy, over-the-top cars with these bizarre themes.

Some of the earliest show rods were Ed Roth creations from around 1963. The genre reached its peak, though, with Tom Daniel from 1967 to 1971. He’s a friend of mine today. During those years dozens of model show rods and real show rods hit the scene. They were highly anticipated. Kids couldn’t wait to get the Monogram catalog, go to the hobby store, and find out when the latest Tom Daniel, Ed Roth, or Carl Casper models were coming in. They were about two bucks each back then.

Tom Daniel and Ed Roth, who passed away a couple years ago, were the biggest designers. Carl Casper was a great one, too. I have the big five or so main designers listed on my website at the bottom of the home page with links to their websites. There were others who worked behind the scenes at companies like AMT, but their names aren’t as well known.

Collectors Weekly: Who were the top show rod model manufacturers?

Rasmussen: The top manufacturer was probably Monogram. There have been dramatic changes in the plastic modeling world—it never will be what it used to be. It’s probably 1/10th the size it was in its heyday. There have been a lot of mergers and acquisitions and companies that have failed completely.

Back then the biggest model companies were Monogram, Revell, MPC (Model Products Corporation), and AMT. There was also Aurora, which made model kits of all types. They were primarily known for their monster models like the Creature from the Black Lagoon, Frankenstein, the Wolfman, Dracula, and things like that. Enterprising young men would paint these figurine models.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the major themes found in the model kits?

Rasmussen: There were a lot law enforcement and paddy wagon models. They made food themes—pie wagons and beer wagons. And there were lots of military themes. I guess the creators looked around at what they say on the road: “I see a milk truck. Well, let’s make a fantasy milk truck.” If they saw a beer delivery truck, they’d make a fantasy beer delivery truck. They did buses, public transportation, you name it. Anything they could think of they twisted into some kind of fantasy transportation. There’s a bathtub show rod. There’s an outhouse one.

After a while, things got crazier and crazier. If you look on my site, you can see two bathtub rods by two different designers. You put a big, fake engine on it, a bunch of fixtures, and a whole bunch of chrome. The chrome was always over the top.

Show rods weren’t really modeled after actual racing cars because you’d have to pay for a license. You couldn’t just copy or use a real car’s likeness, theme, name, or anything. You’d have to buy a license from GM, Ford, or Chrysler to do that. Basing a model show rod on a real muscle car was not cheap. Maybe that’s why the show rods proliferated. The modeling companies could have these guys on staff inventing this wild stuff and not have to pay any royalties or licensing fees.

Collectors Weekly: Did the model designers also design the box art?

Rasmussen: Sometimes. Tom Daniel designed all of the box art for his cars except the photographs. There was a transition period around 1971 or ’72, when the companies moved away from box art in favor of simple photos of the completed model. That was kind of disheartening because the box art was so exciting. That’s what got you really pumped up. The box art was even more fantastic than the model itself. The artist could put it in a surreal setting and really kindle your imagination.

This modified Out House was built by William Clark using parts from T'Rantula, Paddy Wagon, and Vampire Van kits, among others.

Other people in the modeling company worked on the molding details to make sure the model actually worked, that it could actually be put together. At the end of the day, it’s got to fit together or some kid’s really going to be pissed off. So a lot of different people had roles to play.

It wasn’t as exciting after the box art was dumped for photos. I don’t know if it was the cost or what. It was rumored that there was a lawsuit once because the box art didn’t match the model, so maybe that was the reason, but I don’t even know if that was true.

Aurora was probably the most famous company for box design, not just for show rods but for all its models. They had some of the coolest box art ever, particularly in their military and airplane lines. They had high-end artists on staff that created amazing artworks of aerial dogfights and things like that.

My favorite boxes are primarily by Tom Daniel. Some of my favorites are the Tijuana Taxi and Rommel’s Rod. Tom sells T-shirts, memorabilia, and reissued kits with his signature on them at his website, www.tomdaniel.com.

Collectors Weekly: How did the cars get their names?

Rasmussen: I think the designer probably started with a concept and then brainstormed a name later. Some of them are pretty simple like the Bathtub Buggy, or just the Bathtub, or the pie wagon, the beer wagon, the paddy wagon. But some got more creative. On Tom’s website, there’s a listing of all of his designs, and a column on the right of each page explaining the inspiration for the models and how he named or designed them. For example, Tom grew up in Los Angeles, so the trips he made to Tijuana as a young man were the inspiration for the Tijuana Taxi.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of your favorite models?

Rasmussen: I’ve mentioned some already, but my sealed Tom Daniel kits are my all-time favorites. They include the Tijuana Taxi, Rommel’s Rod, the Beer Wagon, the Pie Wagon, the Ice ‘T’, which is a fantasy ice wagon. These are some of my favorites, not just for the cool designs but also for the big slicks, chrome mag wheels, and huge engines. They all have that.

I like the details. The Ice ‘T,’ for example, was a fantasy ice hauler in a hot rod. It came with a little ice block with chrome ice tongs stuck in it. The Pie Wagon had little pies in the back. Rommel’s Rod had a little machine gun and skeletons. In fact, there were probably 15 or 20 show rods that had skeletons. For some reason, we not only loved chrome and big engines, but there was a lot of skeleton-themed stuff. I guess we had a fascination.

Collectors Weekly: Why is that?

Rasmussen: I don’t know. We’ve talked about it in our discussion groups on the site. When you’re a preteen kid, somehow skeletons are cool. I guess a skeleton driving a fantasy rod just fit. The car’s not real, so why not have a phantom driving it? For example, the Laramie Stage Ghost has six skeletons on top of an old, revved-up coach. There was a very famous, exaggerated coffin-like ’32 Ford by Darryl Starbird, which was displayed in full scale at the 1964 New York World’s Fair. It had a real 6-foot skeleton leaning on it.

My website’s discussion group is called the Coffin Corner, which is a reference to Starbird’s little coffin car. The Boothill Express had a skeleton leaning on it. I guess I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention all the skeletons associated with show rods back then.

Collectors Weekly: Were popular characters from the culture at large used?

Rasmussen: Not really. If you wanted to use characters like Mickey Mouse, you’d have to pay royalties. So Ed Roth created Rat Fink. I guess you’d say the only real characters we had were a whole lot of skeletons.

Model collector George Vretta likes to build his show rods as close to the box art as possible. He used a super-fine black Sharpie to detail the window frames of this 1970 S'Cool Bus.

There were a number of movie-themed cars, too, that I’ve included in my model show rod collection because they were one-offs like other show rods. In fact, everything on my site is what we call a one-off—that’s part of the reason it qualifies as a show rod. A model of a regular production car wouldn’t really be a show rod, which is, by definition, something created once for a particular theme, purpose, or celebration. Things like the Mission Impossible car, the Monkee Mobile, and other concept cars or movie cars are one-of-a-kinds. George Barris designed the Batmobile, which is probably the most popular show rod because of the old Batman TV series with Adam West that we watched as kids.

Movie cars or series cars like the Monkee Mobile toured the show circuit. When you went to a car show and saw all the show rods, the most popular cars were the ones that were movie- or TV-themed.

Collectors Weekly: How many different scales did show rods come in?

Rasmussen: The common scale is 1/24th. But AMT or MPC also did a 1/25th scale. I don’t know why they made it that way. But it’s essentially the same size. The 1/24th, 1/25th scale is what everybody built. There’s a big T bucket called the Big T. That was much larger; let’s say 1/8th scale. That was a very expensive kit back then, but all of our show rod stuff was either 1/24th or 1/25th.

Collectors Weekly: What did you do with your models after you built them?

Rasmussen: As adults we make our models much nicer than we did as kids. We display them at home on shelves and sometimes put lights on them. But as kids—and everyone laments this today—we destroyed them. I don’t mean we destroyed them in casual ways; we destroyed them in spectacular ways. We would take big rubber bands and line them up and shoot clothespins at them. We would shoot them with BB guns. We’d put firecrackers in them and blow them up in our backyards. We would shoot marbles at them from a distance with a slingshot.

We came up with all sorts of creative ways to destroy them, never realizing, of course, how much money they’d be worth someday. Then we’d go buy more. There was always a new model coming out. In our house, we had two big shelves in the basement. When they would fill up, we’d select certain ones and blow them up.

All the models I had as a kid are long gone. They’re all slowly wasting away in a landfill somewhere in suburban Milwaukee, I imagine.

Collectors Weekly: When did you start collecting them as an adult?

Rasmussen: In about 1998 I was talking with a friend about how much fun I had as a kid building models. At the time, he was making airplane models. A couple days later, he showed up with a reissue of the little coffin car. He said, “Here. Maybe this will get you back into modeling.” I took it home, broke it open, and started making it. It is impossible to describe, but I got such a rush of nostalgia. It just lit me up. That started me collecting show rods on eBay. I’ve spent a lot of money and time putting together this collection.

In fact, I’ve bought most of my collection on eBay. There are other sites, but eBay’s the main spot where people find show rods. A lot of them have been reissued in the last 15 years. Some of the reissues have lessened the value of the originals. I found an original 1969 Tijuana Taxi just last night. The guy was selling it “buy it now” for $230, or something. That kit would have easily gone for as much as $300 before it was reissued last year. It’s still worth more than a reissue because it’s 1969 plastic, and it’s authentic. But the prices for originals drop anywhere from 25 to 50 percent when a reissue comes out.

It’s just a matter of supply and demand. Before the reissue, the only way to get a vintage show rod design was to buy the original. Now you can get 98 percent of the original kit because it’s got the original box art, uses the original molds, has better decals, and costs 25 percent of what an original would cost.

Collectors Weekly: How can you tell if a model is original?

Rasmussen: The original boxes were much sturdier. They were made of thicker cardboard and were generally better constructed. Some of the reissue boxes are really flimsy. Plus, the logos are slightly different on the front. There’s usually a date on the side panel. It’ll say “Copyright Monogram 1970.” So it’s not hard to distinguish between old and new.

Collectors Weekly: What are the steps to building a model?

The Bathtub Buggy from 1969 is classic George Barris and is based on his full-scale show rod.

Rasmussen: It depends on your skill level. They used to have models that were called snap-tights that didn’t even require glue. But generally speaking, you’d open a model kit and first study the instructions. Then you’d follow them step by step. First you’d use a razor knife to cut the pieces from the sprues. Then you might paint them, let them dry, and then slowly assemble them in stages until you had a completed model.

It depends on how much you want to detail it, how nice you’re going to make the gloss on it, and things like that. But I’d say it takes from 8 to 24 hours of real time to build a model well, which is a wide range. Some of them have a lot more details, painting, and other things.

Everybody remembers Testors glue. The glue worked very well for models because it literally melted the pieces together. It would form a very strong bond. It also had a particular, toxic scent to it. And in the late ’60s, a lot of kids were sniffing glue. So they came out with a non-toxic lemon scent, but it didn’t bond as well as the old Testors glue. Today, since kids have moved on to much more advanced recreational drugs, they don’t worry about that, and the old Testors glue is back.

Collectors Weekly: Are certain models more sought after by collectors than others?

Rasmussen: Yes. That would have to do with a combination of popularity and scarcity. There was a heyday for show rod models, but there was also a heyday for eBay as a place to buy them. Model show rods really happened in the late ’90s until about 2003 or ’04. There were some crazy bids for models, going up to $300, that hadn’t been reissued yet. Plus, the main people buying them were guys in their ’40s, ’50s, and ’60s. We probably bought 75 percent of the models during that time.

Even the kids who bought models were probably doing it because their dads were taking them to the hobby stores and saying, “Come on. We’re going to build a model together.” But it’s hard to get a kid interested in them these days. You have to sit still and concentrate. Kids would rather play the Wii or shoot zombies.

So, in answer to your question, some of the most scarce and sought-after models have just been reissued. There’s a neat AMT model called the Depth Charger. Rommel’s Rod and Tijuana Taxi have just been reissued, too.

People who want something rare look for models like the Laramie Stage Ghost, which won’t be reissued. A small, defunct company called Pyro made it, so who knows where the molds are and all that other stuff. There were a number of smaller modeling companies that cranked out a few show rods and then just disappeared.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for someone just getting into show rods?

Designed by Tom Daniel, Monogram's Ice 'T' from 1970 featured a Chevy 396 engine.

Rasmussen: Buy some books. “The Modeler’s Guide To Scale Automotive Finishes” is a good one. You can get help or advice from members of our Coffin Corner discussion group by searching the archives under a particular topic. If you have a question, somebody’s probably already asked it, and it’s been answered by a group of passionate experts. Or just ask the question again if you can’t find it in the archives. It’s a hobby and people are passionate about it, so they’ll dive in and say: “Here’s what you should do. Go here. Go there. Buy this. Buy that. Use this technique.”

I think plastic model building will always be there, but not like it used to be. We had a great run in the’60s and ’70s. A lot of us feel fortunate that we were around at that time. Unlike a video game, building a plastic models trains you to actually do something. You have to read and follow instructions. You have to have some manual dexterity and use tools. You need patience. The model has to work both mechanically and aesthetically. It’s something you can take pride in and get better at.

In small ways, I think those things transfer over to real life. A lot of young men interested in that kind of thing moved toward manufacturing or engineering disciplines. I’m in a manufacturing technical field today. The combination of fantasy mechanics and psychedelic, over-the-top creativity in the show rod era was a great thing back then. It’s never coming back. But that’s okay because we’ve got our reissues.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Dave, for speaking with us today about show rod model cars.

(All images in this article courtesy Dave’s Show Rod Rally)

In this interview, historian and art director Hayden Peters charts the evolution of mourning jewelry from the 16th century through its most prolific period during the reign of Queen Victoria. Along the way, he discusses how mourning jewelry differs from sentimental jewelry, and highlights such genres as hairwork, miniature portraiture, and symbolism. Based in Australia, Peters can be contacted via his website, www.artofmourning.com, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

Growing up with antiques collectors and costume designers, I developed a passion for the Victorian age and the 19th century. I collected Victorian silver—bracelets, watches, and other things. I worked very hard to pay as much as I could for the best pieces I could find.

This gold ring from 1787 features an enameled band and a dedication to two people.

My interest in jewelry, especially memorial and sentimental jewelry, began when I saw a ring with “in memory of” engraved on the top. I thought it was a wonderful symbol of affection to wear for a loved one. This ring was from 1852 and belonged to a woman named Mary Ann Lewis. I traced her genealogy and tried to learn as much as I could about the time period of the ring.

Soon I was collecting necklaces, rings, and bracelets, and that led to the world of sentimental and cultural history. I kept going further back and ended up specializing in the period from about 1500 to 1920. I’ve now been collecting for about 18 years.

My collection is very cross-cultural. Especially with memorial pieces, the history of one piece really reflects culturally upon another. In colonial times, the Americans were quite good at appropriating or bringing over the motifs and symbols of the English pieces. Protestants, obviously, held true to a lot of the tenets in England. Then they started to adapt it and work in their own motifs. Obviously the French have a different take on it, the Germans as well.

As you go south through the European Continent toward Catholic-based regions, the symbols on mourning jewelry included more religious, cross-like imagery. The southern European way of coping with grief was different from the northern countries.

There were also commonalities, especially where hairwork was concerned. For example, it can be difficult to tell whether a piece was made in either New York or London. But table-worked hair, mourning samplers, and other pieces could also be regional, offering unique perspectives on their culture. Thus, a Swiss piece from the mid-19th century can easily be identified by its hairwork—the way it used thick braids and things. These pieces were all made at home.

Collectors Weekly: What are the differences between mourning, memorial, and sentimental jewelry?

Peters: Memorial pieces were made for public events related to a death. Mourning jewelry was usually a little more personal. While several pieces might be made for someone’s death, it was still for the family or people close to the deceased.

A skull and a watch both represent the passage of time. This example in verge silver is from around 1780.

The early precursors to mourning jewelry displayed the skull and crossbones and all those memento mori, remember-you-will-die motifs. Shakespeare commissioned mourning rings. But the mourning rings from the 1500s and 1600s the skull and crossbones and those motifs as a statement of living. It meant ‘yes, you would be judged at the end, so live your life correctly’. A skull and crossbones was not always about death.

I think that’s one reason why sentimental jewelry is the most misunderstood of all jewelry, especially when mourning comes into it. A lot of people think it’s morbid and maybe grisly, but it’s not. Honoring someone’s life with a piece of mourning jewelry is one of the most beautiful things you can do for somebody. I can’t stand the negative connotations. And sometimes it’s hard to differentiate whether a piece is for mourning the death of a loved one or just a token of affection.

A typical sentimental piece is a locket with hair in it. You might see a neoclassical portrait or symbol from the late 18th century. In the 19th century mourning and memorial pieces were fashionable. Wearing someone else’s hair was pretty typical. It had been going on since the 14th century, and even back to ancient Rome.

Often the sentimental stuff is really unusual. Like the “regard” rings, with rubies, emeralds, amethysts, garnets, and diamonds, or “dearest” rings, with diamonds, emeralds, amethysts, rubies, emeralds, sapphires, and topaz—the first letter of each stone spells out the word “regard” or the “dearest.” Those pieces, obviously, were not for mourning. They were sentimental pieces.

Collectors Weekly: Did sentimental and mourning jewelry happen at the same time?

Peters: Yes. The practice kicked in after the death of Charles I, who was beheaded in 1649. That’s when symbols of mourning, the culture of mourning, and the industry to produce the objects really hit their stride. A lot of royalists wore his portraits. The pieces that showed him looking upward symbolized his death.

But there were also pieces made when he was alive in which he was looking ahead and laughing. This sort of sentimental jewelry was worn around the same time, so you can’t really say one predates the other. And they were certainly simultaneous as far as it being an industry.

Collectors Weekly: How were cultural influences reflected in mourning and sentimental jewelry?

Peters: Jewelry as an art form, a wearable piece of art, and an expression of a person evolved with the culture. Usually fashion dictated the artistic paradigm shifts in a country, and that often flowed through to other countries. What people wore reflected the art and the mass entertainment and media of the time.

Seed pearls were commonly used in mourning jewelry. This locket from the late 1700s was probably in remembrance of a child.

The Baroque period extended from the 16th to the 18th centuries, so the jewelry from that time took on all the elements of the period. The Baroque aesthetic was promoted as a way of subjugating people and getting them to see the grandeur of God. The jewelry simply appropriated all these wonderful flourishes. There were lots of organic imagery and nature motifs, floral patterns, and detailed gold work.

By about the 18th century, jewelry started to embrace Rococo, as seen in all those little scrollwork shanks. Ring bands that once would have been plain and circular started to take on more fluid lines. The biggest shift came in the neoclassical period, which changed everything and is probably the most radical shift.

On my website you can see the evolution. For example, rings at one stage were just bands with a memento around the side, frequently the name of someone who died. Then, all of a sudden, all these wonderful cameo rings appear. They featured an oval ring mounted on the band with a piece of ivory inside and a miniature portrait, or some sort of neoclassical depiction, painted on top.

Just like that, the religious symbols were all but gone. There might be a miniature on a ring in the form of a cypress tree pointing towards the heavens. Or the piece might have a weeping willow, or perhaps broken and unbroken columns.

The pieces kept getting bigger. Large pendants, for example, began to be worn on the exterior of the person. The neoclassical costumes started to reflect this—the earrings, bracelets, and other things. This trend was also a reflection of personal wealth and the growth of the middle classes, who had started to make money. Jewelry wasn’t just for the aristocracy anymore. There was more wealth, so more people wanted to show it off.

In the early 19th century, the neoclassical style went even more high-end. George IV was very decadent. Before he became George IV, he fell in love with Maria Fitzherbert. They were married in 1785, but it was annulled under the Royal Marriages Act because Maria was a Catholic and a widow. But George loved her, so he had a portrait made by the court miniaturist of her eye and part of her nose. He wore it in a locket underneath his lapel to hide his passion. And he didn’t show Maria’s full face in order to keep her anonymous.

That’s how eye portraiture became so popular between about 1790 and 1830, especially among young people. A lot of what happened in royalty became fashion. So if a king or queen took on a certain art or lifestyle or some sort of social tweak or change, people would start doing it, too.

Eye portraiture transcended sentimental and mourning jewelry. A lot of people think it was just a type of mourning jewelry, but it wasn’t. It’s only mourning if it’s set in a teardrop-shaped brooch or pendant, or if the eye is pointed up. Such pieces are very rare and hard to find.

The mourning industry received its biggest boost after Prince Albert died in 1861. When he passed on, Queen Victoria only allowed mourning wear and jewelry in court, and that influenced the fashion. The middle classes were now wealthier, and the mortality rates were high. Mourning was still a dreary, dull thing—people wearing black, crepe, and who knows what else—but it started to become more fashionable than it ever had been before.

This began to change in the 1880s when women started to shift away from being the center of the household and thus the center of mourning. That led to the feminist movement and the suffragettes about 20 years later. By the end of the 19th century, attention had shifted away from the mourning industry. People were tired of the same old thing. Even Victoria broke with convention and started to change later in her life.

The Victorians were very good at appropriating previous styles of art. There was neo-Gothic, neo-Rococo, even neo-Baroque. That’s why this jewelry has always represented the social mainstream version of art. As the periods changed, it took on the contemporary flourishes of the day. Hair mementos were hidden away underneath rings or held in glass compartments. The opulence of the neoclassical periods was out, while symbols such as tear-shaped pearls were used to represent the idea of mourning.

Collectors Weekly: How did the jewelry change at the beginning of the 1900s?

Peters: Mourning jewelry made of gold or pinchbeck—a brass gold-like alloy—with lots of black enamel was seen as unfashionable and dreary. The Nouveau period opened up a more freewheeling lifestyle and a different perspective on living. There was a total shift in communications and the global movement of people. There were changes in how cities developed, and the mobile social structure was much different than anything that had gone before. The folk-art aspect of this stuff, such as your mourning samplers, started to fade.

The woman in this brooch with paste edging is holding a lantern, as if to light the way for one's encounter with one's maker.

Then with the insanely high mortality rate of World War I, people began to reconsider whether they really wanted to spend so much of their lives so absorbed by death. Just before the war, the jewelry’s popularity was waning. After the war, the upswing you might expect in the mourning industry simply didn’t happen.

Aesthetically, though, it was really a good period. You begin to see pieces with just onyx and a diamond, or onyx and a pearl placed within a man’s ring.

Lockets from 1860 to 1880 are probably the most common examples of mourning or sentimental jewelry. That’s how a lot of dealers today make their money. You don’t have to wear it outside your clothes. It’s worn next to the heart. It’s closed, compartmentalized, and if you want to put someone in there you love, you can do so without breaking any social conventions. Lockets were popular during the ’20s and ’30s, and they still are today.

Things like rings, which can’t be hidden, have never regained their popularity. But people still make mourning jewelry. Hair-working industries still exist. I believe there is a shop in America and another in Sweden. There may be more. But you can’t simply walk into a jewelry store and say, “I want a mourning ring.” These days it’s much more common to buy the locket. In fact, locket patents from the 1880s are still in production.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of your favorite eras and types of mourning jewelry?

Peters: The 19th century for sure, Queen Victoria’s period, from 1851 to about 1880. Mourning jewelry was the height of fashion back then. In the 1940s and ’50s it’s fashionable again in some degree due to the high mortality rate during World War II.

As for type, I can walk into any junk store in the Czech Republic and usually find some sort of hairwork piece—a bracelet, necklace, anything really. Women did a lot of hairworking at home. Pieces found their way across borders. It was fashionable, and that was the key.

In the mid-19th century, 50 tons of hair a year was imported to jewelers in the U.K., just for the purpose of replicating colors schemes in hairwork pieces. Northern hair tends to be lighter while hair from places like France tends to be darker—the hairwork-jewelry industry needed both. Sisters in convents would grow their hair long, chop it off, and sell it. It was all treated and woven together.

Burial societies were wealthy and powerful back then. The insurance companies we have today developed from the burial societies of the 19th century. Even the poorest of the poor would give most of their wages to have a decent funeral and all the affectations of mourning. A pauper’s burial was socially unacceptable. What a concept! That’s incredibly 19th century.

I think mourning jewelry from earlier eras is prettier. There is some beautiful stuff from the burgeoning mourning industry in the late 17th century, especially the pieces with crystals or the cipher hairwork pieces with someone’s initials woven in. Then it evolved into the neoclassical stuff, which is beautiful, and not hard to come by.

But I’m a Victorian fan. Mourning jewelry of that era was made for people from any level of society. There were lots cheap pieces made in the 19th century, pieces with pinchbeck, which gave the jewelry a metallic flair.

Even if you were really poor you could afford to show your grief by having a ring made out of hair, perhaps with a little base metal buckle on top. It was a cheaper way of expressing mourning, and there were a lot of people to mourn. Life expectancy in Victorian England was 40 years. The death of children was quite common.

Collectors Weekly: From a collector’s standpoint is mourning jewelry from the Victorian era the most sought after?

An engraved portrait of George Washington is the centerpiece of this gold memorial ring from about 1800.

Peters: I think what you collect is really personal. Some people gravitate more to the neoclassical stuff, while some only collect American pieces. I think the Victorian stuff is the best way to get a foot in the door if you’re a new collector or if you want to learn more about what the industry was like. It’s very accessible and still very reasonably priced. A good piece for a new collection isn’t necessarily the most beautiful or expensive. It doesn’t have to be encrusted with jewels. That’s a good thing.

If you put a piece in front of me that is loaded with diamonds but has no sentiment, and then another that is made out of hair, I’m going to go for the piece with the hair. That was someone’s life and love. That’s what it’s all about for me.

Miniature portraits are entirely different. As a collector, I face a lot of competition from other miniature portrait collectors. They’re very hungry for anything with a miniature portrait in it. Miniature portraiture covers everything—sentimental, memorial, and mourning. The late 18th-century stuff in particular is quite collectible and expensive. It was also well constructed.

Typically, miniature portraits were less expensive in the Victorian era. Salesmen would travel around with cases full of pre-painted miniatures, and they would tailor and tweak each portrait for the buyer. Sometimes the paintings were amateurish, but most of the time they were beautiful and lifelike. They’re pieces of art. They belong in museums.

Collectors Weekly: What are the different forms of mourning jewelry?

Peters: It was so broad—hatpins, cufflinks, watches, watch fobs, rings, necklaces, earrings. There were mourning warehouses in the 19th century that specialized in mourning paraphernalia. The Chase Mourning Warehouse was probably the most notable one. They had nearly everything. You could get a pin that was worn on an Albert chain with some sort of memorial motif on it. The list wasn’t endless, but it was quite extensive.

You can see some really unusual stuff. The watches were beautiful, but there aren’t many available. The handles of walking sticks were often tipped with a skull, which in some circles is still in fashion today. Today, it’s sometimes hard to discern which era a skull piece is from because there were so many semi-revival periods.

It’s more difficult to find pure mourning accessories for men because during the latter years, the armbands and rings made for men weren’t completely mandatory. Besides, the costume of the day was already black, or mostly black.

For women, there were mourning versions of everything—jewelry, of course, but also skirts and accessories, from gloves to ribbons to hats. It was such a fashion. As long as the item could be black, as long as it could be someway used for the regalia of mourning, it was available.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us a bit more about the different metals used to make the jewelry?

Peters: Gold was the most common followed by high-nickel-content pinchbeck, and then things like raw gold. Brass was used, but the further down the scale you got from something that mimicked gold, the less ideal it became. Different metals were made for different social strata. Gold pieces are probably the most sought after. The higher the gold content, the better it is. Most Victorian pieces were 9 karat, I think.

They used silver to a much lesser degree. It’s much harder to find silver pieces. Victorian silver wasn’t really the most popular of metals until about 1880, and it had to develop. I collect Victorian silver. The pieces were a bit showier. They’re regal, beautiful, and bold. Lockets are common in silver, but the “in memory of” inscription in them is pretty rare. I haven’t seen many of them.

I’ve seen silver pieces with black enamel and pearls but without the common symbols of mourning, like the forget-me-nots. You’ve got to wonder whether it was created for the purpose of mourning or for sentimentality.

Collectors Weekly: Were gemstones also used?

Peters: Absolutely. They were the primary focus of sentimental pieces. The gems ran the spectrum from rubies to topaz. For mourning, crystal and diamonds were probably the most common gems. There was a lot of what they call Stuart Crystal from 1650 to 1750. Crystal was used a lot in that period. It was multifaceted, so it caught the light like a diamond.

Here, hairwork is found on the back of a brooch, whose front depicts sentimental rather than mourning imagery.

Under the crystal, there was always hairwork or stretched material with a gold cipher of someone’s initials. There might be a little enamel motif such as the skull and crossbones, angels, or something like that. The same was true for ribbon slides, rings, and brooches. Ribbon slides were very common.

By the Georgian period, let’s say the late 18th century, the same sorts of materials were used. Most stones and gems were there for a reason. They all had meaning and symbolism. But as the early 19th century wore on, a lot of the stones were costume. The actual gem itself wasn’t used, but it gave the impression of the gem. That was quite common. Even costume “regard” and “dearest” rings were made. They were just as fashionable.

A lot of the time, the choice of gems was decided by trade agreements. For example, if an agreement was struck with a diamond mine, you’d see an increase in diamonds being used in jewelry. People often think that diamonds were the most common expensive gems but pearls were more prolific, especially during the early 19th century. As the neoclassical art started to disappear, the focus shifted to hair, which was often displayed inside a piece of glass and then surrounded by pearls.

The choice of gems had to do with the stages of mourning, which changed through the 18th and 19th centuries. In the first period people wore black, hairwork, and whatnot. In the second period, they could introduce a little bit of color like purple. That’s where amethysts came in.

Collectors Weekly: What about jet jewelry?

Peters: Jet was and is quite popular. It was most commonly mined in Whitby, England. The jet industry goes back to Roman times, I believe. It’s basically a kind of a coal. A lot of other materials were made to mimic jet, like gutta-percha. They’d cut it down and facet it to get a sparkle. Then it would be used in bracelets and necklaces. It was very popular in Victorian times, and not just for mourning. It was just a fashionable item.

There was also a glass version of jet, which was cheaper option for people. You see a lot of both in brooches and especially bracelets. Bracelets were worn prominently in mourning dress. A woman in first-stage mourning would be adorned in jet and wore a black bracelet over the top of some dresses. The jet industry still exists to some degree. But it really symbolized that grand Victorian focus on black as a main motif, especially during the mourning era in the second half of the 19th century.

You could also buy a piece of jet carved into a castle or other shapes as a sentimental token or a little memorial. These items were not made only for mourning, but you can find heavy mourning ones. You might find a beautiful jet cameo with a weeping woman carved on it, or a sentimental “faith, hope and charity” piece. The pointing hand is quite common in late Victorian stuff. It was such a huge industry that it nearly exhausted Whitby.

Collectors Weekly: Did symbolism play a major role in mourning and memorial jewelry?

Peters: Absolutely. The symbolism of mourning is probably the easiest to grasp. It’s blatant, with weeping willows and other obvious motifs. It becomes more difficult to decode the sentimentality of the neoclassical period. You might see a piece with two lovers next to a bird in an open cage. Does the cage symbolize death? Is the bird a child? Does it represent that a child is about to be born? Are the people actually two lovers?

The cherubs holding a crown on this English locket suggest a connection to royalty.

A broken column means life cut short; an unbroken column means eternity, basically. The snake eating its own tail also means eternity, or eternal love to some degree. That was symbolism in that era.

In the Victorian period when a lot more gems were used, the symbolism is a little more blatant. The snake is quite common. Queen Victoria liked snake jewelry. You might see a black enameled snake on a piece or a forget-me-not.

They also appropriated the memento mori symbols: the skull and crossbones; Death holding a scythe, an hourglass, or both; angels with cherubs playing trumpets signaling the gates of heaven. Symbolism is probably the richest aspect of collecting memorial, sentimental, or mourning jewelry.

I find that most people project their modern symbolic values on a piece. They don’t consider its cultural and historical significance. That clouds the message and doesn’t really resonate with what the piece was meant to do.

A lot of it actually stems from mainstream art. If you start looking at jewelry, and then go to The National Gallery, you’ll see a lot of those symbols in many of the paintings. They’re all there. The mourning jewelers didn’t really bring anything new to the table. The symbols and motifs were part of the broader art movement, of what was popular at the time.

Collectors Weekly: Please tell us more about miniature portraiture.

Peters: Miniature portraiture tends to be more sentimental, obviously. Sometimes it was commissioned for a loved one. If you gave someone a portrait, maybe a young woman who was going away for a while, it might be regarded as a declaration of marriage. So there were rules about what the pieces meant, who could wear them, and when they should be worn. I mentioned the Charles I pieces and what they represented: That’s a case in which miniature portraiture was about death but it also related to the life of the man.

There were quite a few miniature portraits of Charles II, often in court. A lot of the pieces were anachronistic. Some were just design studies produced by art students—there was a lot of that going around. Silhouettes were also quite popular.

Miniature portraiture declined and almost disappeared as photography became more available. But photography expanded memorial jewelry, as lockets and things to hold photographs got a little bigger to accommodate the pictures. All of a sudden people could wear things with their loved one’s portrait. They didn’t have to sit down for several weeks to have it made and pay a premium to a respected artist. And as photography became less expensive, it gave people of limited means an affordable way of remembering their loved ones.

Collectors Weekly: Were specific jewelers known for making mourning and memorial jewelry?

Peters: Not really. Most jewelers handled it. The English pieces are hallmarked. Those are obviously the easiest to track down. The trend was so broad and culturally fashionable that it’s hard to pin down one maker as being the best.

The makers of the American stuff are harder to identify, but you can find the year for the Victorian material by looking at catalogs of the day. It’s pretty easy. They liked a certain style. I can use the documentation of the era to see if someone made a certain design, such as a Victorian buckle ring with hairwork on the inside. That was a very common piece. A lot of rings came out of Chester in the U.K. That’s where the industry was. They had the molds and so they could just pump it out.

Collectors Weekly: Are certain forms of mourning jewelry more difficult to collect than others?

In this French watch fob, a husband's dedication to his late wife reads, "the further apart, the tighter the bond."

Peters: The ones to be careful of are the degradable and precious pieces. Not just in jewelry, but anything. For example, there were mourning teddy bears and other things like that—things that rot and are a little more obscure. They need better care, and there aren’t many left. Similarly, a lot of the materials used for mourning wear, like crepe and silks, just don’t last.

Hair wreaths can also be problematic. I have quite a few. In fact, anything to do with hairwork that hasn’t been treated properly may degrade and start to lose its consistency. Wood things, like the folk art pieces and the samplers, are really at the mercy of the elements and just don’t age well. Hair is usually the first thing to go in the jewelry, but I’ve pulled pieces from a 400-year-old box that were in beautiful condition. It’s really a matter of how they’ve been stored.

Ivory is the other big one. I’ve had a lot of problems with it. Keeping it at a steady temperature and constant level of humidity is really important. It swells and cracks in the wrong climate. And once it’s cracked, it’s not coming back.

Humidity is something to watch out for in miniature portraits, too. At the times in my life when I haven’t been living in the right environment for these pieces, I won’t buy them. I’m their caretaker. Most of them are dedicated to other people. When I go, it all goes to a museum or somewhere, so I want them to last forever.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most common mourning jewelry inscriptions?

Peters: The most common is “in memory of,” and it’s also my favorite. It can be found in bands even before the development of the dictionary. “Not lost but gone before” is also quite popular.

Most of the time these pieces have a dedication to whoever died and the age they were when they died. It tells you when they died and maybe when they were born. It might also have the names of their children. Those sorts of things obviously make my job of researching each piece easier and more fun.

Other pieces, such as the ones with hairwork, bear no sentiment, no dedication, but they do have symbols. So you have to figure out what it means. What’s the color scheme? If it’s not black, white, or blue enamel, what does it mean? Blue enamel, for example, was used to express sentimental feelings, but blue was also used for royalty. White enamel was commonly used for the death of a child or an unmarried woman. Black obviously signified death.

I love it when a collection can remain together. A woman in London was selling her entire family’s collection of jewelry and other things dating back to about 1760. I made her an offer for the whole lot—her kids didn’t want it. I said, “I’ll take everything you’ve got. Just write down the provenance of each piece, who it was for, and what year you believe it was made in.” She wrote down her entire family history right then and there. It was brilliant because I had miniatures, compacts, rings, bracelets, and slides—all sorts of fabulous things.

Collectors Weekly: So, just to be clear, is mourning jewelry considered a type of funeralia?

This Victorian hairwork bracelet featured a weave that stretched to fit the wearer. The clasp is neo-Rococo.

Peters: Yes. Some pieces are obviously made with the funeral in mind. In the 16th century, it wasn’t unheard of to leave an allocation in your will for the construction of mourning jewelry to be given to the loved ones at the funeral. To me that’s funeralia. That’s an accessory of mourning and part of the pomp and showiness of the funeral itself.

There were other things, though, that may be considered mourning but not funeralia. For example, I don’t consider the neoclassical stuff to be real funeralia, but it all falls under that umbrella. Funeralia, itself, is another world. You have the actual cemetery, the burial, and God knows what. It has so many facets. I think the jewelry fits in there in some way.

Collectors Weekly: Is there a vibrant community of mourning and memorial jewelry collectors?

Peters: Yes. My website and my travels have brought together a lot of very knowledgeable collectors from around the world. And I thank them so much for all of their input into the website and into my studies of mourning, sentimental, and memorial jewelry.

We show each other different pieces. One of my goals is to catalog, teach, and talk about these pieces—to lessen the mystique and romanticism of mourning, memorial, and sentimental jewelry, which has led to negative connotations. There’s so much cultural and social history there. I don’t think the negative stuff is necessary.

Collectors Weekly: Do you have any advice for an aspiring collector?

Peters: The first thing I’d say is to get experience. Physically get out there, touch the pieces. It’s also important to go to all the websites, from eBay to Ruby Lane. You don’t have to buy everything. In fact, that can lead to a lot of trouble because the collecting impulse can overcome the quest for knowledge, which should be the first goal.

Look at as many individual pieces as you can. Familiarize yourself with both the high and the low ends of the market. Read as much as you can. Touch, feel, and really get intimate with the pieces. Use your eyes and learn to identify what you are looking at. That will be your foundation as a collector. When I was quite young, I remember going to some of the best antiques jewelers in the country. They showed me everything, including all their most magnificent pieces. That was an education, and it didn’t cost me a thing.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Hayden, for speaking with us today about mourning jewelry.

(All images in this article courtesy Hayden Peters of www.artofmourning.com)

Through his publishing imprint, Pure Imagination, illustrator Greg Theakston has retouched and reprinted the work of some of the most admired artists of the Golden Age of comics, more than 10,000 pages in all. In this interview, Theakston discusses some of these artists, including Jack Kirby and Basil Wolverton; casts a wary eye on the idea of comics as raw commodities; and explains Captain Marvel Jr.’s little-known influence on Elvis Presley.

My older brother started bringing comics home in 1957 when I was around five years old. The whole form just fascinated me. Even at that age I was collecting. I still have a lot of those comics, most of which are from 1939 to about ‘78. Some exceptional comics came out after that, but for the most part, that’s what I collect.

In the spring of 1941, "World's Best Comics" #1 featured Superman, Johnny Thunder, Crimson Avenger, and Batman and Robin.

Some of the top guys worked during that period. I’d definitely put Jack Kirby at the top of the list. He codified what a superhero comic book was about. Before that, there really was no template. Then Kirby entered the business, showed his peers what he could do, and everybody just struggled to keep up. That’s pretty much the way it was for the rest of his career.

His first work appeared at the beginning of the Golden Age in about 1938. Comic books had been around since 1933, but most of them were just newspaper strip reprints. Once that reprint material was exhausted, artists and writers were hired to create new stuff. A lot of these people were just grasping at straws. They were largely inexperienced artists, but they were the best the comics business could afford.

Very quickly, though, new comics were routinely selling between half a million and three million copies. Keep in mind that’s at a dime apiece. They were competing on even financial terms with “Life,” “Time,” “Collier’s,” and “Saturday Evening Post.”

The publishers had extremely low overhead. The artists largely produced from their homes or their studios, so there wasn’t a lot of need for space. Once the work was in, all you needed was a cleanup guy and the editor. So the profit margin was enormous, which was why so many magazine publishers jumped in at the same time. They didn’t give a damn whether it was a comic book or “Liberty.” They were all selling off the same newsstand for the same 10 cents. That was the beginning of the Golden Age.

Collectors Weekly: Were people collecting Golden Age right from the start?

Theakston: At that point, comics were something to read, not necessarily something to collect. People didn’t think in those terms. It was a throwaway medium. It was printed as cheaply as possible and sold for the lowest possible price.

Kids always collected, but it wasn’t quite the same kind of rabid pursuit that developed in the 1960s. The storyline continuity of Marvel Comics in the ’60s promoted a collector’s sensibility. They were constantly referring to something that happened five issues back, and if you missed it, you wanted to see what it was.

Mail order became a successful part of the business as people ordered back issues of comics they’d missed. It was the first time that you could get whatever you wanted for a price. Prior to that, collecting had been a matter of luck or the ability to make a trade.

So comic book collecting really started around ‘63 or ‘64, when storylines and services began to galvanize the collecting communities. Most comic books of the day printed the addresses of the people who wrote fan mail. So you could write somebody, which unified fans and brought collectors together.

By the mid- to late ’60s, comic book conventions began to spring up around the country. Not only could you meet somebody with similar interests, but the conventions sold the comic books you’d missed. You could look at them and compare the prices with those of other dealers. So it became a much more hands-on way of collecting.

Collectors Weekly: How long did the Golden Age last?

Theakston: Well, there’s a lot of debate on that within the community. It’s generally believed that the Golden Age ran from 1938, when Superman debuted, to 1954, when the Comics Code Authority came into effect. After that, the contents of the books were carefully monitored by an organization that was funded by the comics industry.

The cover of Adventure Comics #75 from 1942 shows Jack Kirby's Sandman, aided by his sidekick, Sandy, doing battle with Thor.

They opted for self-censorship because comic book publishers knew that if they didn’t take steps, they were going to be censored from the outside, which was the last thing anybody wanted. A Senate subcommittee had held hearings on juvenile delinquency in April of 1954. It had been televised and almost permanently tarnished the industry’s reputation. So they formed the Comics Code Authority later in the year.

In fact, there were some not-very-tasteful comic books produced during the early 1950s. Many of the comic book publishers had started out publishing pulps and dime novels. They knew that sex and violence sold there, they thought, “Well, what the hell. Let’s do it in comics.” A lot of publishers were squeaky clean, like Dell, which produced the Walt Disney books and movie adaptations. There was the “Superman” line, of course, and “Classics Illustrated.”

By the time the Comics Code Authority kicked in, a lot of the publishers who’d printed the most questionable material were already gone. They just jumped in, made a quick buck, and left, but everybody else was left holding the bag. I remember a mother telling me that comics would rot my brain. Parents thought comics were dangerous. That perception, combined with competition from television and the demise of mom-and-pop stores, made it very difficult for comics to stay profitable.

Collectors Weekly: Which publishers bore the brunt of those hearings?

Theakston: Primarily E.C. Comics put out by Bill Gaines. They were extremely gory, and yet sometimes charmingly ridiculous. The material may have been shocking, but it was well done. They were the top writers and artists in the business, doing some pretty grim stuff, but it was always a bit tongue in cheek.

Gaines probably lost his entire line because of the hearings and wouldn’t have survived had he not changed the format of “Mad” into a magazine instead of a comic book. That was one of the biggest successes in publishing history. It would routinely sell three to four million copies per issue, even though it was put together in a very small office with low overhead.

Collectors Weekly: Where did the name Golden Age come from?

Theakston: It’s like the golden age in Rome. It’s just a time period thought of nostalgically. In terms of content, a good 80 percent of the stuff done in the Golden Age was pretty awful, particularly the backup features, which barely made sense. But on the other hand, there were some shining moments.

The Dell line of comics was produced largely by the Disney artists themselves. In the Superman line, even the backup features were good. Fawcett, the people who did “Captain Marvel,” were always entertaining. Timely Comics, which published “Captain America,” were hit and miss, but generally a pretty good read.

In the ’60s and ’70s, when collecting started to take off, a lot of the people buying comics had bought the same issues off the newsstand when they were kids, so there was a lot of nostalgia to it. That was when you first started to see the prices go up because the people who bought them the first time had grown up and had a lot more money to buy them a second time.

Collectors Weekly: Were people collecting Golden Age during the ’60s and ’70s?

Theakston: No. I’d say the comics of the day were more popular because they were cheaper and easier to find. You could get them anywhere. In terms of collectibility, the Golden Age material was the rarest. Anybody could go out and buy six copies of the latest “Fantastic Four.” But try to find six copies of “Superman” No. 12. Having a nice set of Golden Age books was impressive because not many people did.

During World War II, superheroes routinely fought the Nazis, as Bill Everett's Sub-Mariner did in the spring of 1941.

These days there’s less of a nostalgia factor—comics are viewed more as a commodity. Comic books are now graded and then placed into a plastic box. It’s called slabbing. It’s a widely practiced abomination.

You send it to the grader. The grader goes through it, grades it, and then locks it into a plastic box. The proof it’s a commodity is that they inspect it and grade it. Now this works wonderfully with baseball cards and coins because they only have two sides. You put them in a little plastic box, and you can still enjoy them. Once you slab a comic book, that’s it. The enjoyment factor is gone, and then it’s strictly a commodity.

The collector only cares that it accrues value. There are bragging rights to having the highest graded copy of something in existence. It’s not, “Boy, I get such a kick out of this,” it’s “Boy, I got the best one and you don’t.”

Part of the tragedy of modern comic book collecting is that it’s turned into a strictly investor situation. If you pay to have that book graded, you’ll never read it again. It’s gone. Sixty-four interior pages are now missing from humanity. There are some collectors who will crack them out of their cases—they are even called crack addicts. They don’t care that they were graded; they just want to see that book.

It’s really become a connoisseur’s hobby, and if you’ve got the right product on eBay, you can make a small fortune. Somebody is always looking to upgrade a copy or at least get their first copy of something. The better condition the book is in, the more people will be bidding on it and the higher the price. Frankly, I’m astounded at some of the prices comic books are fetching these days—six figures.

One of the reasons why they are so rare is World War II. Millions of comic books were sacrificed for paper drives to support the war effort. There are a number of Golden Age comics of which less than 20 are known to exist, making those very valuable. Plus, they weren’t designed to last a long time. They were printed on the cheapest paper with the cheapest presses and the cheapest binding to make a few extra pennies. Comics don’t age well by the very nature of their construction.

Collectors Weekly: How did Superman change the comic industry?

Theakston: Superman, who was created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, really pioneered the comic book story format, as well as the superhero genre. He was the first and the best. Once other publishers saw the figures, they said: “These things are cheap to make. Let’s get involved.” Suddenly there were superheroes everywhere. Having a picture of Captain America socking Hitler was something people had never seen before. It provided an outlet for people’s dreams, power fantasies that most conventional media simply couldn’t compete with.

This cover for "Wonderworld Comics" from February of 1940 shows why Lou Fine was one of the most respected artists of the Golden Age.

Up until Superman, comic books were primarily comic strip reprints. In a newspaper, it took 12 weeks to follow a story from beginning to end. Suddenly, here’s a story that you can enjoy in 12 pages. So the immediacy of the comic book story format really hit home.

Superman was also the first major costumed character to break through. As a result, he defined what comics were. It wasn’t just about cops and robbers or an orphan and her dog anymore. There were things depicted in comics that people had never seen before. They’d never seen an image of a guy lifting a car over his head or a rocket ship to the moon. Who ever thought about traveling to the moon?

Comics also had their own unique language and pace. In the newspaper strips, the first panel of every new strip rehashed what had happened in the previous day’s installment. That slowed down the storytelling. In a comic book, it was just bang-bang-bang, panel after panel, until the resolution.

There were far fewer constraints on how stories could be told in comics compared to newspaper strips. Comics were written and drawn by exuberant, young guys, and the stories were likewise young and rude, with an energy that you don’t see in other examples of popular culture of that period.

It was like a bunch of underground filmmakers had been let loose in a publishing company. They pretty much got to do whatever they wanted because there were no defined rules. The company didn’t give a damn as long as it sold a million copies.

It definitely was a novelty, especially during the War. Comics were being bought by the U.S. Government and shipped overseas to guys with nothing to do while they waited to go to war. A lot of comics were bought and read by adults during the war years, which ultimately led to romance and crime comics once people lost their appetite for superheroes. And some of the abuses in those genres resulted in the Comics Code.

Collectors Weekly: Can you give us a few examples of stellar Golden Age collections?

Theakston: There was a collection discovered in Denver called the Mile High Collection. Some guy had collected virtually every Golden Age comic ever published. Golden Age comics were printed on pulp, which contains acid. If they’re not properly stored, they get brittle, yellow, and fall apart. But this guy had stored them in racks in a cool, dry basement. It was the most pristine collection of Golden Age comics ever discovered, and it made the people who found it millionaires.

That’s an important aspect of Golden Age collecting, the pedigree. If it’s a Mile High copy, you know it’s one of the finest condition copies there is. So you want to advertise that it’s a Mile High. Another example is a comic from the Douglas Crippen estate. There was a huge find of comics through that guy, who penciled a D on the front cover of all of his comic books. So a Douglas Crippen comic has a value over and above what it is. Why that matters to anybody, I’ve no idea.

OOC—original owner collection—always gets people’s interest up. It means the collection probably hasn’t been picked over. If someone hung on to it for a long time, they probably took good care of it. Naturally the added value tends to work in favor of whoever owns the property.

Frankly, I couldn’t care less about where a book came from. And how much money a comic is worth is not what a comic book is about to me. I could give you an estimate of what my comic books are worth, but they’re not going anywhere, so what’s the point of even pricing them? I own them. They’re here. I’m done, and I’ll enjoy them when I want to. In fact, when I was really actively collecting, I was going for the lowest grade copies I could find. I wanted a comic book I could read 10 times and not worry about it devaluing.

Collectors Weekly: You mentioned Jack Kirby: Who were some of the other key artists of the Golden Age?

Theakston: Lou Fine was one of the top Golden Age comic book artists. Although he only worked for two years, a lot of the material he produced still exists because it was so good that fans hung around the office to get a piece of his artwork.

Jack Cole's Plastic Man got his own 60-page comic book in 1943.

Jack Cole, the creator of Plastic Man, is also very well known, as was Basil Wolverton, who drew the famous Lena the Hyena portrait. It was in “Life” magazine. He also illustrated virtually the entire Bible in a very bizarre style in the ’50s. If you want to see the origins of Robert Crumb’s work, it’s in Basil Wolverton. Crumb, who is an underground artist, tends to be a curmudgeon with a weird streak. Wolverton was an ex-Vaudevillian, and that translated into his work, which was a bit daffier.

Bill Everett created the Sub-Mariner and worked steadily for decades. Then in the late ’40s and early ’50s, there was a second wave of guys who had been inspired by the first. They had more of an edge, were a little more sophisticated, and they had a template—tens of thousands of comic books filled with stuff to steal. In the second wave, there were terrific guys like Wally Wood, who worked consecutively on the first 110 issues of “Mad” magazine. There was also Al Williamson, a very fine line artist whose style was reminiscent of Flash Gordon’s Alex Raymond.

Frank Frazetta, who eventually became very famous illustrating paperbacks, movie posters, and record covers, got his start in comics. Everett Raymond Kinstler, who painted several presidential portraits, got his start in comic books. Roy Lichtenstein worked in comics briefly. Mickey Spillane won his spurs writing for comic books. A lot of guys that liked that kind of material cut their teeth there and then moved on.

Pay in the Golden Age was notoriously low, and that stuff was cranked out. If you’ve got six panels and three pages to do by the end of the day, you can’t slave over it and make it perfect. Consequently, a lot of it was formula. One of the biggest problems with Golden Age comics is that you read the same story six different times with six different characters. But getting the job done quickly was the top priority. It didn’t matter if it was great; it had to be at the printer by Friday.

Collectors Weekly: Did the artists also write their stories?

Theakston: Sometimes, if they were really talented and had a strong vision. Kirby, Jack Cole, and Wolverton all wrote their own stuff. But Lou Fine wrote very little. He was strictly an artist. It really just depended on the creator and how much control they wanted.

At first, not many of the writers were well known because credits were rarely given. You never knew who was drawing or who was writing. You’d recognize a style from another book: “I know that guy. He draws in squiggles.” Unless you reached some kind of star stature, you generally worked under a house name. If you were a writer and wanted to be known, you went to the pulps, not to comics.

Collectors Weekly: So fame came later?

Theakston: Yes. In the early ’60s, thanks largely to Stan Lee and Marvel Comics, everybody pretty much started getting credits, all the way down to the lettering. That’s when everything changed in terms of getting your due.

In the Golden Age, comics were often credited to a house name that was owned by the publisher. In some cases, if the artist was really talented, they’d let the person sign it. A lot of people, though, thought what they were doing was just garbage, so they didn’t want their names on it.

Now, you can find some of this information on the Grand Comics Database on the Internet. It’s trying to list every comic book ever published with titles, credits, and a cover reproduction. It’s amazing. All of the images there are public domain, and they’re free to anybody who wants to use them. For the most part the copyrights were never renewed because comics were monthly throwaways. Little did they know that there would someday be a market for reprints.

What this means is that a vast number of Golden Age comics are in the public domain. By the time the issues came up for renewal, the companies were either no longer in business or no longer doing comics. For example, Quality Comics’ entire output until 1955 is in the public domain because the owner went out of business and didn’t bother to renew it.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the other major publishers?

Jack Kirby and Joe Simon's Captain America gives Hitler a hard sock in the kisser in issue #1, which hit newsstands in December of 1940.

Theakston: National Periodical Publications had “Superman,” “Batman,” and “Wonder Woman”; Timely Comics published the “Human Torch,” “The Sub-Mariner,” and “Captain America”; Fawcett had “Captain Marvel” and “Captain Marvel Universe”; and Quality Comics released “Plastic Man” and “Blackhawk.”

Dell was the top of the heap. George Delacorte was its editor in chief. They had movie adaptation contracts as well as a contract with the Disney studios. In the 1940s, anything Disney was golden. You knew that you’d be getting a quality product because it had the Disney name on it. “Donald Duck,” “Mickey Mouse,” and “Goofy” comics routinely sold three to five million copies a month.

Consequently, they’re not the most valuable books because the odds of them surviving were so much better. If a book had a print run of 500,000 or less with a smaller company, it is one-sixth of the run of the new “Donald Duck.” That means one-sixth of the copies will continue to exist. So the Disney stuff tends to be some of the least rare of the Golden Age books.

Collectors Weekly: Were Golden Age comics mainly based on superheroes?

Theakston: Yes, until 1945. Again, it all had to do with wanting a god or goddess to go fight the war for us. We needed all the strength we could get. The guy who can lift a car over his head? Send him first. Comics were saturated with superheroes during the war. But once it was over and the public’s tastes changed, comics had to follow suit.

The whole new art, Film Noir trend after the war altered people’s viewing habits and tastes. They wanted dark crime dramas, and that eventually developed into horror comics. Once again, these were images Americans had never encountered before—a picture of a guy with his head exploding. Even in the bloodiest Pulps, you never got that. So it was an effort by the comic book companies to survive by producing tougher and tougher material.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the other popular superheroes besides Superman?

Theakston: Plastic Man was pretty remarkable. Will Eisner’s The Spirit appeared in comic book format in the Sunday newspapers. Batman and Wonder Woman from D.C., plus Captain America, The Sub-Mariner, and the Human Torch were all very popular characters.

You also had Captain Marvel and Captain Marvel Jr., who was Elvis’ favorite comic book hero. You know the emblem with Elvis’ motto, “Taking Care of Business” with the lightning bolt? Captain Marvel Jr. had a lightning bolt on his chest, plus a little Elvis-like curl of hair in the middle of his forehead. Elvis wore the jumpsuits with the high collar; Captain Marvel Jr. had a high collar. So while Jr. may not be as widely known as Captain Marvel himself, he had a profound effect on Elvis Presley.

A lot of characters like the Shadow, the Lone Ranger, and the Green Hornet were adapted into comic books and did very well because the public already knew who they were. You’d look at a “Hydro Man” comic book, and say, “Who the hell is Hydro Man?” And right next to it would be a “Green Hornet.” So the fact that these characters were known gave them an edge over the more anonymous, new superheroes.

In fact, most superheroes in the ’40s or during the war were very formulaic and forgettable. They all had a gimmick. Take Hawkman: he’s like a hawk. Or The Sandman: he’s got a gas that knocks you out.

Collectors Weekly: Do collectors tend to collect by superhero or publisher?

Theakston: I know guys who collect every title by a specific company because they like the output, the aesthetic, the artists. Timely Comics and Atlas Comics in the ’50s were precursors to Marvel. Their books are highly collectible because they generally featured fairly good writing and art. Some people collect only those. Other people focus on a particular character. I know a couple of people who collect just Sheena or just Blackhawk comics because they like the artist and the character.

Will Eisner's "The Spirit" (issue #21 from 1950 is seen here) was one of many titles that made the leap from newspapers to comic books.

A lot of people collect artists. You find a favorite artist and attempt to collect all their work, no matter what company they worked for. That’s me and Jack Kirby. He was all over the place. I don’t care what company put it out. I like Jack Kirby’s artwork. I’ll buy it. I have reissued an awful lot of his work in trade paperback to an appreciative audience.

I developed a process called Theakstonization, which extracts the color from a printed comic book page, leaving a black and white plate. It was nearly impossible to get good reproduction on Golden Age comics because they threw away all the proofs, thinking they’d never need them again. This is another reason so little original art exists from the Golden Age. The only examples tend to be the ones that either the artist saved from the garbage or admirers saved.

I figured out how to bleach the colors out of the comic books. I’ve retouched probably 10,000 pages of Golden and Silver Age comic book art in my career, resurrecting it for new audiences that can’t afford it or wouldn’t know where to get it if they could afford it. I purposely pick out bad-grade copies so that I won’t take too much of a loss if I destroy them. I buy cheap copies and don’t regret it.

For example, a comic from 1940 in good condition in which Kirby did just a six-page job might cost $60. So I’ll buy a coverless copy for $10, take the six pages out, bleach them, and put them into a bigger collection.

As an artist myself, I get great enjoyment from the visual way these guys told stories. I’m much less inclined to read a well-written story that is badly drawn. Generally, if they were working with high-caliber artists, they were working with good writers. So the names that I mentioned, some of the bigger names in the ’40s, ’50s, generally had good writing. They were doing it themselves or they were working with some of the best guys in the business. If you were writing for Jack Kirby, you were a good writer.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the rarest Golden Age comics?

Theakston: The most collectible comics from the Golden Age are always issue number one of a title. They were all untested books, and the publishers were not inclined to do a big print run for fear of having them returned. So a comic book might have an initial print run of 250,000. But then if it’s a smash hit like “Captain America,” three years later they’d be doing a million copies an issue. Consequently, “Captain America” #1 is four times harder to find than “Captain America” #4 because the print runs were so low.

Batman made his first appearance in issue #27 of "Detective Comics" in May of 1939.

There are also bragging rights about having the first appearance of a character. Batman didn’t appear in “Detective” until #27, but that’s the most valuable book in the “Detective” run because it’s the first appearance of Batman. “Action Comics” #1 features Superman. It’s one of the longest running titles in comics history with probably the most important hero in comics history and his first appearance. That’s probably a six-figure book in excellent condition.

During the war, they only printed 100,000 of a lot of comic books—today, for some of these titles, maybe only six copies are known to exist. If it’s got anything adventurous in it, it’s a rare, valuable book. A famous artist or a character’s first appearance, first issue or not, always adds value to a book.

A number of books are impossible to find, but because of the content and the obscurity of the publishers, they’re not nearly as sought after as something that might be more available and is more appealing in terms of content. But when you get down to less than 10 known existing copies, the book has value no matter what just based on its rarity. It’s the same with coins and stamps. If it’s the only one known, you’re going to get a good price for it.

The factors in pricing and dealing Golden Age comic books are very much like those in pricing cards, coins, and stamps. They have a similar sensibility about what they are, how they’re marketed, and who they’re marketed to. The same factors determine the cost of a comic book as they do in other collectibles. The method for determining the value of a comic book is very simple—scarcity, content, condition.

Of course, the older a comic is, the harder it is to find in good condition. Since the ’80s, with the proliferation of backing boards and comic book bags, mint copies of books from the late ’70s are easy to find because these collectors would go to a store and buy three copies. They read one, put the other two in the plastic bags, and put them in their closet in the cellar and wait for them to accrue value.

So all of these millions of books are sitting as multiple copies in somebody’s house or garage. They’ll never be worth anything. It doesn’t matter what the condition is. There are boxes of them in this condition. There were millions of them printed, and everybody saved them because they thought they’d be worth a lot of money someday. It wasn’t the same with Golden Age comics. People read them and threw them away with no expectation that they’d ever be worth any money.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of your favorites in your collection?

Comics like "The Vault of Horror," 1951, created a public outcry that led to the Comics Code Authority in 1954.

Theakston: I have a very soft spot for William Gaines’ E.C. Comics because they’re such high quality. He was a very hands-on editor, paid good rates, and attracted the top talent in the business. So anytime you get an E.C. comic, you have a guarantee of at least two good stories out of the three.

I also like anything by Jack Kirby. He rarely lets you down, even though a lot of the books that would be my favorites are out of my price range. I’m kind of partial to the anthology books where you got eight different heroes: “All Winners” from Marvel and Timely, “All Star” from D.C. Comics. If you liked any of the heroes from D.C. Comics, you can pretty much guarantee that they’re showing up in “All Star.”

If you like Superman and Superman is in “All Star,” you might discover Wildcat or Mr. Terrific or any one of the other supporting characters in that book. It’s a good way to cross-populate the characters—Marvel did that a lot in the ’60s. “Spider-Man” consistently had crossovers and guest stars from other titles. So if you never read “Daredevil,” there he was in “Spider-Man.” It was a marketing ploy.

Collectors Weekly: How did the publishing houses compete against each other?

Theakston: By doing their best work, I guess. They all had the same 10 distributors. They all racked in the same amount of space. The only effective way of competing was to produce more comics and push other comics out of the rack. The key was to have the kind of material that the readers liked, to spot the trends.

Collectors Weekly: Are American comics only collected in the U.S.?

Theakston: No. In fact, American comics, at least after the 1950s, were merchandised around the world. I’ve seen Mexican copies of “Superman” from the ’50s. I’ve seen Danish copies of Marvel comics from the ’60s, French copies. They would license the artwork and story, and the publisher in the other country would translate it and reissue it there. Since the ’50s, you could have collected American comics anywhere on the planet. So it wasn’t like all of a sudden American comics are a hot deal because they’re American comics. They were always around. Everything was translated.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for someone new to collecting comics?

Theakston: Go on eBay and start keeping track of which companies produced the most valuable comics. See how they’re sold. See what the sellers have in their advertisements explaining why it’s a valuable book. I’d say learn about the product before you begin investing money. It would be the same thing with any collectible. You really should know the subject inside out before you start throwing money at it. You may end up making some horrendous mistakes.

For someone who collects new comics, I’d say buy what you like because it’s never going to be worth a lot of money. There may be some strange case like “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles” where they printed 10,000 the first time out and it exploded. But how rare is that? So I would say buy what appeals to you and enjoy it. Collecting Golden Age books and collecting modern comics are two completely different creatures. There will never be a deficit of these new issues. They’ll always be around, and you could pretty much count on them being in excellent condition because some fanatical collector popped them into a bag with a board on the back.

If you buy what you enjoy, chances are it’ll still be a good read for you 10 years down the line, whether it’s accrued any value or not. You can’t enjoy a Golden Age comic without wearing white gloves and taking care not to breathe on it too hard. They’re very delicate. If you tear the cover, a grading company will reduce the value of the book by $200 and lower it a full grade.

Collectors Weekly: Is comics collecting still as big as it was in the ’60s?

Theakston: I’d say definitely not because of video games, the thousand TV channels, cell phones, iPods, and anything else that divert our attention. When television took hold in the ’60s, people started reading less. Their entertainment was much more passive; they could just sit there and let it flow over them. In that respect, television has been the undoing of the comic book. Comics are going through a very difficult time right now because so many of the outlets have dried up—they stopped selling comic books at 7-Eleven, which must have been a terrible blow to the business.

In 1947, an issue of "Whiz Comics" from Australia included a 10-page story about Captain Marvel.

The whole hobby has changed radically since I started collecting. The Golden Age books that were perceived as rare were expensive but still doable. Now, it’s a huge business, people expect to make money, and prices go accordingly. You have a situation where people who were collecting comics in the ’60s, especially the early 1960s, are now in their 50s. In a lot of cases they have a lot of money, discretionary funds. And they compete against each other and drive the prices up.

What’s the true value of a book? Well, only as high as what people are willing to pay for it. There may be only five people in the United States who’ll pay X amount of dollars for X book, but it doesn’t matter. If those five people will pay that kind of money, everybody else is locked out. There might be another 200 people willing to spend half that amount, but they’ll never see it because the big rollers are controlling the market in that respect. Maybe 50 dealers in the United States control probably 90 percent of the Golden Age stock.

I think the only way comics are going to succeed in the future is over the Internet and in major bookstores because the old outlets are drying up. If Diamond Distribution, the largest distributor of comics in America, went out of business, it would mean the end of the comic book business as we know it. The industry has painted itself into a corner by relying on one key distributor.

That’s one of the main reasons why comic book companies publish collections. A 12-issue mini series bound into a single volume can be sold in a bookstore. They get two sales off of it from the initial comic book fan, and then the casual reader at Barnes & Noble, or wherever, discovers it. That’s probably the future of comics. It’s a very good sign that major book retailers now have entire sections devoted to comic books. That’s a positive sign in a drastically shrinking industry.

Today, comic books are largely jumping-off points for Hollywood. If you can get your creation into a comic book, then you can send it to a film company and say, “Are you interested in this property? Here it is visualized, fully realized.” Right now there are more than 100 comic-book-adaptation movies in production, which shows you where all the true creativity of popular culture rests these days.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you so much, Greg, for talking with us about Golden Age comics.

(All images in this article courtesy the Grand Comic Database)

Four dolls broke the thousand-dollar mark. Lorraine Schwartz’s Barbie, featuring real diamonds, achieved the highest bid, selling for $7,500. Deborah Lloyd of Kate Spade created a pink bag for her doll, as well as a Lady Marmalade costume jewelry necklace. That went for $1,625. Betsey Johnson’s Barbie was encircled by an enormous see-through hoop skirt and donned a sequined, devil-horn hat. Final price was $1,202. And Devi Kroell’s doll carried a fuchsia purse and wore over-the-knee, open-toe, stiletto boots. She sold for $1,075.

That was last week. This week’s Barbie news is the announcement that the doll’s next career (she’s had 125) will be as a computer engineer (available in November, 2010). Described by Mattel as geek chic, the doll’s outfit features a binary-code t-shirt and black knit slacks. Accessories include a Bluetooth earpiece, pink laptop, and hi-tech wristwatch. No word yet if empty pizza boxes and a stack of soda cans will also be available for this new engineer’s cubicle.

As the cofounder of Gryphon Stringed Instruments, Richard Johnston has spent a good part of his life around guitars, mandolins, and other stringed instruments. An appraiser on “Antiques Roadshow,” Johnston is also an author, whose most recent title traces the history of C. F. Martin & Company. In this interview, Johnston explains the histories of Gibson and Martin, including their early forays into mandolin and ukulele making, and weighs in on the effects that age and different types of wood have on the sound of a guitar.

I started playing guitar when I was pretty young and bought my first guitar when I was 10 or 11. Like a lot of people of my generation, I was inspired to do so because of the folk revival, initially the more commercial parts of it like the Kingston Trio and Peter, Paul & Mary. I later got interested in their influences, like Woody Guthrie and Doc Watson, and from there I got into early country music, bluegrass and country blues.

In the first half of the 20th century, Gibson mandolins dominated the market. This sunburst A4 model is from 1919.

When I was about 20, I got interested in buying, selling, and working on guitars. Around that time I met Frank Ford, and we started working together while I waited to see where I was going to fit in the draft lottery in 1969. Gryphon started that fall.

I was never really interested in collecting a lot of guitars. I bought a couple of early Martins when I was in college, one I still own. I’ve had a couple of different old Gibson mandolins and things like that. But partly because of the space they take up, I never really aspired to have a big collection. I’ve never owned more than three or four guitars at any one time.

Before the Gryphon partnership started, I was buying and selling guitars, primarily Martins, and Frank was working on them and building them. But once we linked up, we both did everything. As it’s become necessary to specialize, we’ve reverted to our old roles: Frank is in charge of the repair department and I’m more in charge of buying and selling vintage instruments as well as appraisals and writing. Franks also writes about how to repair them, offers shop tips, and also teaches repair techniques at a couple of different trade schools.

We were originally just interested in acoustic instruments—we didn’t do much with electric guitars until the mid-1990s—and almost exclusively American-made guitars, mandolins, banjos, and ukuleles. Of course, there wasn’t really much business in old or even used ukuleles until fairly recently. They’re the most recent instruments to enjoy a resurgence. For the first 25 or 30 years, although we would buy and sell ukuleles, they were a very small part of the business because they were worth so little.

Neither of us played electric guitar, so we were primarily interested in music that was acoustic-based rather than electric. Although I listened to the classic San Francisco-era bands like Jefferson Airplane, trying to recreate that sound never appealed to me. Frank and I were more involved in playing old-time string-band music. In the early days of Gryphon, we had the Mayfield String Band, which was active playing square dances and parties, and that was very much based on music of the 1920s and ’30s.

Collectors Weekly: Can you give us a brief history of the acoustic guitar?

Johnston: I didn’t do much writing on guitar history until the 1990s. But I was an English major in college, so I’d done a fair amount of writing in general. I helped out when “Acoustic Guitar” magazine was getting started. I took them around at one of the NAMM (National Association of Music Merchants) shows and introduced them to manufacturers so they could get an idea of the advertising support they could expect. I wrote a long article for the premiere issue and have done quite a bit of writing for them since.

From there, I contributed to books for Tony Bacon and Backbeat and then the first Martin book, which was published in 1996. The two-volume set was just completed last year. That’s the most recent book on Martin guitars.

The acoustic guitar as we know it today, which is primarily played on steel strings, is a relatively recent development. The guitar was fairly popular in this country in the early 1800s, and there were a number of different individuals and companies building guitars here in the 1830s. For example, C.F. Martin Sr. came to New York from Saxony in 1883. The guitar was quite a fad. There were a lot of touring musicians from other parts of the world who played New York, Boston, Philadelphia, Atlanta, and other major cities.

At home, women were the primary players of guitars, so a lot of the instruments from that era are quite small and feature a lot of decoration. Although there were a few concert guitarists, the guitar didn’t really gain widespread popularity until the mandolin craze of the late 1880s. The guitar hitched on as an accompaniment instrument in mandolin groups or for duos. Guitar and mandolin duets were popular around the turn of the 20th century. That’s also when mass production techniques arrived, especially with large companies in Chicago like Lyon & Healy.

Large-scale manufacturing and wide distribution of the guitar began at this time because that’s when catalogs first appeared. You see guitars and mandolins featured prominently in the early Sears & Roebuck catalogs, for example. Mail order also enabled people in rural areas to acquire instruments—they didn’t have to travel to a major city to find them. So that’s when it really began to pick up. The guitar was far more popular in this country in 1910 than it had been in 1880.

Collectors Weekly: Did popular music styles drive the creation of specific types of guitars?

Mahogany delivers a brighter tone than rosewood or spruce. This mahogany Martin 0-17 guitar is from 1937.

Johnston: From the beginning instrument makers sought ways to make their guitars louder. These guitars were strung with gut strings similar to violin strings, but longer. A small gut-string guitar isn’t very loud compared to the instruments it might accompany such as the mandolin—which was always strung with steel strings—the piano, the violin, horns, and woodwinds. It’s a highly portable instrument, extremely versatile, comparatively easy to learn to play, but it just wasn’t loud enough to hold its own, especially outdoors.

So there was an immediate push to make bigger guitars, string them with steel, and make them louder. The quest for volume dominates guitar development from the 1880s to around the 1930s, when they figured out how to make resonator devices—a mechanical diaphragm that vibrated in a metal body and amplified the sound—for what became Dobro and National brand guitars. Of course, magnetic pickups eventually came along, and the search for volume has primarily been in that direction ever since.

Since both the guitar and mandolin were so portable, it was very easy for two people to travel around and entertain in almost any situation. In fact, two Martin brothers performed on mandolin and guitar shortly after the turn of the 20th century, as did many others, sometimes with a vocalist. Around the same time, it was popular for people to write songs and record them. Of course it’s much easier to sing with accompaniment. And if you can accompany yourself on guitar, then the money doesn’t have to be split two ways.

Shortly after that, radio broadcasts of live music became extremely popular. Microphones had made it possible for the guitar to be amplified more effectively in balance with the human voice for broadcast. In the late 1920s, WLS-AM broadcast “National Barn Dance.” We think of those radio shows as being primarily associated with country music because that’s what they became. But at the time they were variety shows that would include popular sentimental songs, folk songs, light opera, and humor. It was basically whatever could be carried over onto the radio from Vaudeville.

Collectors Weekly: So when was the mandolin’s heyday?

Johnston: It would have been just before World War I. It began to fade in popularity in the early 1920s, although it was still popular throughout the decade. There were mandolin orchestras. If you’ve seen “The Music Man” with Robert Preston, which is about distributing horns and starting brass bands, the same formula was used to distribute mandolins. In fact Gibson—the most famous American mandolin company and the one that did more than any other to popularize the instrument—didn’t even sell through retail stores for the first two decades of its existence.

The instruments were all sold through what they called teacher agents. They would go to small towns and find a couple of people who already played the violin, because the mandolin is tuned like the violin but played with a flat pick instead of a bow. Then they would teach these people a couple of songs and demonstrate the mandolin in a concert.

The salesman would say, “Well, George Sanders has only been playing the Gibson mandolin for two weeks and listen to what he can do.” And so there would be these really impressive performances, and it got across the idea that you could play credible music much more quickly on a fretted instrument with a pick than when dealing with the difficulties of intonation and tone with a bowed instrument.

The tiple is like a large ukulele, but with 10 strings. This Martin T-18 is from 1925.

Of course this was before there was radio, and before many people listened to recordings at home, so it was appealing to be able to play music and do it socially and reasonably well without having to practice for years. I don’t think many people already in their 30s were willing to take up the violin or the piano because it was understood that the difficulty of those instruments required starting young. So working-class or middle-class people who’d had little music education when they were young were basically resigned to never playing music.

The mandolin was a way out of that. Although people worked 50 or 60 hours a week in those days, they still might have time to become good enough to play in a mandolin orchestra, maybe not as a soloist, but in the section. The music was primarily popular classical songs, things like Stephen Foster tunes.

Sometimes relatively small towns would have a 50- or 60-piece mandolin orchestra with guitars, mandolins, mandolas—the mandolin equivalent of the viola—and mandocellos, which were the fretted mandolin equivalent of a viola. Gibson even marketed mando-basses, which were almost the size of a regular string bass but were played with a pick and had frets. So that kind of distribution brought mandolins, guitars, and other instruments to small towns all across the country. One of the last functioning mandolin orchestras in the U.S. was the Garment Workers’ Union Orchestra in New York City—they were still active in the 1950s.

Towards the end of World War I, the Hawaiian music craze offered an even easier route to playing music. Magazines and catalogs were full of “Learn the ukulele in five minutes” type of courses. And a lot of guitar methods were for Hawaiian guitar, which is played on the lap in an open tuning with a slide for that glissando effect that you hear today from pedal steel players. Even more portable and way less expensive was the ukulele.

It’s hard for us now to imagine how influential these musical fads were because we’re surrounded by music. But in those days, we weren’t. Certainly both radio and records were already happening when the ukulele became popular in 1915, but not nearly to the extent that they are today.

For example, at the Pan-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco, Hawaii had a large pavilion with a four- or five-piece Hawaiian group performing several times a day. People just went nuts for that sound. They loved thinking about sun-drenched beaches, girls in grass skirts, and coconuts on the ground. It was a great antidote to all that horrible, depressing news from the other side of the Atlantic during World War I. The Hawaiian pavilion by far drew more people than any other exhibit at the 1915 Pan-Pacific Exposition. Everyone wanted to see it.

There was also a wildly popular Broadway show called “Bird of Paradise” that played in major cities on the East Coast and in Canada, and it featured Hawaiian music. It’s almost impossible to imagine how popular this trend was: You’d see palm trees on napkins, pillowcases, cocktail glasses, everything. A shipment of ukuleles would arrive at a store sell out in an afternoon. A lot of the interest was centered in and around Los Angeles because that was the main place to board a cruise ship for Hawaii.

At one point, up to one-third of all recorded popular songs had a Hawaiian guitar on them. On most of the recordings by Jimmie Rodgers, who’s considered the father of country music, the lead guitar is a Hawaiian guitar. It was not played in the conventional way of country music today.

Collectors Weekly: What happened as that craze died out?

Johnston: It had already begun to fade before the Great Depression hit in late 1929. Swing became more popular, and people were dancing to big orchestras. In the mid-1920s, the guitar had been given a whole new life as American manufacturers began making guitars with an arched top and back—more violin-like rather than flat.

Guitars with F-shaped sound holes rather than round sound holes project more and have a much more percussive tone. They’re much louder than a flat-top guitar. And so that became the standard guitar for dance bands and orchestras because it was better able to compete with horns, pianos, and percussion. But its role was primarily to play rhythm. It wasn’t until Charlie Christian began playing amplified lead solos on a guitar with a magnetic pickup that the guitar began to be considered a solo instrument.

Collectors Weekly: How did the guitar rise to prominence?

Four-stringed tenor guitars were popular in the 1930s. This Gibson TG-25 is from 1966.

Johnston: Recordings certainly helped. Nick Lucas, who played both an archtop and a flat-top guitar, played with a flat pick on songs like “Tiptoe Through the Tulips” and “Teasin’ the Frets.” He was the first to record what we would consider to be a hot flat-picking kind of solo guitar with singing. Recording made it possible for people to hear what the guitar was capable of without sitting right in front of the guitarist.

Riley Puckett, who was the guitar player for a popular string band called the Skillet Lickers, recorded solo records in which he would announce at the beginning of the songs, “I’m going to play a tune called ‘Fuzzy Rag.’ Now play close attention to these runs.” And of course he would play these long solos. He knew people were listening for that, and the recordings made it possible to hear every note. So singers realized that if they could play a guitar solo themselves that made the performance more interesting, they wouldn’t have to pay a guitar player.

When you look at photographs of those performers, you notice that they frequently wear their guitars extremely high on the chest compared to the way most guitar players do today. The reason is that most of them were performing and recording with only one microphone. By holding the guitar very high, basically so the upper edge of the guitar is almost in line with your bowtie, the guitar would be picked up by the same microphone you were singing into.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the best-known early guitar manufacturers?

Johnston: Martin and Gibson were the primary ones to make flat-top guitars, which are the ones that are most popular today. For archtop guitars, there were also other manufacturers, like Epiphone. But in terms of the flat-top guitar, with the exception of a couple of much smaller builders like the Larson Brothers out of the Chicago area, Martin and Gibson pretty much ruled the roost.

They were highly competitive and paid very close attention to what the other was doing. For instance, Gibson had always produced a lot of instruments with a dark-shaded finish on the face, so Martin began doing that in the 1930s. Martin was having a lot of success with a big, fancy guitar aimed at cowboy singers like Gene Autry, and that prompted Gibson to do the same. You see both of those brands in those early 15-minute short films that would either precede the main feature in a movie theater or would be played between reels.

Collectors Weekly: Did their quality distinguish them from the rest?

Johnston: Their quality and their volume. Those guitars were extremely loud. They worked well with the crude microphones and sound systems of that period. For a typical Western band such as the Sons of the Pioneers, those early flat-top Gibson or Martin guitars would frequently be the only instrument that was used. There might be a string bass, but sometimes it would just be one member playing chords on the guitar and then the three- or four-part vocal harmonies, and that was it.

That same formula was used by a number of singing groups in the swing genre and black harmony groups such as Three Cats and a Fiddle, which used the tiple, a large steel-string ukulele. They would perform with really tight three- and four-part harmonies with these ukulele bass instruments plus one guitar, which was frequently a tenor with just four strings. It was played like a tenor banjo.

Collectors Weekly: When did Martin start making guitars?

Johnston: C.F. Sr. came to New York in 1833, so there are Martin guitars that date from 1833, 1834. The company didn’t really begin to make a lot of instruments until it began to make steel-string guitars for the Hawaiian craze in the late teens. But certainly by the 1920s it was making a lot of steel-string guitars, and the production accelerated very rapidly from 1915 until the Depression slowed things down. The company went from less than a dozen employees in 1913 to more 70 employees in 1928.

As I said, the early guitars were strung with gut—they didn’t start making steel-string guitars in any quantity until well after the turn of the century. The more elaborately decorated guitars didn’t really begin to become popular until that time either. Martin’s decorations were always quite subtle. Usually it was just a narrow band of abalone inlay around the sound hole and around the edge of the top. The decorated instruments were initially intended for women, so they were only produced in the smaller sizes, but men immediately took to that kind of decoration as well.

Martin was asked to build larger examples of those guitars almost from the very beginning in the Civil War period. Those larger guitars were sought later by performers like Jimmie Rodgers and Gene Autry, both of whom played the fanciest Martin style, the style 45, because they glittered a lot from the stage.

That’s really the beginning of highly decorated instruments for performers. Jimmie Rodgers was one of the first to have his name inlaid in the fretboard of a guitar. The guitar became a portable press agent. You’re holding a business card, essentially, that says, ‘my name is Jimmie Rodgers’. A lot of performers after that, especially in what we now think of as country music, did the same thing.

Collectors Weekly: What are the characteristics of an American guitar?

Johnston: History is written by the survivors, and Martin was the company that stuck with it. So by the 1890s, most other guitars being made in this country were of a similar shape and style to Martins. And even when they were making gut-string guitars, the gut-string American guitar looked distinctly different from similar guitars made, say, in Spain. That was largely because Martins had evolved into a narrower waist and a smaller upper bout for a longer, slimmer body profile.

Lap guitars such as this Gibson BR-9 from about 1948 were some of the first electric guitars.

Likewise, when they began making instruments for Jimmie Rodgers or Gene Autry, and then even later for performers like Hank Williams and Elvis Presley, the popularity of those performers and the photos of them defined the style. For instance, the Martin Dreadnought, which is a bulbous-looking instrument with a very wide waist, was first produced as a Hawaiian guitar in the teens. But once it was adapted for use as a regular stage guitar and played by Hank Williams, Elvis, and Johnny Cash, it became the iconic American acoustic guitar, and remains so.

If you look at steel-string guitars made anywhere in the world, an overwhelming majority of them have directly evolved from those early 1930s Gibson and Martin examples. Many times the manufacturers don’t even know that’s where they came from. It’s just such a standard appearance that it’s like a bowtie or wing-tipped shoes—nobody buying them thinks, “Gee, where did that come from?” It’s just that’s what everybody wears and that’s what you have to have.

The guitars that are commonly referred to as having the hourglass shape are the earlier ones Martin made before it developed its own style. If you look at the guitars they were making in the 1830s, the upper and lower bouts were almost the same size, the waist is very narrow, and the upper part mirrors the lower section.

Sometimes the hourglass shape is used to describe later Martins that still have that narrow waist, even though the upper bouts in the later ones are much slimmer in comparison to the lower bout. But today, because of the popularity of the dreadnoughts, which have a very wide waist, sometimes the hourglass term is used to describe any guitar that has a narrower pinched waist as opposed to that very wide waist that results in a guitar shape that’s almost a trapezoid.

Collectors Weekly: What set Martins apart from Gibsons?

Johnston: The Martin Company has always been so conservative. Also the ownership of the company has remained more consistent, whereas Gibson, especially in recent times, has been owned by outside corporations that oftentimes had very little interest or knowledge about music, let alone guitars. So Gibson has had more ups and downs in terms of quality, consistency, styling, and things like that.

A certain percentage of Martin is publicly held, but I think the family still retains a majority stake in the company. So the Martin family has always had the last word as to what was being done. The guitars have evolved very slowly, and that means they have a more consistent sound and style. Today both companies are making reissues of the guitars they made in the 1930s, the ones that are really valuable to collectors. So the differences aren’t as apparent now as they were for many years.

Probably the most important innovation Martin made was the way the underside of the top is braced. They began using a pattern that has been widely described as an X pattern. The intersection of the X is between the sound hole and the bridge, and it enables the top to be quite stiff to counteract the tension of steel strings without being overly heavy so that it muffles the sound of the guitar. That was the style of bracing Martin began using 50 years before they began making steel-string guitars. But as it turns out, it’s a bracing pattern that’s far better for steel strings than it is for gut.

Today, virtually all steel-string guitars have some variation of X-bracing, whether they’re shaped like a Martin or like a Gibson. But Gibson began using that pattern in the late 1920s. Today it’s just accepted as the way you brace the steel-string flat-top guitar.

Collectors Weekly: Did Martin make mandolins and ukuleles?

Ukuleles are enjoying a revival, but they have long been a part of Martin's product line. This mahogany Martin Style 3 ukulele is from 1945.

Johnston: They did. Martin’s success with the mandolin was not nearly as great as it was with the ukulele. Today Martin ukuleles are very highly regarded. The most valuable American-made ukuleles are the more decorated Martin models. Martin’s mandolins have never competed successfully with Gibson. So Gibson rules the design and the configuration of the American mandolin in much the same way it rules the electric guitar and the archtop guitar. But Martin’s ukuleles were far more successful. The ukulele was one of the few times when Martin came to a popular fad before anybody else.

When Martin started making ukuleles in 1907, they didn’t get it quite right and only made a very few. But they started making them again around 1915, and the instruments quickly caught on. It was the ukulele that really enabled Martin to grow. They had success with their guitars at the same time, but they made something like 14,000 ukuleles in 1927, which is what gave them the cash reserves to survive the Great Depression.

The Depression wiped out a tremendous number of American manufacturers, especially those that made the banjo because it had begun to lose popularity right at the same time. Companies like Paramount, Bacon & Day, and others that relied on banjos were either bought by larger companies or just disappeared altogether. Gibson was reduced to making toys for a couple of years to make ends meet. Martin was able to continue to be primarily an instrument manufacturer. They had some hard times and had to lay off a lot of people, but they came out of the Depression better than most manufacturers.

Collectors Weekly: Why didn’t Martin mandolins hold up?

Johnston: Gibson had a head start. It was actually called the Gibson Mandolin and Guitar Company around the turn of the century. Martin didn’t want to copy Gibson, and their mandolins were just not as loud. They were very well made—they’re still excellent instruments for playing in the home—but they just don’t have the volume and the percussive chop needed for modern mandolin playing. All the famous American mandolinists, especially Bill Monroe, used the Gibson F-5. That mandolin and the more simply shaped A-model have defined the American mandolin. Martin never quite got the formula right.

Collectors Weekly: When was Martin’s heyday?

Johnston: Most Martin fans would say the company’s heyday was from the late 1920s through the Second World War. But I don’t think the company would have seen the 1930s, when it began making the big steel-string guitars that made it famous, as a heyday because that was the height of the Depression. They were making great guitars that would go on to be worth tens of thousands of dollars and would appreciate more rapidly than most other collectibles. But they were struggling to survive at the time.

World War II interrupted production, and Frank Henry Martin, who’d led the company for many years, died in the late 1940s. His son C.F. Martin III was far more conservative. So Martin still made great-sounding guitars after the Second World War, but the ones that are considered the best and are being reproduced today are from the 1930s.

A small upper bout is typical of Martin guitars from the 1930s. This 12-fret, 00-18 is from 1931.

During World War II, there were restrictions on how much brass and steel you could use. Martin was fortunate in that it had no facility for doing anything with electronics, so it wasn’t forced to aid the war effort. Gibson had to devote a certain amount of its energy to wiring things for control panels for airplanes and things like that. Martin was only limited in the amount of brass and steel it could use. So it stopped making archtop guitars, which weren’t really selling very well anyway, as well as its mandolins, tiples, and things like that. They limited the number of guitars they made and didn’t put steel reinforcement in the neck. Other than that, the guitars were pretty much unchanged.

The large dreadnoughts are the most valuable, especially those made in the 1930s. Martin first started making what is now considered the modern dreadnought—meaning the ones with 14 frets clear of the body instead of only 12—in 1934, and so the most valuable Martin guitars are those made between 1934 and roughly 1939.

The reason they’re so sought after comes down to supply and demand. They weren’t making many of the large guitars. The Martin company itself didn’t think much of its largest guitar. They thought they were too bass heavy. As I’ve said, singers liked them because the sound systems of the day were very harsh and trebly. And so you needed the bassiest, smoothest sounding guitar you could find.

Today, of course, we like a lot more bass in the music we listen to than we used to. What do you hear when somebody comes driving down the street with their sound system turned up? Basically, bass is all you hear. So our affection for bass response over anything else is partly why those early guitars, which Martin called bass guitars, caught on. They didn’t really consider them for solo playing, but we use them for that today.

Collectors Weekly: Is the Martin guitar sound associated with particular musical genres?

Johnston: Yes. A Martin dreadnought or a copy thereof is basically the standard guitar for any bluegrass singer and flat picker. Whether it’s made by Martin isn’t really the point. There are other companies—Collings in Santa Cruz, Merrill, and others—that make guitars that look almost exactly like a D-28. Basically, that look is required for that style of music. Many performers who play early, Hank Williams-based country music use the guitar for the same reasons.

Other types of guitarists also prefer Martins, but the bluegrass crowd and many folk performers have stuck with them through thick and thin. Martin was the most popular brand during the folk revival of the late ’50s and ’60s. Joan Baez, Peter Yarrow of Peter, Paul & Mary, and Bob Shane of The Kingston Trio used Martin. Woody Guthrie primarily used Martin guitars.

Collectors Weekly: Do you have a favorite Martin guitar?

Johnston: Among the Dreadnoughts I like a brighter sounding guitar, so my favorites are the D-18s. They’re very simple. I like that understated elegance. Among their big guitars, that’s my favorite, but I actually like the smaller ones, too, because they’re so much easier to hold, and they have an elegant shape. But I don’t really have a favorite model.

My interest in Martin is partly the family history, its connection to American history, and things like that. It’s been a fascinating company to write about because the personalities have had so much to do with shaping the direction of the company. So you’re sort of writing about family psychology, American popular music, instrument building, and guitar popularity all at the same time.

Collectors Weekly: How has the wood used to make the guitars evolved?

By the 1940s, Martin D-18s (this one is a left-handed model) had acquired an almost boxy shape thanks to its very wide waist.

Johnston: Martin has always used rosewood for most of its guitars, and of course that’s a tropical hardwood—there’s no rosewood in North America. So they were importing wood for the back and sides of their guitars from the very beginning. That hasn’t really changed much.

They used Brazilian rosewood, which is from the Amazon, up until the late 1960s. At that point they switched to wood from India, East Indian rosewood. They still make a few guitars out of Brazilian rosewood, but the wood is endangered and is extremely expensive. So that’s a very small part of their production, whereas they used only Brazilian rosewood on all their rosewood guitars from the 1830s until the very end of the 1960s.

Martin initially used local spruce from the Adirondack Mountains, which is not far from their headquarters Nazareth, Pennsylvania, but that type of spruce was overharvested so there wasn’t that much available by the mid-1940s. That’s when they began using Sitka spruce from the northwest. They now primarily use that and spruces from Europe and other parts of the world.

They do use a limited amount of Adirondack spruce today, although it’s from much farther north than what they used before. Now most of it comes out of New Hampshire and even Canada. Martin also uses rosewood from Madagascar and other exotic hardwoods on special limited edition guitars.

Collectors Weekly: Does the type of wood change the sound of the guitar?

Johnston: Somewhat. I think most of us who work with guitars don’t feel that the wood has nearly as large an impact on the sound of the guitar as the advertising and the consumers would like to believe. But it does make a difference.

Martin has been making both rosewood and mahogany guitars for a long time. The bulk of their mahogany guitar production was in the 1920s and ’30s. And they sound significantly different than rosewood guitars. Rosewood tends to produce overtones that are somewhat offset or stacked in a way that produces a natural reverb effect, and that’s the sound a lot of people like, especially in the bass tones. They like a very rich palate of overtones.

Mahogany delivers a brighter, much more straightforward tone. It’s not as complex, and it’s easier to record. But for somebody sitting around the living room who probably wants something bassy—something that comes close to the sound you get when you’re playing in a tiled bathroom—a rosewood guitar will deliver that.

In recent years, even genuine mahogany has become scarce, so more guitar makers are using an African hardwood that closely resembles mahogany but isn’t really a true mahogany at all, for the backs and sides. What we’ve always called genuine mahogany, South American mahogany, is probably going to disappear from all but very expensive reissues of earlier historic guitars within the next 10 years. It’s been overharvested.

These days, Martin produces a number of models made from sustainable woods—either the species isn’t endangered or the wood is harvested in such a way that it can be designated “sustainable.” So they’re doing more with some native hardwoods like cherry. For a long time in the 1800s, cherry was widely used for banjos in this country. In recent years there has been a lot more attention paid to how the wood is harvested.

A lot of effort is being made to prevent the remaining Sitka spruce forests in Canada and Alaska from being overharvested because spruce is the best wood for guitar tops. But a lot of the spruce trees are being felled and used for construction purposes when other woods would function just as well. So there’s a growing consciousness of the fact that the woods like mahogany and spruce that we thought were going to last forever are going to run out if we don’t change the way they’re used.

Collectors Weekly: Is it true that guitars sound better the more they’ve been played?

Johnston: That’s purely anecdotal. Someone will say that this guitar they’ve had for 10 years sounds X-percent better than it did when they first got it. Its may be true, but how can you possibly determine that? I don’t want to say that guitars don’t improve with age. For one thing, only the exterior of the guitar body is finished. The interior is unfinished in almost all instances in finer guitars. So the wood in the guitar is certainly going through a seasoning process that continues for a long period of time. Although the wood is seasoned before the guitar is made, it’s still going to continue to absorb moisture, lose moisture, and age.

Decorative details were used sparingly on early Martins. This 00-45 from 1927 features abalone inlay around the guitar's outside edge and sound hole.

Some of the tests that guitar makers have made indicate that when wood takes on moisture, loses moisture, and goes through a lot of climate changes, the variation in its reaction to those changes becomes narrower with time. So, in other words, a relatively freshly cut piece of wood will fluctuate more dramatically to changes in humidity than an older piece wood.

On the other hand, we don’t have any real data on all of this. All we have is what people perceive, and frequently they’re comparing things in radically different environments, including humidity and other factors. And that’s not even counting the differences in rooms. There’s a huge difference between playing a guitar in a room with wall-to-wall carpeting and heavy floor-length drapes compared to playing that same guitar in a room with a hardwood floor and bare windows. Personally, I don’t think it’s possible to make a really knowledgeable comparison between two instruments in two radically different environments.

That’s why I say that the scientific community would just laugh at all the anecdotal comparisons we have about guitars. But in the music industry, it’s widely accepted. A bunch of people all log on to a forum and say how much better a certain type of wood sounds than something else, and first thing you know, it becomes the gospel truth.

Collectors Weekly: Why does a musician need more than one guitar?

Johnston: Well, that’s easy. We’ve talked about the difference in sound of different kinds of woods, but there’re also different sounds from different sizes and body shapes of guitars. So different guitars have distinctly different tones, and some people are happy playing virtually everything on one guitar, while others feel the need to have several guitars to produce different sounds. That’s just a matter of choice and probably indicative of how many styles they play.

Some musicians can really cover a lot of territory, from acoustic pieces on a steel-string guitar that are classical or even Baroque in nature to music that’s heavily influenced by hip-hop and other modern styles. A lot of modern acoustic guitars are played in a very percussive style with a lot of slapping and tapping on the body and strings. So guitars that might work well for the more delicate, classically oriented pieces simply might not be strong enough to withstand the heavy rhythmic pounding that the player might use for another piece of music.

Collectors Weekly: Are guitar companies continuing to evolve as music changes?

Johnston: Well, yes. The biggest difference in the evolution has been that as the acoustic guitar began its revival in the late 1980s and early ’90s, guitars were expected to be much louder. A lot of guitars now have built-in pickups. So they’ve evolved in the sense that a lot of them look like a regular acoustic guitar, but have a fairly complex electronic arsenal inside that enables that guitar to be amplified almost to the same degree as a solid-body electric guitar. So it’s made the acoustic guitar a lot more versatile, as well as more complex.

Manufacturers are introducing a wider variety of models and types of woods partly because they want to offer more choices to their customers. Also, because of the introduction of CNC (computer numeric control), a company can store a lot more bracing patterns or neck shapes than in the past. What used to take up a wall in a warehouse can now be contained in an envelope. There’s still a tremendous amount of handwork involved in the guitar, but much of the machining is computer controlled.

Collectors Weekly: You mentioned an acoustic guitar revival in the late ’80s. Has that revival ebbed?

Bacon and Day was renowned for its Dixieland banjos (this Senorita Plectrum Resonator is from 1939), while Gibson banjos were preferred by bluegrass musicians.

Johnston: The guitar was tremendously popular both in the folk revival and in the folk-rock era that followed it, with groups like Crosby, Stills and Nash. But in the 1980s, synthesizer-based popular music was dominant, and frequently there would be no songs in the top 10 that involved much guitar at all. The guitar really went through a horrible downturn, and that had disastrous effects on all American guitar companies, including Martin.

In 1983 or so, Martin only sold about 5,000 guitars—they now sell 150 guitars or more per day. In the early ’80s, their production was below what it was during the early 1940s. So it gives you an idea of why the company almost went out of business. A lot of the revived interest in the acoustic guitar started when “MTV Unplugged” became popular, and performers like Eric Clapton began arranging their rock hits of the ’60s and ’70s to be played on acoustic guitar.

I don’t think many people before those unplugged performances of the early ’90s thought you could play “Layla” on acoustic guitar or that you could perform Beatles classics on an acoustic guitar. But then people began to realize that most of those songs were written on an acoustic guitar, so you can take them back to their beginnings and they’re often very credible songs with just a singer.

We were so used to the loud bands of the ’70s and early ’80s that I don’t think we were willing to listen to something played in a stripped-down, fairly elementary form like that. But now we’re a little more flexible. We’re willing to listen to the song itself, and frequently an acoustic guitar for accompaniment is all you need.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Richard, for talking with us today about acoustic guitars.

(All images in this article courtesy Richard Johnston of Gryphon Stringed Instruments)

Even though Rosalie Sayyah’s chief passion is for a relatively common product—costume jewelry—what she does with these baubles and bangles is rare. She and shop manager/goldsmith Lucia Sayyah repair them, from rhinestone necklaces and earrings to bracelets and brooches. In this interview, Rhinestone Rosie, as she is known to customers of her Seattle store and fans who have seen her on “Antiques Roadshow,” describes the origins of rhinestones and explains what makes a piece of costume jewelry collectible. For more information, visit www.rhinestonerosie.com.

My parents had a second-hand store in Orlando, Florida. They sold furniture and clothing. They would buy estates, and there was always a little bit of costume jewelry included in the sale. My mom always gave it to me, and I just played with it.

A green watermelon stone anchors the heart of this circa-1960 Juliana brooch, which also features fuchsia rhinestones and aurora borealis highlights.

Years later, when I was working at a television station, I became friends with a co-worker who had a vintage-clothing store. I was doing some part-time clothing-repair work for her, but she also had a lot of broken jewelry. So I basically taught myself how to repair her jewelry. Eventually I started repairing jewelry for other dealers, and I finally opened my store in 1984.

I sell mostly costume and vintage jewelry. We have thousands of pieces for sale, including some with semi-precious stones. But the thing that keeps us in business is the fact that we specialize in costume-jewelry repair, although recently we added gold and silver repair. Not very many people will attempt it because costume pieces are made out of non-precious metals.

Repairing a piece involves soldering, glue, finding replacement stones, and learning the history of pieces to make them look like they haven’t been repaired. It’s actually quite hard to do. Most regular jewelers consider it beneath them to work with costume jewelry. So I discovered a niche, and it’s worked out very well for us.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most common costume-jewelry repairs?

Sayyah: The most requested repair would be replacing stones. A rhinestone can be any size, shape, or color. Most people think they’re just the color of diamonds, but they can be red, blue, or green, too. They can also be square, round, or oval.

The second most-common repair is changing clip earrings to pierced. We do a lot of that, but we make sure our customers understand that an alteration like that can reduce the value of a piece by as much as 50 percent. We also do bead restringing, we change clasps, and we put clasps on bracelets, necklaces, and pins.

We do what we call creative restyling. Last year a lot of the brides were wearing strapless gowns, so we had many brides coming in looking for large necklaces and hair ornaments. Most of the hair ornaments they had been looking at weren’t large enough, so we transformed a lot of brooches into hair clips, barrettes, or combs.

We also lengthen necklaces if people need them longer, or we can shorten them. We can do the same thing to bracelets, or we can make a necklace out of bracelet. A crystal necklace can be restrung to create four or five necklaces by varying the style of the necklace—it has to do with the way you put the beads on the chain or string. So we do a lot of things.

Collectors Weekly: Do you collect jewelry as well?

These Eisenberg Ice earrings from around 1950 include lilac, pink, and clear rhinestones, some of which are pavé-set.

Sayyah: Myself? Yes, I have a nice collection. Usually if it comes in the shop and I like it, I take it home. And it also helps me because I appear as an appraiser on “Antiques Roadshow,” and I like to wear my jewelry. I want people to understand that they can wear brightly colored costume jewelry at any time of the day. It’s not so precious that it needs to be locked up in a safety deposit box. It should be worn.

I try to collect the best examples if I can from eras like Art Deco and Art Nouveau. I also look for signed pieces, because some pieces of costume jewelry have signatures on them. Designers started signing pieces in about the late 1930s. Eisenberg was one of the first. It’s not very common, and just because a piece has a name on it doesn’t mean it’s going to be valuable, because there are plenty of examples of dime-store jewelry that’s signed, too. But it’s nice to know that there is a name to look for, and some names are better than others.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of your favorite pieces in your collection?

Sayyah: There’s a company called Regency, or Regency Jewels, and they used fabulous colored stones in slightly darkened settings. I love the Regency jewelry. I also like jewelry that we used to call Juliana. Now we call it D&E Jewelry, for DeLizza and Elster. They did big, bold, colorful pieces. Another one of my favorites is a necklace made of rock crystal balls. It’s called “Pools of Light,” and it is a fabulous necklace.

Beyond that, I’ve got some really nice Mexican sterling from the 1940s that I find quite attractive and works well with my wardrobe. I tend to wear basic one-color outfits so that my jewelry stands out. It works, because people come in and they say, “I like your pin,” or “What is that?” or “Can I wear that kind of thing?”

I like to mix colors, like maybe wearing a green pin on a brown jacket. I don’t do the monochromatic thing. I like to mix my colors because part of my job is educating our customers on costume jewelry. That includes its value, how to have fun with it, and even how to wear it. For example, in the 1920s they had dress clips and fur clips that nobody makes anymore. People come in to my store and say, “What is this? A shoe clip?” And I say, “No, no, it’s a dress clip.” It’s all about education.

Collectors Weekly: Do you mostly appraise costume jewelry on “Antiques Roadshow?”

Sayyah: No. I appraise all kinds of jewelry. I usually leave the real big diamonds and high-end stuff to other appraisers. But if I feel confident that I know a higher-end piece because I’ve seen it—in 25 years you see a lot of jewelry, so your knowledge base expands—I will go ahead and pitch it to be taped for the show.

Kenneth Jay Lane enamel-and-rhinestone rings like this one were produced from the 1960s to '70s.

I’ve seen some terrific pieces. Last summer, a lady had a necklace by a designer named Henry Schreiner. She said Marilyn Monroe had worn it in a movie, but she didn’t have a picture, so ultimately we didn’t tape it. It was actually two necklaces. One was a dark-colored choker about 3 or 4 inches wide, with pearls and colored balls. The second necklace went underneath that necklace and hung all the way down to the waist. It had some condition issues, but it was fabulous.

The other thing I saw last summer was some Eisenberg clothing, which was a line that preceded Eisenberg jewelry. The person brought in several pieces of clothing, as well as a purse and some jewelry. I had only seen maybe one or two pieces of Eisenberg clothing before, but here were a couple of dresses and a purse. It was really, really exciting.

Collectors Weekly: Were there other jewelers who also made clothing and accessories?

Sayyah: Sure. Coco Chanel, Elsa Schiaparelli, and Hattie Carnegie come to mind. That’s where the term costume jewelry comes from—the designers were making a costume, really, so costume jewelry was made to go with it. It was not a derogatory term; it was just a simple and explanatory way to talk about this type of jewelry.

Collectors Weekly: When did rhinestone jewelry become collectible?

Sayyah: There have been collectors all along, but I would say that serious interest probably started in the 1970s. That’s when companies slowed down their production of new jewelry while, at the same time, people starting realizing the beauty of the vintage stuff, and that so much of it had been hand worked. I opened my shop in ’84, and I was in the middle of the rush.

Prior to the ’70s, people might have collected Native American jewelry, the sterling turquoise pieces from the Southwestern United States, or antique jewelry, which meant Art Nouveau, Art Deco, and other kinds of fine jewelry. But the public didn’t take notice of costume until the ’70s.

Collectors Weekly: Since you opened your shop, have you noticed any trends within costume or rhinestone jewelry?

Italian fashion designer Elsa Schiaparelli also produced costume jewelry, such as this gold mesh and rhinestone necklace from about 1950.

Sayyah: It’s a pendulum, it’s a fad thing. One year it’s pendants, last Christmas it was brooches. Madeleine Albright’s book had just come out, so we sold a lot of brooches. People would buy her book and some brooches, too.

Color trends are also interesting. For example, orange was really hot last year. And while we’ve always had a steady demand for your basic rhinestone necklace, the clear kind, lately people have been asking for bigger, chunkier pieces. Things go in and out of fashion. I’m not sure how it starts, or where. Maybe somebody sees it on television, or some designer decides to put a certain type of piece on an actress who does a movie, and then everybody wants it.

Materials are also affected by trends. Plastics were big when they first were introduced. During the Depression, designers made jewelry out of nuts and wood because it was related to the economy. Today everybody is big into recycling, so trends can be cyclical.

That’s at least part of the reason why I think my business is doing so well—people don’t really want to throw away that brooch if it can be repaired. Why buy a new one when the quality of the old one is so good? We try to be very honest with our customers. If we feel it’s just not worth repairing, we tell them. Sometimes they go ahead with it anyway because it was grandma’s, or something like that. There’s a lot of sentimental value in this jewelry.

Collectors Weekly: When were rhinestones first used in jewelry?

Sayyah: The first glass stones were called paste, and they were actually high-lead-content crystals. This was in the early 18th century, believe it or not, and the inventor was a jeweler named Strass. Then came the Industrial Revolution, which allowed manufacturers to mass produce pieces so that common people could afford to own a little pin or a bracelet. In other words, jewelry didn’t need to be made by a skilled crafts person in a little one-person shop anymore.

Technological developments of that time included gold plating. And then Daniel Swarovski patented his foil-backed stones, I believe in the 1890s. Cut glass stones were not new, but Swarovski’s system produced very high quality, very beautiful crystals. I would say rhinestones really took off in the 1920s, when Coco Chanel started showing them with her clothing. Suddenly everybody realized that they could wear these, that it was fun.

During World War II and especially in the 1950s, rhinestones took off way, way big. Many women were working outside of the home for the first time. They wanted to buy themselves something special. Jewelers took note and began making a lot of this costume jewelry. Millions and millions of pieces were produced. People liked it because you could wear a piece of costume jewelry and if it got lost it was not that big of a deal.

Collectors Weekly: Which eras are the most sought after?

This CoroCraft brooch, circa 1940, uses pavé-set rhinestones to contrast with the feathers and leaves that have been painted on the pin's sterling base.

Sayyah: Right now, hands down, Art Deco. True Art Deco jewelry is extremely desirable. Prior to that it would be the Victorian pieces and the Art Nouveau pieces, but then you’re still getting into more fine, high-end pieces, although there are a lot of nice silver pieces. (I consider sterling silver to be in the costume-jewelry realm.) But definitely I would say Art Deco, from about 1915 through the 1930s. There are definite style points to this jewelry—we don’t see a lot of it in the store.

Art Deco was one of the first styles that people collected, so the better pieces are already in good collections. There was a lot of production of lower-end pieces, but the really fine, very high quality pieces, with good silver and synthetic stones, are hard to find. The types of pieces aren’t all that different from what came immediately before or after. There were earrings, brooches, dress clips, necklaces, shoe clips, and rings. It was all the same types of elements, but they were just superbly designed. Art Deco costume jewelry was sleek, clean, graphic, geometric, and wonderfully made.

Collectors Weekly: What kinds of non-precious materials did jewelers use before rhinestones?

Sayyah: The Egyptians used glass, along with brass that looked like gold. Pinchback was another substitute for gold. There were natural materials like jet, gutta-percha, and bog oak that were used in the Victorian Era. These were non-precious materials that today would be considered costume jewelry, but the term didn’t really exist back then.

In the theater, they called rhinestones used in costumes paste. In fact, at the turn of the 20th century, there was a good deal of jewelry created expressly for theatrical costumes. They were all glass, and the pieces weren’t intended for wearing in public because they were just too big.

Collectors Weekly: Can tell us some more about Daniel Swarovski?

Red beads and rhinestones set in gold filigree make these Miriam Haskell button earrings from the 1950s particularly eye-catching.

Sayyah: Sure. He was an amazing influence because he was the one who developed a permanent foil backing for stones. They were the best quality, were made of brilliant high-lead-content crystal, and came in various colors and shapes to imitate turquoise, carnelian, onyx, sapphires, and rubies—every possible gemstone you can think of. Even today, Swarovski still makes the best rhinestones. Until he came along, people didn’t realize that glass could look like this.

Most of the costume jewelry in America was made in Providence, Rhode Island, Newark, New Jersey, and the New York City area. These jewelers would buy their stones from Swarovski and other suppliers in Europe. They would make the settings here in America and put the imported stones in the settings. Ironically, a lot of the major costume jewelry that was produced in America was exported to Europe, so the stones made a round trip.

That’s one of the things our shop can’t do, by the way—re-foil a stone. When they tarnish you can’t clean them. So you have to replace the stone if you want the piece to look its best.

Collectors Weekly: Is most rhinestone manufacturing still based in Europe?

Sayyah: I’m pretty sure it is. Swarovski is located in Austria. The Gablonz region of Germany and what used to be known as Czechoslovakia are also centers. So it started in Eastern Europe, and that’s where the best stones still come from today, as far as I’m concerned. When you put diamonds next to some of the older rhinestones, it’s hard to tell the difference. They’re beautifully done.

Collectors Weekly: Did European jewelers also use rhinestones?

Sayyah: Yes, and in the former Czechoslovakia, they also made their own settings. The thing about the American jewelers, though, is that they took it to the limit, they realized the rhinestone’s potential. Most of the pieces that were coming out of Europe in the teens, ’20s, and ’30s were more modest than what the Americans ultimately ended up producing in the ’50s and ’60s. We made really huge pieces. The French were also known for their fabulous jewelry, and their rhinestone jewelry was exotic and wonderful. But the best stuff was produced in America.

Collectors Weekly: Who were some of the best rhinestone jewelers?

This Eisenberg clear crystal dress clip from 1940 boasts baguette, round, and cushion-cut stones set in a pot-metal back.

Sayyah: Well, the early ones would be Eisenberg, for sure, along with Trifari and very early Hobe pieces. I’m going say the teens and ’20s were when people really started producing it, and those were the names most in vogue.

A lot of the second-wave costume jewelry designers started out as fine jewelers. Some came to America prior to World War II—they were here for freedom. For example, Marcel Boucher had worked for Cartier making fine jewelry. Other important names in costume jewelry, though not all were immigrants, included Hattie Carnegie, Chanel, DeRosa, DeMario, Miriam Haskell, Florenza, Har, Hollycraft, and Mazer Brothers. I’ve already mentioned Hobe.

Joseff of Hollywood made jewelry for the movies in the ’40s. He devised a special setting that allowed his jewels to reflect the studio’s bright lights. Renoir-Matisse did beautiful copper and enameled pieces. McClelland Barclay, Napier, Panetta, Schiaparelli, Schreiner, Warner, and Weiss are a few others. A Canadian company called Sherman produced beautiful pieces. So there were a lot of them. Not all of them signed their pieces and not all of their pieces are especially collectible.

Collectors Weekly: If a piece isn’t signed, how do you determine who made it?

Sayyah: You can tell by the type of settings that they used, the clip. If it’s an earring, clues include the type of clip on the back, the color of the stones, the shape of the stones, the way the metals are finished. Ultimately it’s a guess if it’s not signed, but it’s an educated guess.

Collectors Weekly: Out of all those designers, what are some of the must-haves for collectors?

Sayyah: Well, right now the hot one is Henry Schreiner. Really bold Miriam Haskells from the 1950s are always in demand. Har did suites of dragons, cobras, and genies that people love to collect. And original gold-washed, or vermeil, sterling Eisenberg pieces, especially the faces or animals, are very high-end collectibles. DeRosa is hard to find so it must be in demand. The market tends to be fickle, though. One year it’ll be something by Hollycraft and the next year it might be Regency. So it changes.

A very popular style of jewelry that’s highly collectible today is the Jelly Belly, which usually consisted of an animal made out vermeil sterling, with a carved piece of Lucite for its belly. Legend has it that the Lucite for these pieces came from recycled airplane windshields. I’ve seen Jelly Bellies sell into the thousands for a single pin.

Collectors Weekly: Were there eras when bigger rhinestones were more popular than smaller ones?

Sayyah: The 1950s were all about really, really big stones in bold colors. In the ’20s, during that Art Deco period I was talking about earlier, they did more of what they call pavé setting, which is when lots of tiny stones are set closely together. That’s a good indicator of Art Deco, whereas in the ’50s it’s mostly bold, brilliant, and big, big, big.

Collectors Weekly: What accounted for this change?

Many Trifari Jelly Bellies from the 1950s were relatively simple, such as this fly brooch made of sterling vermeil, diamante accents, and red cabochon eyes.

Sayyah: Well, basically, we won the war, and we were glad that we were able to get stones again from Austria because we couldn’t get them during the war. So designers and customers alike just went nuts. Christian Dior came out with what he called the new look or the big look, and he showed his models wearing big necklaces and bracelets. Everybody wanted it. Big cocktail rings were extremely popular.

It was just Americans feeling good about themselves, I think—costume jewelry reflected that. We weren’t even trying to make it look like real jewelry. It was obviously fake, but that’s what people loved about it.

One important technological development from the ’50s was the introduction of the aurora borealis coating. It was a chemical salt that was applied to the surface of glass stones and beads. You don’t see that until the ’50s and ’60s, and that made the jewelry even more sparkly. When you see that coating, you can immediately date the piece.

Collectors Weekly: So these pieces were mainly for cocktail parties and special occasions?

Sayyah: You bet. Movie stars were wearing them on screen, so people followed suit. Remember, in those days a lot of women wore hats and gloves when they went out. All their outfits were coordinated, so they had to have jewelry to go with certain outfits, whether it was for a cocktail party or an afternoon tea.

Today people are very open-minded about how they wear their jewelry. And I think collectors’ tastes change as they mature. They eventually want the better-quality pieces. In the beginning they just buy anything that glitters. At some point, though, there is a tendency to refine, which is not to say that they are inclined to limit their focus. At least I know I’m not. I like lots of different things, and what I decide to wear and how I want to wear it really depends on my mood.

Collectors Weekly: How did these impulses differ from the trends in jewelry before the 1950s?

Sayyah: In the Edwardian period, which was the very early 1900s, jewelry was lacy—small pieces with lots of delicate filigree work. As women went from being the Gibson Girl, who was covered in clothing from head to toe, to the flapper, whose arms and neck were now exposed, there was simply more room for jewelry.

In the 1920s and ’30s we also had Art Deco. We were going through the Depression. People were making jewelry out of nuts, beads, and lots of plastics—from celluloid to Bakelite. In the ’40s, during the war years, metals were restricted, so a lot of the jewelry from the ’40s is dominated by one big stone. Even fine jewelry from that period looked like this, with rose gold as a popular base.

In the 1950s everything opened up, with lots of colors and bright metal settings. The open look of ’50s fashions encouraged jewelry to get bigger. So what the jewelry looked like was definitely a function of the culture and the economy of that time.

Collectors Weekly: What were some of the regional differences in terms of how people wore jewelry?

For this bold, sunburst necklace, Juliana designers placed Colorado topaz navette rhinestones around a core of aurora borealis gems, which dates the piece to about 1960.

Sayyah: For instance, women in California probably wore more white jewelry than women in Michigan. People who lived in the Southwest, in Santa Fe or Arizona, wore more silver and turquoise. Back in New York, where there was lots of immediate access to fashions from Paris and London, women wore more of the high-end stuff.

The regional differences also had to do with the era. For example, in the 1950s there was a modernist revolution, but it mostly happened on the coasts. This wasn’t in costume jewelry but what we call studio or artist jewelry. These artists basically pared down all the glitz that we were throwing at them, reducing their pieces to just little twists of metal, accompanied, perhaps, by organic stonework. That happened in various little clusters around the country

As for the big costume jewelry producers, they made everything, but not every store in every region of the country sold their entire lines. In some cases it was because people in a certain part of the country didn’t dress in a way that would allow them to wear certain kinds of jewelry. A regional buyer for a department store might think, “Well, this won’t go with my market,” so they just didn’t buy everything the designers produced.

Or maybe the colors weren’t right for their complexion. Up here in Seattle, we don’t get a lot of sun. We’re not real tan. As a result, it’s hard for me to sell big silver jewelry. We prefer colored pieces. It’s an interesting phenomenon. As you travel around, from Florida to California, you notice definite regional differences.

Collectors Weekly: What makes a piece of rhinestone jewelry rare?

Sayyah: First of all, it’s probably going to be one that was not mass-produced. Most companies did a lot of mass production, but there were some items that they didn’t make thousands and thousands of pieces of. That would be one criterion.

The next one would be its quality. It’s probably a piece from a designer who worked in fine jewelry before going to costume. Quality means its presence, something you can not only see but also feel. It could be a multidimensional piece made from several smaller pieces that were cast and then screwed together. When you look at a lot of costume jewelry, it’s hard not to notice that a lot of it was very inexpensively made. And then you find that one piece that just says quality to you, and that stops you in your tracks.

Rarity is also key, but it’s not precisely the same thing as whether or not the piece was mass-produced. For example, it might have been a weird piece for the time that just didn’t take off with the general public, so maybe the company cut back production or pulled it off shelves.

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

Christian Dior is one of many mainstream fashion designers who created costume jewelry for their customers. These earrings from around 1970 feature diamante and faux emerald rhinestones.

Sayyah: There was a German company called Theodore Farner that made some beautiful sterling jewelry in the 1920s and earlier. I find them to be quite unusual. In my own collection I have an Eisenberg original sterling fish with topaz rhinestones. That one is very desirable. I have an unsigned piece that’s a parrot on a circle of glass. It’s just fabulous.

I’ve had some very early sterling pieces by Georg Jensen, as well as some very good pieces by Miriam Haskell that have sold in the $3,000 range for a necklace, brooch, and pair of earrings. And I’ve seen some pretty amazing Bakelite pieces, some of the bracelets and little carved figures. Those are pretty phenomenal, and rare.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for people who are fairly new to collecting rhinestone jewelry?

Sayyah: Buy what you like, buy the best that you can afford, and be willing to pay a little bit more for something if you really like it because it’ll probably pay off in the end. I don’t tell people to buy it as investment. I just say if you like it, buy it. And wear it! Don’t be afraid to wear it.

I could probably give you a long list of books, but off the top of my head, I like Judith Miller’s book on costume jewelry, Carole Tanenbaum’s Fabulous Fakes, and Christie Romero’s title for Warman’s.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Rosie, for taking the time to speak with us today about rhinestone jewelry.

(All images in this article courtesy Carol Tanenbaum.)

Located on the abandoned runways of the former Alameda Naval Air Station, just outside of San Francisco, CA, this monthly event (first Sunday of each month) is one of the things I look forward to most.  It attracts hundreds of vendors and thousands (5-10,000 on a good day, I’d guess) of shoppers, and I’ve seen some of the most amazing, unique items there (like this monster). And bought quite a few (like this vintage supercomputer and this excellent office chair).

But I’ve always wondered about the other people who go (everybody’s too busy looking to talk to strangers). Who are you? Why do you go? What do you find? What’s your deal?

So I’ve decided to create a Facebook Fan group for Alameda and see what happens.

If you like Alameda, join the Facebook group… and maybe leave a comment here too (below) if you feel like it!

Dave