A.C. Dwyer, an avid coin collector, talked with us recently about the history of U.S. $20 double eagle gold coins, especially those struck during the California Gold Rush. Dwyer discusses the types of double eagles that were minted, the most interesting and rarest varieties, and why he’s so enthralled with coins that have been found at shipwreck sites. Dwyer can be contacted via his website, acdwyer.com.

The double eagle is really a result of the California Gold Rush. Prior to the California Gold Rush, the biggest gold discoveries were relatively small strikes in Georgia and North Carolina. That led to new U.S. Mints in Dahlonega and Charlotte, and they struck smaller denomination gold. But in California, the amount of gold being found was so spectacular that in the beginning, people didn’t even believe it.

The San Francisco Mint struck two types of double eagles in 1866. The mintage of coins without an In God We Trust motto, like the one seen here, was only 120,000. The mintage of 1866 motto coins was 842,250.

When gold was first discovered in California, there wasn’t this immediate stampede that everybody thinks of. Instead there was a lot of skepticism, and the newspapers of the day were basically bashing the reports of the gold. It wasn’t until President Polk gave his last State of the Union speech in December of 1848 that he confirmed that the extraordinary stories of gold in California were true. And that’s what really kicked off the exodus to California.

Shortly after California became a state in 1849, there was a clamor for a mint in San Francisco. Until it opened in 1854, all the gold from the California Gold Rush—the vast majority of it, anyway—went by side-wheel steamer down to Central America, where it would travel overland through Panama or Nicaragua to the Gulf before being shipped to the mint in Philadelphia. Some of it would even go all the way around the horn of South America and back up the other side. But with a mint in San Francisco, they didn’t have to ship the gold anywhere.

You have to understand that the United States became a very wealthy country almost overnight. At the time of the California Gold Rush, the majority of coins that were in circulation were probably foreign coins that were legal tender alongside our own coins. Like the Mexican reale. Probably the most popular silver coin was the Mexican pillar dollar. Thanks to the Gold Rush, by 1857 we did away with all that foreign coinage—it was no longer legal tender here.

You have to understand that the United States became a very wealthy country almost overnight.

If you were going to be paying other countries in gold, you needed an efficient means of accomplishing this. At the time, the $10 eagle was our largest coin, so the double eagle made it much easier to do these large transactions. As a result, the double eagle probably didn’t circulate much, especially on the east coast since it was just going from bank to bank, or from U.S. to Europe to pay debts.

In fact, a lot of the gold eagles being collected today, especially a lot of the uncirculated coins, have come from Europe. They were repatriated as they became popular over here. Collectors would go over there and find them in foreign banks and ship them back. One of the coins I have in my collection has what’s known as vault grime on it. It’s kind of a dirty coin. I don’t know for sure that it came from Europe, but I’m pretty confident that it’s probably one of the coins from Europe because they typically have this vault grime on them.

On the west coast, the coins tended to circulate a little bit more. Partly this was due to the high inflation caused by the Gold Rush. In some places, you might have to pay $50 for a steak dinner, the same price you might today 150 years later. So the gold tended to circulate more out west.

Collectors Weekly: Why was the coin called a double eagle?

Dwyer: The word “double” describes its value, $20, which was double the $10 eagle. The half eagle was worth $5 and the quarter eagle was worth $2.50.

Collectors Weekly: Where were double eagles minted?

Dwyer: Well, in the beginning, 1850, it was in Philadelphia and New Orleans. So you can get an 1850 double eagle from both of those mints. Then, in 1854, the San Francisco Mint began striking coins. Shortly after the Civil War started, the New Orleans Mint went over to the Confederate side, and it didn’t reopen until 1879, when a small number of New Orleans double eagles were struck.

Collectors Weekly: What were the different types of double eagles?

Dwyer: There were two major types. One was the Liberty Head double eagle, and the other was the Saint-Gaudens. The Liberty Head was designed by James Longacre and was minted until 1907. The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens designed the coin that followed, from 1907 to 1933.

Within these, there are sub-groups that people tend to collect. Most Liberty Head collectors prefer doubles eagles through 1866 without the In God We trust motto on them. After the Civil War there was a lot of religious sentiment in the country, so the motto was added. The 1864 two-cent piece was the first coin to actually have the motto on it. Double eagles followed two years later, along with some other coins.

This San Francisco-minted double eagle from 1857 was recovered from the wreck of the S.S. Central America, whose sinking hastened the Civil War.

In 1877, the Liberty Head changed again when the description of the denomination on the back of the coin was changed from “Twenty D.” to “Twenty Dollars” fully spelled out. There were other little differences on the reverse, things like the shape of the shield, but most people pretty much identify double eagles by motto versus no motto, Twenty D. versus Twenty Dollars.

I actually prefer the Liberty Head. I actually think it’s the better coin. The other one is considered by many to be the most beautiful coin we have, and I agree that it is very artistic. But to me it looks like a beautiful piece of metal rather than something I would think of as a circulating coin.

I also gravitate to the history around the early double eagles. You have the California Gold Rush, which was the whole reason for them to come into being in the first place. And you can be pretty sure that any early double eagle with an S, for San Francisco, mintmark on it is made out of California Gold Rush gold. To me, that’s exciting stuff.

There are also great rarities in the early Liberty Heads because the mintages were just so low. But it’s not just about supply—demand also plays a role. I’m not a dealer, I’ve never been a dealer, and I have no plans to become a dealer. But if you were to talk to a dealer about these, they’ll focus on the rarity and the mintage figures. The dealer will look at mintage numbers and conclude that compared to other coins, the Philadelphia double eagles from, say, 1858 are undervalued, and so you should buy them.

It’s been that way for years, and for years these same coins have always been the best value, but not if you want to sell them. That’s where demand comes in. There’s a premium on the mint. People want New Orleans gold coins. They want San Francisco gold coins. There are collectors that specialize in just New Orleans gold or focus on the mints. But you don’t hear people focusing on the Philadelphia Mint. It doesn’t have the demand that the other mints have and it never will, in my mind.

Carson City, Nevada also had a mint—the 1870 Carson City double eagle is very rare because so few of them came out. But even if you compare coins with the same rarity and mintage numbers, Carson City gold coins are always going to command a premium over Philadelphia gold coins because people want that old Gold Rush gold.

Collectors Weekly: Do minting variations make double eagles more collectible?

Dwyer: Not really. For example, there are a lot of die variations on Liberty Head double eagles, but they don’t currently command any premiums. Double eagles are not like Lincoln pennies, which are collected by millions of people.

The reverse of 1850 to 1877 double eagles read "TWENTY D." to describe the denomination. This example was minted in San Francisco in 1857.

Take the 1955 Lincoln penny with the double-die obverse: Well, some Liberty Head double eagles have that, too, but people just don’t collect double eagles for that reason because it’s too expensive. That’s not to say it won’t change in the future, but right now, variations like that don’t get much attention.

People pay attention to die variations when there are millions of collectors in the picture. As the number of double-eagle collectors grows—and I think the growth is reflected in the prices—they’re going to start differentiating by that sort of stuff.

One of the examples that I find most interesting is the misspelling of “Liberty” on the master hub, which affected every coin minted from 1850 to 1858. It was spelled “LLberty.” To correct it, an “I” was punched over the second “L” but you still see the remnants of the L below it, even without magnification.

That extra L was probably just caused by some guy who made a mistake. He punched the first L then punched the second. Then, somewhere along the line, somebody caught it. With overdates, I believe sometimes that was just caused by reusing the die. Let’s take the 1853-over-2 double eagle overdate as an example. They may have had an 1852 die but they needed 1853 coin, so they just took a 3 punch, positioned it over the 2, and repunched it.

That double eagle does command a premium, but for me, personally, I would hesitate. If I was collecting just by date, including overdates, and I had to pick a coin to leave out, that would probably be the coin that I would pick because there’s an argument as to whether or not that’s really a 2 under there or not. I’ve looked at it under magnification—personally I think the 2 is there. But what if somebody comes along one day and proves that it’s not a 2. Will the premium go away? That’s why I hesitate.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the other causes of die variations?

Dwyer: Well, the dates could have been punched into the dies separately, and they might have had different size dates for different coins. In some cases the same punches could have been used on silver dollars that were used on double eagles. So there could have been situations in which somebody grabbed a date punch that wasn’t supposed to be on a double eagle but used it anyway, and this act created a variety that subsequently got collected.

It really comes down to The Official Red Book by R.S. Yeoman. If the variety gets listed in the Red Book, it immediately starts commanding a premium because all of a sudden anyone who’s putting together a complete set now has to have one. They’re missing it from their set. And when the variety gets listed under registry sets on PCGS (Professional Coin Grading Service) and NGC (Numismatic Guaranty Corporation), it helps perpetuate the demand.

The thing is, right now none of the double date coins are under a registry set or in the Red Book, so therefore they don’t command a premium. But if that ever changes… People do pay premiums for double dates when they are listed, so there’s a lot of hidden value out there.

Collectors Weekly: What about the platinum-sandwich coins?

Dwyer: Those were counterfeited double eagles shortly after the Civil War. At the time, the mint director had actually made a recommendation to discontinue the double eagle because it was so easy to counterfeit. Counterfeiters would simply cut the coin in half, separating the obverse from the reverse. They’d hollow it out, fill it in with platinum, and basically glue it back together. The work was done well enough to pass them off as valid double eagles. Even the weight was similar. Today it would be looked upon as a very crude attempt at counterfeiting, but in its day, it was considered quite good. Today, you’d probably like to have one of those if you could find one. I’d love to have one, but I’m sure those are all long gone.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the major gold double eagle rarities?

Dwyer: Basically you’re talking about the first Liberty Heads from 1850 to 1866. If you’re going to collect Liberty Head double eagles, those are the most popular. They’re in a very good historical time period. There are great rarities, but at the same time, recent shipwreck finds have made lots of beautiful coins available and more affordable.

Double eagles minted in New Orleans, such as this one from 1860, are among the rarest $20 pieces around.

Within these coins, there used to be a tier of rarity from, say, $10,000 to $100,000 each, for coins like the 1855-O, 1859-O, and 1860-O, all from New Orleans. But since at least 2002 or 2003, the values on that tier have just skyrocketed. And so, even people who were willing to spend a little more are being priced out of the market. For any type of rarity, it’s strictly a high-roller game.

The next two great rarities are the 1854-O and 1856-O New Orleans double eagles. Maybe only 20 to 30 of each exist. They’re out of the reach of just about everybody now. Even one with a hole in it is going to cost you more than a hundred-thousand dollars. A nice one? You’re getting into half a million or more.

Even pricier is the 1861 Philadelphia Paquet, of which only two are known and now command prices in the millions. The San Francisco Paquets used to be at the under-$100,000 level, although some examples would go higher because the coin had a unique design to it. That came about in 1861, when Anthony Paquet was asked to redesign the reverse of the Liberty Head. One of the things he did was to make the letters taller and skinnier. But when they minted a bunch of these in Philadelphia, they determined that the dies weren’t going to be able to last, that they were going to have problems with die breaks, so they canceled the redesign and melted just about all of their coins.

In San Francisco, they had already started minting, and by the time word got out to cancel the coin, about 12,000 Paquet double eagles had already been released into the circulation. So in this case, the San Francisco coin is really the only option for collectors who can afford one. In truth, none of the Paquet coins should exist at all.

Another rare one is the 1866-S no motto, although it’s not as rare as the Paquet. There are probably 200 or so of those. Like the Paquet, the 1866-S no motto shouldn’t exist. As the year began, coins were going to be struck without the In God We Trust motto on them. Then the decision was made to add the motto. The Philadelphia and New Orleans mints got the word in time, but once again, by the time orders reached San Francisco, they had already minted a bunch of no-motto coins and released them.

Collectors Weekly: What happened to the New Orleans Mint during the Civil War?

In 1861, Anthony Paquet redesigned the reverse of the Liberty Head double eagle. The front, or obverse, shown here, remained the same.

Dwyer: Well, to me the 1861-O is one of the most fascinating of the 1850-1866 double eagles. It was actually minted by three different authorities. The first was the Union. Next came the state of Louisiana when it seceded from the Union but before it had joined the Confederacy. They hadn’t turned it over yet, although eventually they did.

This is where the shipwrecks come in, particularly the S.S. Republic shipwreck. When the S.S. Republic sank in 1865, it had almost every double eagle from 1850 on board. The only one missing was the 1856-O, which just goes to show you that the rarity was true. Also on that shipwreck was one 1854-O, which is the second rarest double eagle from that period, an 1860-O, and an 1861-O. But that 1861 New Orleans coin, even though it’s not as rare as the others, is a fascinating coin because you don’t really know who minted it. It could be a Confederate coin.

There were only 17,000 or so 1861-O coins minted. On some of the coins, you can see where the date has been reworked. Some people say, “Well, that must be a Confederate coin because they were fixing the date.” Every now and then you’ll see somebody trying to sell one of those at a premium under the theory that it’s a Confederate coin, but in my view, you should not pay a premium for this coin because nobody has ever been able to prove which ones are confederate and which ones aren’t. So, if you can afford an 1861-O, the last thing you want to do is add a premium onto the cost based on its possible link to the Confederacy, which could be proven wrong later.

Collectors Weekly: Why are the rare double eagles so prized by coin collectors?

The letters on the reverse of the 1861 Paquet were tall and skinny, making them difficult to strike, so the redesign was cancelled. But not before thousands like this one had been put into circulation in San Francisco.

Dwyer: Right now there are a lot of new collectors who are trying to put together sets, whether by mint, date, or mint. Many of these are wealthier people who have been told to diversify some of their portfolio. Rare coins have done well versus the stock market, especially in the last year. The advice these people get is to go after the rarest, most expensive coins because those are the ones that never sell for less, or at least that’s what the brokers say. This is obviously not always true but it is probably true if there are only four or five examples of a particular coin available—if the supply is that small, you don’t need very many rich people who want them to keep the price up. That’s why I think you’re seeing some of these enormous values today, where coins that were expected to go for a hundred thousand sell for half a million, and everyone is surprised.

When I was a kid, I would have never considered a double eagle for my collection. Even back then, they cost hundreds of dollars. There was no way I was going to get one. As I got older, double eagles started to get more within my price range. But it requires you to be at a certain level financially, and there’s risk involved, as with anything. The biggest risk for me is my lack of diversification. I collect 1850 to 1866 double eagles by date and mint. But if double eagles ever fell out of favor or if demand ever dropped far enough, the prices would sink like crazy. That may never happen, but things do go in and out of favor.

Most collectors only see the big, expensive, rare double eagles at auction. What they don’t see is how many times those coins have traded in private behind the scenes. So, you may look at the auction and say, “Man, this 1856-O double eagle has only sold at auction once or twice in the past five years.” On the other hand, that same coin may have traded hands two to three times in the past year. With the big rarities, some people just want to be able to say they owned one for a while. They buy it and then they sell it two years later—sometimes you see the thing come up six months later.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us more about the shipwrecks and gold coins on the S.S. Central America?

Dwyer: It was common to ship coins in great quantities all around the country. The S.S. Brother Jonathan and the S.S. Central America were transporting mostly newly minted San Francisco gold. The gold from the San Francisco mint had made it down the Pacific coast, across Central America, and into the Gulf side. When the S.S. Central America sank in 1857, it was on its way to New York—a hurricane sank her.

At the time, the country was in a financial crisis, not unlike what we’re in right now. Banks were failing and things like that. People started hoarding their gold and silver. In Europe, countries were demanding payment in gold, so there was lots of gold being shipped here and there. Banks in New York were running out of gold, so the gold on the S.S. Central America was terribly important. When the ship sank, the financial crisis began to spin out of control. It didn’t cause the financial crisis, but it sure poured fuel on the fire.

This New Orleans double eagle from 1861 was recovered in the S.S. Republic shipwreck. Because of the Civil War, it could have been minted by the Union, the state of Louisiana, or the Confederacy.

A lot of historians believe that this financial crisis was a big reason for the Civil War starting as early as it did. The Civil War happened for all sorts of reasons, but it may have occurred later if it had not been for the sinking of the S.S. Central America and the financial crisis that followed.

The S.S. Central America was carrying not just double eagles but also hundreds of large gold ingots and bars of gold, and even gold dust. There were unrefined nuggets on that ship. One of the exciting things about the shipwreck’s recovery is that all of a sudden you could actually buy gold nuggets that you could be 100-percent sure came out of the California Gold Rush because they were on a ship that was sending California gold to New York.

The S.S. Republic, which I mentioned earlier, was headed from New York to New Orleans in 1865 right after the end of the war as part of the Reconstruction effort. The ship contained things like school supplies for kids and all sorts of other stuff, as well as gold double eagles, gold eagles, and more than 50,000 silver half dollars.

On the S.S. Central America, there were thousands of mint date 1857-S, 1856-S, and even 1855-S double eagles, just beautiful coins that looked like they did the day they came off the presses. The water was deep enough so that the coins weren’t etched by sand, which is common to shipwrecks closer to shore, where tides and sand can ruin coins. These were pristine, mint-condition coins. All of a sudden, almost any serious collector could now afford to get an uncirculated coin for their collection.

There was also what we call passenger gold. Most passengers carried their coins in purses and on their body. If they were making a long trip, let’s say from California to New York to visit relatives or whatever, they might sew a double eagle into their clothing. One of the coins in my collection is a privately minted eagle made by Moffett & Co., which was a private mint in San Francisco before the San Francisco Mint opened. It’s a worn, circulated coin that probably saw plenty of poker games and things like that. There were a few of these scattered around in the wreck.

Collectors Weekly: How are shipwreck coins verified?

Dwyer: If a shipwreck coin has been put into a holder by PCGS or NGC, then the pedigree is pretty much assured. It didn’t always used to be that way. One of the biggest shipwrecks for double eagles was the S.S. Yankee Blade. This was in the late 1970s. The shipwreck was found, the double eagles were recovered, and then they were secretly released into the collecting population.

The S.S. Yankee Blade went down, I believe, in 1854 in San Francisco. It was racing another ship in the fog toward Mexico when it hit something and sank. The coins were in shallow water, so they were etched by sand. Some people say they shouldn’t even have been graded—that the damage from the shipwreck should’ve excluded them from being graded and put in the holders.

In fact, when you submit a coin to a third-party grading company, if it has been harshly cleaned or if there’s some damage on, maybe a big scratch, the company will send it back to you saying, “Sorry, we couldn’t grade it. It’s damaged.” Some grading services will send it back and say, “Well, if it wasn’t damaged, it’d be this grade,” and they’ll list the damage on the holder. With shipwreck coins, companies like NGC will note the shipwreck effect on coins that are damaged enough that they can’t be graded.

Coins such as this 1861 New Orleans double eagle survived more that a century at the bottom of the sea thanks the deep depth of the wreckage site and way in which the coins were packed tightly together.

A lot of people, though, say that since all these shipwrecked coins have damage on them, they shouldn’t be put in holders at all. By that logic, there are thousands of mint date coins that shouldn’t exist because they’re all technically damaged. But that is obviously not true since thousands of S.S. Central America coins have been cracked out of their holders and resubmitted in an attempt to get a higher grade, thereby losing their shipwreck pedigree. Still, a lot of collectors like the shipwreck coins, which actually command a premium if you’re trying to buy one in the same grade as one without the shipwreck designation.

The conditions of the wreck are the key. Obviously many of the coins on the S.S. Republic were damaged when the ship broke apart, but many others were intact and stayed sandwiched together, which protected them. Over time a sea crust formed over them, and it turns out that that protected them, too. The same thing happened with the S.S. Brother Jonathan coins. When they were found, there were still a lot of them stacked in their wax paper wrappers and encrusted by sediment. It was like they had been sealed in cement and protected for a hundred years.

It didn’t used to be this way with PCGS or NGC guaranteeing the pedigree. It used to be that when you bought a shipwreck coin, all you’d get with it was a certificate. There was no encapsulation or anything like that—your only assurance that it was from a shipwreck was a piece of paper. Well, how do you know that piece of paper is real? On eBay one time, I actually saw an auction for shipwreck certificates, without the coins. Where’s the guarantee in that?

So I won’t touch an uncertified shipwreck coin. I love them, but I won’t pay a premium for a coin that’s not certified. If it’s the same price as one without the shipwreck pedigree and I’m pretty sure it is a shipwreck coin, I might buy it as a shipwreck example. But I won’t pay a premium for a shipwreck if it’s not encapsulated.

Collectors Weekly: Are there any double eagles that were actually illegal to own?

Dwyer: In the 1950s, a 1933 double eagle was put up for auction, confiscated, and then eventually went to auction anyway. Here’s how it happened. In 1933, when Roosevelt became president, one of the first things he did was to make it illegal to own gold—it wasn’t until just a few decades ago that it became legal again to own gold in the United States. The only gold that wasn’t confiscated was gold that was considered to have numismatic value, and that was left very vague. Well, in 1933 the new double eagles were set to come out. Obviously they were not going to have numismatic value because they were slated to be the current circulating coin. So they were all supposed to get melted down. Naturally, some of them didn’t.

One of the biggest coin collectors in the first half of the 20th century was King Farouk of Egypt. After he was deposed in 1953, the new government auctioned off his collection, including one of the 1933 double eagles. When it was listed for auction, the U.S. said, “Hey, that coin is illegal, we want it back.” Egypt and the U.S. were not getting along at the time, so instead of giving it back, they just pulled it from the sale and the coin disappeared. Eventually it reappeared in England, there were lawsuits, and finally the U.S. and the guy who owned it worked out a deal to auction the coin and split the proceeds.

Collectors Weekly: If you could own just one double eagle, which one would it be?

The San Francisco Mint struck its first double eagles in 1854. This coin, whose gold came from the California goldfields, was recovered from the wreck of the S.S. Republic.

Dwyer: Out of all the rare double eagles—the 1933, the 1856-O, the Paquet—if I had all the money in the world and I could buy any one I wanted, I would actually get one that isn’t even in any of the reference guides. It’s not a great rarity as far as the date and mintmark. But it’s a double eagle that was in the pocket of Confederate Lt. George E. Dixon, who went down in the Civil War in the submarine, the H. L. Hunley. This coin was in Dixon’s pocket.

There had been a legend about this coin for more than a hundred years. According to the story, Dixon had a coin in his pocket that he had carried with him at the Battle of Shiloh. During that battle, the coin took a bullet direct in his pocket—if the bullet had missed the coin, it very likely would’ve killed him. When they found the wreck of the H. L. Hunley a few years ago, they found this same coin in his pocket, bent from where the bullet had hit it, and engraved with the date of the Shiloh battle. So a legend that seemed unbelievable turned out to be true. You couldn’t get it graded because it had been shot with a Civil War musket, but to me, that is the coolest double eagle.

Collectors Weekly: Can you suggest some double eagles for novice collectors who just want the pleasure of owning one?

The reverse of the San Francisco 1866 double eagle, the last coin put into circulation without the In God We Trust motto.

Dwyer: Yes. The 1861 Philadelphia is the most common double eagle—almost 3 million were minted. The 1854-S is the first double eagle struck in San Francisco, but there’s a bit of a premium on those, so you might have to settle for a lesser grade. But that may be okay: I actually like some of the used, circulated coins because it’s nice to know that it didn’t just sit in a bank vault prior to sinking in a ship—that it was in somebody’s pocket or in a saloon or used for gambling. But if you want a high-grade California Gold Rush coin that’s still affordable, you can go after an 1857-S from the S.S. Central America shipwreck, because in 1857 it was still California gold.

The first time I ever held a double eagle in my hand, the thing I liked the most about it was that it was a nice, big, heavy coin. It’s like the Morgan silver dollar. They’re similar in size and I like those silver dollars because they’re big. It’s why people collect these things versus dimes. The fact that it’s gold makes it that much better, and the fact that there is all this history in these coins—the shipwrecks, the Civil War, the Gold Rush—well, you just can’t write a better story for a coin.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, A.C., for sharing your knowledge of gold double eagles with us.

(All images in this article courtesy A.C. Dwyer of acdwyer.com)

Tony Hyman has been collecting cigar boxes since he was 12. By his 17th birthday, he had amassed a collection of some 2,300 boxes. Recently, we spoke to Hyman about his online National Cigar Museum, which is a great resource for collectors looking to date U.S., Canadian, and Cuban cigar boxes. We also discussed the legendary self-igniting cigar and the history of cigar manufacturing in New York City. Hyman can be reached via his museum’s website, www.cigarhistory.info, which is a member of our Hall of Fame.

The National Cigar Museum has been open for 10 to 12 years in various formats on the Internet, but I completely redesigned the site about four years ago. In the early days, I’d send information to industry executives, and they’d post it, so they had control of the site. But when iWeb came out for the Mac, it made it so easy to build and maintain a site that I took it back from them, because they weren’t posting enough new material.

A 1920s cigar tin from a popular Pierre Lorillard brand.

Since I’ve taken over the site and revamped it, I’ve put up 193 exhibits. Some of them have 100 or more photographs. My long-term goal is to have about 300 exhibits covering the history of cigars as well as the various artifacts associated with them—premiums, labels, boxes, photographs—and the complete gamut of memorabilia, including ashtrays and holders. I want to create a permanent source of information for everyone interested in the field.

For the most part, the photographs in the museum are of my own collectibles. There are also a few exhibits from people who are very prominent in the field. For example, I went to Amsterdam and photographed several major collections of Dutch cigar tins. As a result, I’ve posted two exhibits—pre-World War I Dutch tins and post-World War I Dutch tins. Those are images from other collections.

My goal isn’t to hog the glory, such as it is. Instead I want to provide information to museums, historical societies, amateur sellers, beginning collectors, and dealers, so they can properly evaluate what they have. I’m happy to refer to other collectors and their collections, and I show pictures of things that they own. Nonetheless, more than 90 percent of what’s posted belongs to me. I label the pieces and note in an item’s description if I don’t own it.

Collectors Weekly: How long have you been collecting?

Marksman was a popular brand from the 1870s and beyond. This box is from the 1920s.

Hyman: I’ve been doing this for 58 years. I started in 1952 at the age of 12. When I enlisted in the Navy at the age of 17, I already had 2,300 items in my collection. That’s what happens when you’re a child fanatic! I was trying to answer to the question, “How many different cigar boxes are there?” Over the years I’ve learned an awful lot. For example, one thing I’ve learned is that that wasn’t necessarily the best question to ask. But it was a fundamental question that has led me down many interesting paths allowing me to learn more about the industry.

My goal is to understand the comprehensive history of my field. Collectors who do that make a major historical contribution. If you go to the history departments at Harvard or Yale, you’ll find these marvelous people who study the history of women, the history of politics—all this big stuff. But they don’t care much about the history of glass, the history of book matches, the history of yo-yos, the history of French dolls, or the sorts of things that fascinate collectors. I think collectors make an important contribution to social history because they are the preservers of that history. A lot less would be known about the history of dolls if it weren’t for doll collectors. The same is true of the history of toy trains and cigar boxes.

Collectors Weekly: Did your interest start with cigar boxes and then evolve?

Hyman: Yes. Everything evolved from the boxes, because I was trying to answer the question I mentioned earlier “How many different boxes are there?” I was an early reader and a library rat. We had a wonderful library where I lived as a teen, but I quickly learned that almost nothing had been written about cigars, cigar packaging, and their history. There was almost nothing known about an entire industry.

When I started in 1952, there were only three books on cigars in English. One was from 1875. One was from around 1900. Another was from 1932, and it was a doctoral dissertation. That was it. You could find dozens of books on cigarettes, you could find dozens of books on dolls. You could find hundreds of books on toys. There was a lot of information in some fields, but there was almost none about the history of cigars. So my collection, out of necessity, spread to other categories—billheads, catalogues, correspondence, ledgers, photographs, trade cards, and those kinds of things. Only by learning about them could I piece together the history of the cigar industry as a whole.

Collectors Weekly: On your website you refer to the cigar industry as being like hard-to-find puzzle pieces. How deep did you have to dig to find the missing pieces?

A giant Christmas cigar car by the Merchants Cigar and Candy Co. of Fort Lauderdale, Florida, in the late 1930s.

Hyman: I’m still digging, and I’m going deeper every day. eBay has been a godsend. I used to go to all of the major advertising shows and to Brimfield, Black Angus, the Indie Show, and other extravaganzas in Florida and Pennsylvania. You could work hard at an event like Brimfield for five days and only come away with two or three items. Now I can do that in an evening by spending two hours on eBay.

Even now, my picture of the industry is far from complete. After 58 years, I’m learning new things about the industry, such as how it solved problems and created new solutions and approaches to things. I’m still learning of new ways that manufacturers’ packed cigars. I’ve held more than 100,000 cigar boxes in my hands, and they can still surprise me. I continue to see some very interesting and unique pieces. That’s one of the things that I truly love about this hobby—there’s always something new to learn. If you’re the sort of person who likes regularity and order, you should collect coins, stamps, or Hot Wheels! I’m exactly the opposite sort of person: I like surprises every day. I thrive on the unexpected both in my personal life and in my collecting life.

Collectors Weekly: What are the most unique pieces you’ve found?

Hyman: Sometimes I play a little game with myself. I ask myself, “If I can only keep 10 items, which ones would they be?” Since I know that would be impossible, I then ask myself, “If I could only keep 50 items, what would they be?” Of course, that would be impossible, too. It would be very difficult for me to even pick 100 items because their variety is so extensive.

If I had to pick a few, there’s a desktop cigar cutter that I paid a lot for—$2,500. It’s an absolutely marvelous piece. I show it to everybody who visits. I also have a wonderful deck of cards featuring pin-ups from the 1880s that would bring $1,000 to $1,500 at auction.

These sorts of things are very difficult to classify. I own a document signed by a Spanish government official in 1818 licensing someone in the Canary Islands to come to Cuba and start a one-room cigar factory. That sort of item is hard to categorize, yet you can learn a lot from it.

I remember the first time I went into an abandoned cigar factory. It had opened in the 1870s and closed in 1926, when its owners moved it from New York to Pennsylvania. The building’s new tenant had a store on the first floor and used the second floor for storage, but he almost never went to the third floor attic. I crawled up there and found hundreds of boxes of files and ledgers. They told me a great deal about how a cigar business was run in those days.

This company only manufactured two cigar types, yet they were marketed under 100 brand names. That was a revolutionary concept. Learning about these custom brands happened early in my collecting experience, and it gave me an entirely new perspective on the industry. That attic was a treasure trove of information, and it was the kind of find I relish.

Collectors Weekly: What sorts of categories do you like to collect?

Straiton & Storm became General Cigar in 1917, but OWL remained one of the company's leading brands.

Hyman: I like items with puns and jokes as part of the label or the brand name. I also like health claims that would be preposterous today. When I sold my collection of Canadian cigar boxes to the Museum of Civilization in Quebec, the curator gave me an 1884 Pennsylvania cigar box that told smokers they could cure their asthma by blowing the smoke from its cigars through their nostrils. Of course, today the idea that asthmatics should smoke cigars to cure asthma is incredible. That was a very wonderful thank-you gift.

I recently came across an 1865 box emblazoned with a special black stamp depicting Abraham Lincoln. It was issued in his memory following his assassination, and was used only briefly in 1865. Inside was a picture of the USS Monitor, the first iron-clad ship. And it’s in color, which was rare in the 1860s. With a historic ship, a stamp commemorating Lincoln’s assassination, and color imagery, this was a very exciting find, the kind of thing I live for as a collector.

Because I study the history of the companies and their processes and procedures, things such as this have great meaning to me because they are truly rare. I see that word ‘rare’ tossed around on eBay and in antiques shops all the time. Most of the time rare means junk that was made by the millions. After you’ve studied something for 58 years, you get a handle on what really is rare. That’s part of the fun of shopping after all these years.

Collectors Weekly: What’s the earliest cigar collectible you own?

Hyman: My earliest piece is a 1702 map of Cuba and its trade routes. At the time, Cuba provided most of the world’s cigar tobacco. So that map is significant. Regarding cigar boxes from the U.S. and Cuba, the earliest box I have dates from 1847, a date whose accuracy I’m sure of. In Cuba, cigar manufacturing went strong from about 1800 to about 1890 and changed radically in the 1890s during the Spanish-American war. In the United States, factories existed as early as 1770. But the industry really flourished in America after the Civil War, and I thrive on finding illustrations and boxes from the Civil War period.

Collectors Weekly: What’s one of the strangest cigar collectibles you’ve seen?

Hyman: The self-igniting cigar. Here’s the story: A big dealer whose specialty was cutters and lighters invited me to his home, saying he had many cigar boxes he wanted to sell. Most were pretty-picture boxes from the 1890s to 1920s. He wanted anywhere from $75 to $250 for each. The best he owned was the cheapest—a black-and-white item from 1901. He wanted $40 for it, so I bought it. It was something I’d never seen before—a box of self-lighting cigars! I knew I was looking at a historically significant attempt at doing something radically different, as well as a very short-lived item. To see another label depicting a scantily clad young woman or a Civil War battle is not nearly as exciting to me as finding this sort of landmark in the industry’s history.

Collectors Weekly: How did the self-lighting cigar work?

Hyman: Imagine inserting a wooden match inside of a cigar.  In this case, however, chemical compounds were built into the cigar’s tip. It worked like a friction match. You’d strike it against an abrasive pad, and, boom, your cigar would ignite.

Collectors Weekly: Why did it fail in the marketplace?

Hyman: In those days match heads contained a lot of sulfur. It would have made these cigars stink, spoiling their distinctive aroma, something cigar smokers like. I’ve never seen an ad for the self-lighting cigar, and I read a lot of publications from that period. Cigarette makers also tried this gimmick for about 20 years with four or five self-lighting brands of cigarettes. None of them succeeded, either.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us about some of the other forgotten failures?

This box from the early 1930s was used by Norristown, Pennsylvania cigarmaker Joseph Russo.

Hyman: There were attempts at different blends. One cigar claimed it was made from tobacco from the Holy Land. It smelled like lilacs. This wasn’t exactly the way to entice cigar smokers. Another novelty brand had a mirror built under its lid. When you opened the box, you saw two donkeys with a mirror between them. The name of the cigar? ‘Three Jackasses.’ This product was designed for people whose friends bummed a lot of cigars. Did it last? For a year or two. It was a gag.

The cigar industry has been as faddish as Americans themselves. Today we’re enamored of celebrities and risque images. In the 1800s we doted on a slightly higher class of celebrities, possibly because Shakespearean stars were honored as much as vaudeville performers. Today that’s not the case. Pop singers and athletes get the accolades. Starting very early on, those people were on cigar boxes just as they’re on magazine covers today. On the whole, however, cigar box imagery in the 1800s appealed to a slightly higher class of consumer. They depicted opera stars, serious authors, and famous painters, as well as slapstick comedians.

Collectors Weekly: When did the cigar industry see its biggest growth?

Hyman: After the Civil War. First, manufacturers developed an outstanding new cigar tobacco in Connecticut. Second, Sumatran tobacco arrived in the American market in 1876, and it was outstanding for cigars. Third, most of the taxes imposed to finance the Civil War were lowered and eventually abolished in 1883. Because the cost of cigars suddenly fell as their quality rose, the industry in the 1880s quadrupled and even quintupled.

At the industry’s peak, 40,000 cigar factories operated in the United States. Between about 1840 and about 1940, roughly 250,000 cigar factories opened and closed. Each year we manufactured six to eight billion cigars, making us the cigar capital of the world. The state that produced the most cigars was New York followed by Pennsylvania and then Illinois. Surprisingly, for a while, California was in the top five. New Jersey and Ohio were two other very important manufacturing states, as was Connecticut. Florida ranked about 15th overall—during the height of its prominence in the 1950s, it rose to about third place. In the early days, the big producers were in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois. At one time, there were 3,000 cigar factories in New York City alone.

Collectors Weekly: How could so many factories coexist in New York City?

Hyman: It’s a big place filled with lots of big buildings. Sometimes there were three factories in one building because most were tiny. Out of those 3,000, only about 70 had more than a hundred workers. The majority were family enterprises, little storefronts with perhaps three rollers, possibly employing only a man, his wife, and their children. They didn’t make the majority of cigars, but they comprised the majority of manufacturers. Such an establishment might have made only 20,000 or 25,000 cigars a year, but they were legitimate businesses. The big factories made a million cigars a day.

Collectors Weekly: What manufacturers were the most prominent?

A cigar box by giant New York City cigar maker Kerbs & Spiess, whose 750 rollers worked at 2nd Ave. at 54th.

Hyman: If you want to know their names, go to my site, click on ‘Cigar History’, and you’ll be taken to a page on which I list about 50 major companies. For example, in the 1870s, the company Straiton & Storm owned three large factories in New York. It hired more than a thousand rollers and produced hundreds of nationally-known brands. There were about 70 such companies in the 1800s with maybe even a hundred factories of similar size in New York City. These places were very well known.

Generally, however, it wasn’t the factory itself that was well known as much as its brands. People didn’t say “Give me a Straiton & Storm cigar.” They said “Give me a Robert Burns or an Owl” or some other brand. Factory identity didn’t exist for most American cigars, though it was very important to the Cubans.

If you went to the supermarket today and said, “I like Tide detergent, but the color of its box clashes with my laundry room. Do you have the same detergent in a different colored box?” the clerk would think you were crazy. But in 1900, you could order your own custom brand of cigars that way, selling the same cigar in different boxes, and everybody did that. That’s why there are so many cigar brands.

Some factories’ ads said, “For the trade only.” Consumers couldn’t buy from them. They manufactured brands for distributors, wholesalers, and retailers who would order 500 boxes of this or 200 boxes of that, creating scores of custom brands. A medium-sized factory employing 30 or 40 people might make a hundred brands. Wholesalers would say “I want 20 brands, and I want a different zeppelin on each label.” Bingo: you’d have 20 new brands and 20 new packages. Then, when the wholesaler saw that they weren’t selling, he would say, “Well, give me 100 boxes of the same cigar, but this time put a bunny rabbit on them.” Now the rabbit brand doesn’t sell, so he says “I’ll buy another 100 boxes of those same cigars, except this time put a naked lady on the boxes.” Suddenly, these cigars are selling like crazy. That’s how the business worked.

In Cuba, it was an entirely different story. A company would make many private brands, but it was very proud of its corporate identity. Partagas and companies like that kept their boxes, logos, and designs the same for a century. In the U.S., nobody did that. Nobody. Here labels changed every few years, because there was no such thing as tradition in the United States. We were and are fad-driven. Everything has to be new, the latest, the most up-to-date. The cigar industry was no different from any other. It was constantly fiddling with its brands and logos to tell consumers an ever-changing story. That’s what makes it fun to collect cigar boxes. There are probably close to 2,000,000 brands of cigars.

Collectors Weekly: In the United States?

Hyman: Yes, if one cigar could be packaged under 100 different brand names, and there were 40,000 factories, the numbers get staggeringly big. I’ve got cigars whose boxes feature pictures of rattlesnakes, black sheep, skunks, and salamanders. I don’t believe a box picturing a slimy little amphibian is going to sell many cigars. How long was that salamander-brand or skunk-brand cigar around? That question is generally impossible to answer. Consider that out of the 4,000-or-so boxes that I own, more than half are the only one of its type known. That says much about how short many brands’ production runs were.

Collectors Weekly: Were the production runs based on whom the companies were marketing their cigars to?

A 1911 Campbell-Lakin Segar Co. advance card. Campell-Lakin Segar Co. was a Portland, Oregon wholesaler, whose brands included Tadema, El Gonzales, Havana Taste, San Lucia, Prime Minister, Refund, and Passport.

Hyman: Yes. For example, brands might have been marketed to a particular ethnic group, although that wasn’t so common. Some cigar boxes feature text written in Polish. I have two or three such items. These were made in Chicago where there was a huge Polish-American population. I have one box directly aimed at German-Americans.

Today if a company’s going to launch a new product, it knows the science of surveying consumer preferences, and it’s studied the great advertising campaigns of the last 150 years. Well, in 1850 there was no background. Everything was new. Companies had to discover something as basic as the fact that an image of a naked woman on a box will outsell a box with a picture of a moose on it. I actually have a cigar box with a dead moose on it.

The cigar industry created the roots of all of modern advertising. It was the first to do promotions. The first premiums that we know of were done by a Cuban cigarette company. Cigars jumped on that bandwagon very quickly, using giveaways, putting things in packages, and offering discounts, things that we take for granted.

What are the great advertising themes of today? Family, health, good times. There’s a very fundamental attraction to advertisements with pretty girls or puppies. These are the things you see in advertising over and over and over—wealth and health. Sit down and thumb through just about any magazine and look at the ads: they all boil down to a very few themes. Regional marketing was also very important.

Collectors Weekly: Can you give us an example of that?

Hyman: I followed one factory in great detail. It only made two cigars, a nickel cigar and a 10-cent cigar, but it made more than a hundred brands. A big regional wholesaler might say, “I’ll take 50,000 cigars, but instead of your generic label on them, I want the label to show my headquarters.”  Now this distributor’s rep goes to a small rural town, and the storekeeper there says, “I don’t want a picture of your building on it. Our local harvest festival is coming up. I want a box with trees and autumn foliage on it.” Not a problem. Now the wholesaler’s man goes into a pool hall in the big city carrying the harvest festival cigar box, and the pool hall owner says, “I don’t care about leaves. We play pool here. Put pool players on this, and order me 5,000.”

So here’s the same nickel or 10-cent cigar, and everybody is ordering a custom label. A custom label would cost the retailer a penny extra for each box, two cents at the most. If you could have your own custom box of soap or tissues or whatever it is that you use for publicly, and could have your name and face on it, wouldn’t you pay an extra penny? Of course you would, and retailers in those days did, too.

Collectors Weekly: People got more excited about the boxes and the labels than about the quality of the cigars themselves?

Hyman: Of course. If you went to a tobacconist in 1900 in a town, say, the size of Green Bay, Wisconsin, or Dayton, Ohio—a nice small- to middle-sized town—the tobacconist would have maybe four cigar counters each containing about 30 boxes. He’d be marketing 100 brands in price ranges from 2 cents each to 50 cents or a dollar per cigar. There’d be all these choices, and the storekeeper wanted to catch your eye. The more eye-catching the box and its label, the more likely a shopper would be to buy a more expensive cigar. Ultimately, the goal with a fancy box is to sell you, the consumer, a whole box of those cigars, and that was very common in the 1930s. You can read all about that on my site.

Collectors Weekly: Is there a difference between a cigar lighter and a cigarette lighter?

Cigars by M. Foster & Co. of New York.

Hyman: Yes. Cigar smokers are very conscious of tobacco’s aroma because cigar smoke is held in one’s mouth longer than that of a cigarette whose smoke is inhaled into the lungs. Therefore, cigar smokers prefer an odorless flame like butane that doesn’t affect the odor of the cigar. Cigarette smokers don’t care what they light their cigarettes with.

Cigarette and cigar lighters attract two separate groups of collectors. It’s not because the product is necessarily that different. It’s that they are very different collectors. At one time an article in Antique Trader listed 91 different categories of collectibles related to tobacco. It’s surprising that people think of tobacco as some kind of monolithic world. People who want cigarette lighters want cigarette lighters. None of us will pass up a great bargain or any interesting piece that’s reasonably priced in some other category, but the bottom line is that you can have the most wonderful cigarette lighter in the world, I’ll pass it up because cigarettes aren’t interesting to me. Now, of course, if you’re selling something from the world of cigarettes from the 1880s, and it’s not overpriced, I’ll buy it because that was the early days of the battle between cigars and cigarettes. It’s a historically interesting piece to me.

Collectors Weekly: To what degree are you in touch with other collectors?

Hyman: I wrote for The Trader for about 25 years. I used to get a lot of reader questions. I still do. Right now, I have about 280 unanswered questions on my website. They pour in, and I’m able to answer about 90 to 95 percent of them. It ultimately becomes a matter of finding the time to do it between living my life and writing several pieces for every issue of Cigar magazine. I’m 70 years old and have a house and garden to maintain. So I’m not building my website as fast as I’d like to. As a result, I don’t keep up with all the questions I know that I should answer. I do get to them eventually. Those with good, sharp pictures always rise to the top of the pile.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the other things that cigar-industry collectors like yourself collect?

Hyman: There are people who collect labels and people who collect boxes. Box people have a few labels, and some label people have a few boxes, but basically a person collects one or the other. There are people who collect lighters, vending machines that gave away cigars, cigar advertising, trade cards, salesmen’s advance cards (the postcards salesmen sent to retailers that told them when they would arrive), tin signs for cigars, pouches, holders, cigar union items, cigar bands. You name it. If it has to do with cigars, people collect it.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Tony, for taking the time to talk with us.

(All images in this article courtesy Tony Hyman of www.cigarhistory.info)

Tony Swicer is the president of the Palm Beach Coin Club, the vice president of Florida United Numismatists (FUN), and an avid collector of Kentucky bank notes. In this interview, he discusses the history of the regional banking system of the 19th and 20th centuries, the thrill of collecting his home-state notes, and the advantages of collecting currency over coins. Tony can be reached via FUN.

I started collecting when I was about 10 years old. My father was in the Air Force, so he got me started collecting everything—coins, stamps, military insignias, baseball cards, all kinds of stuff. I settled on coins, maybe because they’re worth the most money. I don’t know why particularly, but I just did. I collected coins from probably 1959 to the late ’70s when I sold my collection. I collected dollar-size metals for 10 years, and I sold that collection in about 1990.

An 1882 series $5 note from Louisville, Kentucky. Grade: Superb Gem Uncirculated.

Then I floundered around for several years, not knowing what I wanted to collect. But I was still in the coin business, buying and selling, when it hit me: Why not collect my home-state notes? They’re very rare, and in the long run they’d probably appreciate.

The bank notes I collect date from 1863 through 1935. I bought the Don C. Kelly book, and it told me about all the banks, the number of known notes for each bank, and the pricing. Basically, you have to go out and buy them. You can’t find them anymore because the federal government recalled them all in 1935, and most of them have been turned in. There are about 600,000 known notes of all types in the United States, from every state.

When you consider that there were 12,635 chartered banks, 600,000 is not a lot of notes. That’s just fifty per bank on average. That’s how rare they are.

I started collecting notes from Kentucky because it was my home state, and it’s a thrill to get a note from your hometown bank, with the name of the city and state on it. When I acquired a bank note from my hometown bank that sold me a car, that was really exciting. Right now I’ve got about 15 notes from my hometown. The last note I bought was the only one if its kind known—an 1875 large-size note—and I thought if I don’t buy it now I’ll never see it again in my lifetime, so I bought it for $3,000. It was a bargain.

After I started collecting, I visited most of these towns. A lot of times the banks are long gone, but you can visualize in your mind what the place looked like.

I started buying bank notes at local coin shows, then bigger shows, and then I started buying them at national auctions because they were more plentiful. I bought 15 in one auction out in Beverly Hills a couple years ago.

I’ve been doing this for six years and I have about 215 different bank notes from Kentucky. It’s the thrill of the hunt that excites me. I hope to get over 400 before I’m done, maybe in another 10 years, if I’m lucky, and then maybe I’ll put them all up at auction.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the shows you attend?

Swicer: I went to the ANA show in Los Angeles in 2009. I go to the FUN Convention every year in Orlando because it’s only two-and-a-half hours away. And I’ve been to the Cincinnati show. I used to do the national circuit in the 1980s, but I’ve cut way back with the recession and everything.

This 1875 series note from Newport, Kentucky is the only known $5 note from this bank.

These days, I mainly get my notes from national auction companies like Heritage, Stack’s, and Goldberg’s. I just go online and bid.

I bought those 15 Kentucky notes I mentioned at a Goldberg auction in Beverly Hills, online. And that’s how I’ve been acquiring them, just one here, one there. If I get one or two a month, I’m happy. Even locally I’ve picked up a couple of rarities, like a serial number one from Owensboro, Kentucky down at the Fort Lauderdale monthly coin show. It’s just incredible to find a serial number one. I snatched that up right away.

As I said, the average number of notes is fifty per bank, so they’re very rare. They made 5-dollar bills, tens, and twenties. Some of the bigger banks made fifties and hundreds. There are hoards that come out periodically. In Lexington, Kentucky, one bank had about 500 preserved notes, and I got some those in choice uncirculated condition.

Collectors Weekly: Do people collect by state?

Swicer: Yes. Even a lot of dealers collect by state. For example, Littleton Coin Company up in New Hampshire is mainly a mail-order company that’s been around since 1946. Littleton’s owner collects New Hampshire—he’s got about 250 different bank notes from the state. A lot of people also collect by condition. But most people, I believe, collect by state.

A 1902 series Owensboro $5 note, labeled serial #1 (bottom left).

Condition is not that critical. The Kelly book is for pricing in fine condition, which is mediocre at best. You don’t find a lot of these notes much nicer than that. I do have some uncirculated notes, but they’re few and far between. To find them uncirculated is really tough. So condition’s not that important, but in the Kelly book, for every grade you go up, you add 25 percent to the value. The grading scales are ‘fine’, ‘very fine’, ‘extremely fine’, ‘about uncirculated’, then ‘uncirculated’.

If someone finds a hoard of old bank notes, a lot of times they will uncover a few uncirculated notes, but for many banks there are simply no uncirculated notes available. A lot of times the best known note might be an extremely fine, which means maybe two or three creases and pretty crisp, but not new. So anything fine or better is collectible in national bank notes.

Collectors Weekly: Where was the first note issued in Kentucky?

Swicer: I believe in Louisville, and the last note in the whole country was also issued in Louisville, which is just a coincidence. The first national bank note in the United States was for the First National Bank of Philadelphia, and it got charter number one. That’s on all of its notes. Each bank had its own charter number, and every 20 years the charter was renewable.

Collectors Weekly: When did the first bank in Kentucky open?

Swicer: I believe it was probably First National Bank in Louisville, chartered in 1863. That’s when it all started, and that was charter number 109.

At the time, Kentucky had 111 towns, and a total of 238 banks were issued charters. My hometown, Newport, Kentucky, had three different banks over the years, each with a different charter number.

Collectors Weekly: Where were Kentucky’s biggest banks?

A 1902 series Newport, Kentucky $10 note.

Swicer: Louisville and Lexington probably had the biggest, most prosperous banks, which means they printed a lot more notes. Those notes are more common today than the notes from the small-city banks. Louisville had 12 to 15 chartered banks, while my hometown, right across the river from Cincinnati, Ohio, had three.

Some banks were named after the person who started the bank, like the Joe Black Bank of Louisville. Others were just the First National Bank of Podunk, or whatever. A lot of the Kentucky notes were from German National Bank. They changed that name after World War I.

Collectors Weekly: Could Kentucky notes be used in a different state?

Swicer: That was the nice thing about it. They were printed by the Federal Reserve, so they could be used anywhere in the United States. National bank notes, even ones printed for chartered banks, were accepted all over the country with no problem. The notes that had been printed before that were regional. If you went far enough away from a given bank, they wouldn’t accept the notes. As a result, a lot of notes were traded at a discount.

Collectors Weekly: How did merchants make change?

Swicer: Well, at first everybody wanted hard coinage, silver and gold. After a period of time, though, they began to accept the notes. California actually wanted its notes to be redeemable in gold, and for a while they had their own nationals, what they called gold bank notes. But after 10 years they used the regular national bank notes like everybody else. Over time, merchants and customers alike began to accept the notes and realized that it was just as good as coinage. They were forced to. Either you took it or you didn’t get paid.

Collectors Weekly: How did a bank get chartered?

Swicer: Each bank came up with a minimum of $25,000, which they’d give to the government. That money would be put in government bonds, drawing interest. In turn, the bank would get currency printed by the Bureau of Engraving and Printing, the BEP.

Each bank was issued notes with its name, city, and state on it. In the beginning the notes had to be hand signed by the cashier and the president of the bank, so a lot of times those signatures were forged. The signature authorized the notes and made them legal tender through that bank. Finally, I believe in the early 1900s, the BEP started printing signatures on the notes.

A 1902 series $20 note from Hodgenville, Kentucky, Abraham Lincoln's birthplace.

See, the government would make these sheets of notes, but they wouldn’t print the whole thing. A five-dollar bill would have Lincoln on it, a ten would have Hamilton, etcetera. They would all have the same denomination and vignettes on them. Then they’d put the name of the bank and the charter number and all that on it. So they had a bunch of sheets already made up, half printed, and then when a new bank came online, they’d add in the new bank’s information.

The notes were standardized. Each $5 note had the same vignette, each $10 note had the same vignette, and so on. But they changed the series periodically, and that would give the currency a whole new look. In 1863 the notes looked one way. In 1875, they changed the notes and they all looked different. Notes from 1902 changed again, and then in 1929, of course, they went to the small-sized notes that we use today. Before that, all notes were larger.

The 1929 series, for example, is very plain looking, with no real vignettes on the front, just the printing of the bank and the serial numbers and all that stuff. The older notes had more vignettes on them, featuring people and different figures.

Collectors Weekly: Did the Federal Reserve print its own notes, too?

Swicer: Yes, they started printing paper money in 1861. This whole national bank note system came about because of the Civil War. They needed extra money to pay for the Union war effort. Making paper money was a way for the government to get more money into its coffers. They issued bonds against it so that the banks had something to back up their money.

At the same time, the government was issuing Federal Reserve notes, which were mostly backed by silver and gold until the mid-’20s. Since the 1930s, Federal Reserve notes have not been backed by anything.

Before the national bank note system there were several financial panics, one from 1835 to 1837 and another in the 1850s. Back then, banks just issued their own notes with nothing to back them up, and they all went bankrupt. Those notes are known as broken bank notes or obsoletes. They were outlawed after the Civil War when the government started issuing notes.

Collectors Weekly: The colonists also used paper money, right?

A 1902 series Louisville, Kentucky $100 note.

Swicer: Colonial currency was used to pay for the Revolutionary War. That was the main reason they came up with it. Early in the history of the country we did not have any gold coins, so people had to use paper, or they bartered. The early gold strikes in the United States were in 1829, and the government started coining after that. We used foreign coinage until 1857 because we had such a shortage of coins, especially silver and gold. Copper was easier to get—we bought copper from England for years after the Revolutionary War. But we didn’t have coinage of any consequence until the mid-1850s.

Collectors Weekly: What was the smallest denomination of paper money?

Swicer: From 1863 until 1875 we had fractional currency. They made three-, five-, 10-, 15-, 25-, and 50-cent notes because coins were being hoarded during the Civil War. In terms of the bank notes, the first year they made one-, two- and five-dollar notes was 1863. Around 1900, though, the smallest denomination was a five. The denominations went all the way up to 1,000, but they discontinued those pretty quick. After the turn of the century, a 100-dollar bill was pretty much the highest. The higher the denomination, the fewer they made, so they’re pretty scarce. I do have some three-hundreds in my collection, but they are very rare—they cost a couple thousand dollars each.

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

Swicer: I’ve got an 1882 note from Louisville that’s in absolutely perfect condition—it has no signs of wear whatsoever. I really like my serial number one from Owensboro, Kentucky, 1902, because they started with number one and numbered them right on out through however many notes they made. And of course I get a kick out of having notes from my hometown banks. Those are my favorites, I guess. But generally, to have an older note in choice, uncirculated condition is amazing. I’ve got one from Hodgenville, Kentucky, where Abraham Lincoln was born, in choice uncirculated condition.

Collectors Weekly: How do you store your notes?

Swicer: They’re all in hard, clear currency holders. There’s no PVC on them, and I keep them in a safety deposit box at the bank. Periodically I look at them. I keep a list on my computer of what I have. That way, I can update it every time I buy a new note.

Once I get a complete collection of my hometown bank notes, I’m going to put them on a disc and send them to the local library so they have a copy of everything I’ve got because I don’t think they have more than one or two notes.

Collectors Weekly: Is there anything else that you want to say about collecting bank notes?

A 1929 Type 2 series Madisonville $10 note. Grade: Gem Uncirculated.

Swicer: To me, collecting bank notes is just a general progression. When you’re a coin collector, you go from coins to maybe metals. A lot of us go that way. We start out with coins, and then we go on to other things. Eventually some of us get into paper money—that’s how it happened with me. I just narrowed it down to bank notes. Grading is not as important on bank notes as it is on coins, and the really nice thing about bank notes is they’re lightweight. You can lug your whole collection in a briefcase. In coinage, you can’t do that. They’re just too heavy. Paper money is much easier to store and handle.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Tony, for taking the time to talk with us!

(All images in this article courtesy Tony Swicer, vice president of FUN)

Jim Elyea co-runs History for Hire, a prop house in Hollywood, California, and has provided props for a variety of movies, television shows, and music videos. Recently, Jim spoke with us about the different types of props and the different eras that History for Hire covers, as well as the steps he takes to make sure an item or scene setting is historically correct. Jim can be contacted via the History for Hire website.

When I was a kid, my mom had an antiques shop in Kansas City and then in Texas, so I was always around antiques and I always collected things. At one point, I would buy things and then sell them through our shop. She let me put things on consignment. So it was always in my blood. In 1985, I just wasn’t having a good time as an illustrator, which was what all my training was in, so I said to myself, “What do I do when no one’s paying me?” and I realized I was running a rental facility. By this time I had accumulated large amounts of costumes and props and all sort of things.

These History for Hire microphones were featured in Martin Scorsese's The Aviator.

So I talked my brother Bob into becoming partners with me. We rented a storefront in north Hollywood and brought over everything we had. At first we decided to have costumes and props. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it wasn’t, so after about nine months, we came to our senses and sold off all the costumes and kept the props. Then it grew and grew, and now we’re in our third location. We went from 4,000 square feet to 7,000 to 17,000, and now we’re at 32,000 square feet. It’s a big warehouse full of out-of-date technology.

We don’t carry furniture and we don’t carry costumes, but we do carry what goes on these things. For instance, if you were doing a period newspaper office, you’d get the desks from someone else, but we have the lamps and all the goodies that went on top of them. If you were doing a war film, you’d get the uniforms from somebody else, but you’d get all the equipment and leather gear from us.

Anything is potentially a prop, and there are places that are many times larger than we are. Most of them carry furniture, but you can really overwhelm yourself with furniture quickly. We try to stay away from furniture because the pieces are so big, and you can’t just carry one kitchen table. You have to carry 10 kitchen tables to be competitive, plus 10 sets of chairs. It’s a space issue. We joke in our business that if you’re doing it right, you have a space problem.

This December we’ll begin our 25th year in business. Our first big show was Platoon, and that was back when we did wardrobes, so probably 95 percent of everything you see on screen came from us.

Collectors Weekly: Are there specific types of movies that you cater to?

Elyea: We like to think we have everything, but there are some categories that tend to be disproportionately popular. We refer to them as the Ms: music, motion picture, media, microphones, and military. For instance, if there was a rock-and-roll film made in the last 25 years or so, we probably had a big part in it. We ship music equipment practically every day. We tend to get a lot of military requests, too, and any show about making movies that’s been made in the United States since 1990 used our equipment. A lot of times we have stuff that corporations don’t have. For instance, we’ve rented television cameras to NBC and ABC and CBS for their retrospectives. We’ve rented cameras and things to the Emmys. Most places don’t hang on to that sort of stuff.

We’ve done World War II a lot. It’s a marvelous era to graft your story onto. It’s arguably the last good war, and perhaps the only one. World War II was about good versus evil. Even X-Files and Star Trek and several other shows have had episodes where they had aliens who were basically wearing World War II Nazi uniforms. Here’s something that’s set in the future in space and yet to make them the quintessential bad guys, they put them in clothing that looks like World War II German uniforms.

We’ve shipped to every continent in the world, including Antarctica. We’ve shipped rickshaws to Japan, and we’ve shipped ski goggles to Norway. It’s crazy. We will often have something that the original company has long since gotten rid of, which is fun. Having a prop house is a great thing for a packrat. I can collect professionally so my home can be halfway normal.

The only things that I collect personally are Vox amplifiers. They’re the ones that The Beatles and everybody used. Actually, I’m so into them, I wrote the definitive book. It has its own website, voxguidebook.com.

Collectors Weekly: How many different departments do you have in the warehouse?

A music stand used in James Cameron's Titanic.

Elyea: Probably a couple of hundred. We have kitchen items and home furnishing items and musical instruments and barber items and cosmetic items and Mardi Gras heads and watches and rings and parasols and umbrellas and eyeglasses and sunglasses and microphones. It goes on and on.

We tend to stop in about the 1970s and ’80s, unless it’s media or newsgathering equipment. We do all years of that. If you’re doing something from the 1920s through the 1940s, we have such a depth of items that we pretty much have anything you can think of in what’s known as small or hand props.

Around a dozen people work for History for Hire. Each person specializes in a specific area. For instance, we had propped a show about the Runaways, the girl group in the ’70s, and as happened, Seiji Kobayashi is not only the head of our musical department but an enormous Runaways fan who went to see simulcasts of them when they went to Tokyo, which is a big part of the movie. So he actually went on set and helped with the instruments and tech advice, not only on the musical stuff but on Japan, too. He made these special paper fans for the girls in the audience, which was apparently really common to very traditional Japanese fans, and he put messages on them for the people on stage. Without Seiji, we never would’ve known about that.

Everybody here knows a lot about a lot, but there are some people who really nitpick about the details of certain areas. One of the things that our philosophy is based on is to try and make movies and television better and more historically accurate by putting the right things in them. Our motto with our clients is, “We’ll tell you what’s right, and then we’ll rent you anything you want,” because a lot of times, even though we know better and they know better, their boss wants something different. The director wants it different or the actor wants it different, and ultimately, they’re the ones calling the shots and paying the bill. But we’d like to think that stuff looks a lot better and is more accurate because we’re around.

Collectors Weekly: How do you go about making sure something’s historically correct?

Elyea: Pretty much the same way as a collector would—by dating your collection. For example, if a doll came out in 1867, it wouldn’t be appropriate for a Civil War movie, which ended in 1865. But it could be that your only choices are that doll or one from the 1880s, so sometimes you pick the lesser of two evils. The 1867 doll is technically not right, but it’s much closer to being correct than the 1880s doll.

There are an enormous number of people who care passionately that things are historically accurate. There are a number of barriers that get in the way, a number of reasons why one might have a hard time getting something accurate. One of them is what we mentioned a minute ago, when the director says, “Yes, but I want the different one.” You can’t fight that; you just have to do it.

Then there are times when everybody knows what’s right and everybody cares deeply and everybody’s ready to do it, but you just can’t come up with it in time. Ultimately, just like you can’t have dead air on the radio, you can’t have somebody in the film theoretically waving something around that’s not there. Whether it’s historically right or wrong, it still has to be in that actor’s hand. So ultimately, whether something is historically accurate or not, there has to be something on screen.

Collectors Weekly: If someone needs a prop that you don’t have, what do you do?

Just some of the military gear supplied by History for Hire for Oliver Stone's Platoon.

Elyea: It depends. If it’s something that for one reason or another we want to acquire, which usually happens with feature movies, because there’s often more time to do that, we’ll search for it or make it. When we did The Patriot, we made almost everything. We did between 100 and 200 sets of equipment for the soldiers because, besides the fact that the originals are 200 plus years old and ratty, they’re museum pieces and if they’re in fantastic condition, you’d never ever want to take one out. So that stuff has to be made again. With props, if you can’t tell it’s been remade, then we’ve done our job.

The gentleman who runs our custom shop is named Gary Aardahl, and he’s amazing. One day he’ll be making a scabbard from 1755, and the next day he’ll be working on a 1950s television camera. He’s the supreme craftsman, and he just has the standard that everybody else has to live up to.

We recreate props pretty much every day. Sometimes it’s just repairing something. Usually things have to look new, so we have to do a restoration job on them. It’s more important that it looks right than that each element is an original, authentic antique. Say you have a food scene in 1775. You have some people sitting around, eating and drinking. You could use original antique plates that are crazed, have little stains on them, that look good for antiques but still show their age. Or, you could have reproductions that look brand new. What would be the more appropriate thing to have? It depends on the film.

Collectors Weekly: How often do you have to go through your inventory to make sure everything is in top shape and ready to go?

Elyea: The goal is to have everything perfect and wonderful all the time. The reality is that we have so much that we’ll generally pick a section to refurbish. Once a month is “air up all the tires” day, which is an entire day of somebody’s time spent running around with a little compressor to make sure there’s air in all of our tires. We have bicycles and different cars, and some of our moviemaking equipment has tires, too. For The Aviator, we built a 1920s era camera dolly, which is a big wooden platform on a Model T suspension, so we have to air up the Model T tires. And then we have the rickshaws.

Speed Graphic cameras are an important part of what we do. We have about 80 Speed Graphics from different eras, including the so-called pre-anniversary models from 1928 to 1939, and we just finished a big six-month project earlier in the year where we went through every camera and made sure that everything was tight, the flashes worked, all the bits and details were right for that particular era, etc. And then we cleaned them up and made them all nice and wonderful.

A World War I pilot uniform, used in Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

We’ve gone through and restored a lot of the first-generation ones, the ones that came out before 1928. Back then, the flash arms were different—the early ones were actually converted flashlights. So we took vintage flashlights and created our own flash arms from scratch. Many of the parts for the early speed graphics aren’t available so we’ve had to remanufacture them. I didn’t make any extras, and none are for sale.

If it’s a show we’ve done already, we’ve already done the research, so we know what the prop master needs. So for instance, if you came in and said, “I’m doing press and it’s 1930,” we’d say, “You can use a pre-anniversary camera because it came out in 1928, but you can’t use a flashbulb because those weren’t commercially available until about 1931, ’32.” Usually the client will say, “The director wants flashbulbs,” so we’ll give them an era-correct pre-anniversary with the earliest flash attachment that came out.

The other thing we have is a really large research library in our warehouse—it has about 5,000 books. It’s our own library, not for public use. We have books on just about everything we carry. We have a lot of auction catalogs, including huge ones on sports memorabilia and music- and motion-picture-related items. Periodically there’ll be an auction of some star’s estate, so the catalog will be filled with fantastic pictures of their stuff. So if we ever have to recreate them in a film, we can just go and look it up.

We also have a series of Montgomery Ward catalogs from virtually every year of the 20th century up until they stopped producing them. We use those all the time.

Say you’re doing a 1928 movie. We’ll look in the 1928 Montgomery Ward catalog to see the most up-to-date stuff that an average person would have. Say you want a picnic cooler. You can see what picnic coolers looked like in 1928. Or you might go back to 1921 because you’re story is about people who weren’t necessarily as cutting edge, so they bought their cooler eight years before. A lot of times we use catalogs to find out when a particular product was introduced. You look through a succession of years and you won’t see it, then, all of a sudden it appears. It’s a good bet that that’s the first year they became commercially available, or at least in widespread use.

I think the stupidest thing I ever rented was an old stove knob. Why they needed it, and why I had it, I don’t know, but I got a quarter for it and they brought it back.

Collectors Weekly: Have you ever had problems with people not returning things?

Elyea: It’s a chronic problem. Most of it has to do with just the hurry-up nature of film production. Things slip through the cracks. If somebody loses something from a prop house or if they break it, they’ll end up paying two or three times the market value for it. As a group, we really don’t like it.

I had this 1880s tea set that had four cups and saucers plus a pitcher, just a lovely piece. The first time we rented it, somebody broke a couple of the saucers. I didn’t that say it out loud, but I thought, “This thing survived for over a hundred years and you have it for a week and you can’t even keep it intact.” But usually that’s the result of the production company hurrying up our clients, not giving enough time to do something correctly. All our clients are wonderful.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the movies that have used your props?

These flight helmets were used in Michael Bay's Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.

Elyea: Let’s see, Titanic, Year One, Public Enemies, Transformers 2, That Thing You Do. Here’s a lovely story about That Thing You Do. They shot it at the Ambassador Hotel, for the hotel room and coffee shop scenes. When the hotel shut down, we bought a lot of the hotel’s silverware at their sale. We rented that same silverware to the movie for that scene, so it actually played itself.

For Good Night, and Good Luck, we did all the TV and film equipment. In the offices, everything on top of the desks up to, but not including, the fluorescent lights was ours. We rented 60 period telephones. So it varies. There are other times when we’ll only have two pieces in a show. We do films and television, but we also do music videos and commercials and fashion shoots. We do a lot of stuff for “Italian Vogue” and “French Vogue.” If it’s in any sort of popular culture, we’ll do it. We’ve rented to Jay Leno. We’ve actually done some work with American Idol and shows like that, generally microphones.

Here’s a fun one. We have a very authentic electric chair, and it’s so good that if you hook somebody up, it would work. But Quentin Tarantino, Billy Bob Thornton, Snoop Dogg, and Madonna have all been grilled in our electric chair. Billy Bob Thornton actually badgered us. He wanted to buy it, but it’s not for sale.

We never sell anything. We never get rid of anything, so we have lots of things available for our clients. Plus most studios don’t like things to go out onto the open market unless they sell it themselves. Sometimes when a movie comes out, some studios will sell off some of the props on eBay to raise awareness of a film.

Sometimes people who rent our stuff try to buy it after. We have really good musical instruments, and we’ve had bands very nicely ask if they could buy a set of cymbals or a bass guitar, but we always decline. Sometimes people will claim that they lost something and then they see what the bill would be if that were true, and interestingly enough they find it. It’s like, “Oh, I don’t want it that bad.”

Collectors Weekly: How do you acquire items?

Elyea: We get things every way you can think of, and more. It’s not particularly different from any collector who’s going to be reading this. There are special shows for train items or advertising items or paper ephemera or whatever. There are specialty shows. There are antiques shops and antiques malls. I don’t garage sale very much, I don’t want to get up that early, but eBay is good if you have the time.

Right now I’m not buying anything. We have everything that we need, and it’s been a hard couple of years with the writers and then the actors going out on strike. So I’d rather pay my employees than buy more stuff for a while. We’ll be back to buying sometime next year.

Collectors Weekly: If you’re looking on eBay or at a sale, are you after a certain level of quality or just a certain type of prop?

Elyea: Quality always has to enter into it in one way or another. Part of it is serviceability. Even if it sounds like a bargain, if we have to put lots of labor into it, we’re better off buying the better quality one, even if it is more expensive. We don’t cut corners. The turntables work and we polish up the leather and we make sure everything looks nice and is in good condition.

Collectors Weekly: Are there times of the year when some props are in higher demand?

Elyea: Yes. It used to be that July and August were hiatus months. That’s when most TV shows would be down for the summer. Now with all the different cable channels and changes in the business, you have shows going on hiatus all the time. Some of them are really ramping up for the fall, whereas Mad Men shot its last episode yesterday and won’t be back in production until April. So it varies. Usually most features don’t want to pay people to be off for Christmas, so they try to wrap up before then. A lot of features start in late January. And December and early January are always busy with Super Bowl commercials. So it is seasonal, but it’s a bunch of different seasons.

We used to be able to prepare for certain seasons really well, but now it changes so much that it’s hard to predict. The only rule of thumb is that the longer the slow period, the busier it’ll be when things gets busy.

Collectors Weekly: Did you help prop Mad Men?

Elyea: We did a lot for Mad Men. They own many of the things they have in the offices because they need to have them year after year, but we get calls for special things. For instance, there’s a shoebox full of money that one of the lead characters has, and we rented them the shoebox and the vintage currency. My favorite part about the show is how they show how lax and careless we were with certain safety issues. There’s one lovely scene where this little girl comes to her mom and she has a plastic cleaning bag over her head and she’s using it as a toy. You think the mom’s going to freak out, but she just says, “Now, now. Did you wrinkle my dress when you took it out of that bag?” and lets her go.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the really random or obscure things you’ve learned?

History for Hire supplied the control room for George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck.

Elyea: We’ve probably learned more than we need to about clothespins. We’re working on a movie right now about the co-conspirators with John Wilkes Booth, who killed Abraham Lincoln. We’re studying the photographs of the execution and identifying each person by what they were wearing. Sometimes you can learn a lot from photographs of an event like that.

In The Aviator, there’s this series of scenes in 1947 when Howard Hughes is called before a Senate committee. They take place over three days, so I spent a couple of months researching and coming up with every photograph I could and then putting them together, judging by the microphone placement what day it was. So we bought and made microphones. We made stands. We did an enormous amount of work on this one. We basically made paper layouts for each day. If you’re shooting day one, put microphone A here and microphone B here, C here, etc. There were probably a couple of dozen microphones that were set up. The layout was perfect and matched all of the original photos.

For way too long, I was living and breathing this one sequence, and unless you wanted to talk to me about microphones, I wasn’t much good to anybody. But the client loved it and appreciated it, and of course he moved a couple of microphones around because he wanted it in a certain spot. But generally speaking, it was probably 98 percent perfect.

Collectors Weekly: How often do you just get completely engulfed in researching something like that?

Elyea: Usually it’s almost always for a feature because there’s just not the time to do it otherwise. We did that with Good Night, and Good Luck. It was very important that everything was just right, so we watched a lot of footage and looked at photographs and specially made things. That was one for which we devoted enormous amounts of detail.

Collectors Weekly: What area have you found yourself becoming more interested in as the business has grown?

Elyea: Vintage baseball equipment. We don’t cover modern baseball, but when we did the movie The Babe, Gary (who runs the custom shop) and I went to the Hall of Fame at Cooperstown. It was so cool. They let us in the back, and we got to photograph all kinds of things. We got to photograph one of Babe Ruth’s original bats with 26 notches in it, each one representing a homerun.

We knew we would be doing other baseball films, so we also researched a lot of other eras as much as possible. We can do a whole baseball scene for most of the first 60 to 70 years of the 20th century, including the bases, the line markers, the baseballs, you name it.

Collectors Weekly: Do you have a favorite era of props?

Authentic booking numbers used in Michael Mann's Public Enemies.

Elyea: I like the ’30s. It’s just fun to work on. I like the clothes from the era. That said, one of the things that’s really fun about what we do is that we’ll work heavily on one thing and then we’ll switch to something a hundred years different, or a lot of times we’ll be working on several different eras at once.

Right now we’re doing a movie about the Scopes trial from 1925, the one I mentioned about the Lincoln conspirators in 1865, and we also just finished a film that was set in ’57 and ’62. We’re doing a recording studio set in the 1990s for Cold Case, and we just did props for Army Wives, which is set in World War II. So it’s fun bouncing back and forth between the eras.

We were talking at lunch about how with most jobs, once you learn the job, that’s pretty much it. Our jobs are really fun because no matter how much you know, every day you’re asked to learn something new, and that’s great. Learning every day keeps your brain going.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us, Jim!

(All images in this article courtesy Jim Elyea of History for Hire)

Scott Buckwald has been the prop master on a variety of popular movies and television programs, including Race to Witch Mountain and The Prestige. Recently, Buckwald spoke with us about his experiences as a prop master for AMC’s hit show Mad Men. He discussed what life was like in the early 1960s, when Mad Men takes place, and the lengths he had to go to to source and create authentic period props for the show.  He also talked about TV and movie props generally, and his personal experience as a collector.

I always wanted to work in film, but I didn’t have anybody in my family who worked in the film business. I’ve been a major movie buff since I was a child, and I’ve always been very meticulous. I’ve always been a collector. The Beatles are definitely my main thing, but my wife and I collect old metal lunch boxes and I’ve always just been good at holding onto things.

A prop is anything you can carry in your hand or, in this case, wear on your finger. This still of Joan Holloway (Christina Hendricks) is from Mad Men, Episode 1.

I have a fairly nice collection of movie memorabilia. For example, I like collecting police badges. I did the first props for The Shield, so I have Michael Chiklis’ detective badge. I’ll also collect autographs of all the actors I’ve worked with, which is something I started very early in my career. Usually I’ll have them sign a photograph or, if they have them, a lunch box or an action figure. I’m kind of geeky in that respect.

I studied history in college, which was great training for doing prop research. When I got out of school, I started pursuing film. I started out as a production assistant. It was like going to summer camp—you see all the different activities, and you just decide which direction you want to head in. I’ve always been good at tinkering and building things, making little toys and trinkets, so I was attracted to the props department. I started doing movies that had budgets that you and I could probably put together with our spare change. But 20 years later, here I am, so it found me as much as I found it.

There are many steps to it. It’s not just going out and finding the props; it’s also maintaining them, putting them in the actor’s hand, making sure that the continuity is correct, and making sure the props are always available. So it’s very much a full-time job. I went to work yesterday at noon and got home this morning at 5:00 am. It was a very long day.

It’s also a lot of fun. We were in the process of wrapping a movie last night, so I just got Betty White’s autograph, which was a kick. She signed a picture of herself firing a handgun from a recent TV episode she did. It’s a very uncharacteristic picture. It’s a funny photo. She was just amazing to work with.

In 1995, I was working with Kevin Pollak. We took continuity pictures every time he came into a room wearing eyeglasses and a watch and what not—we take a picture in every scene just to match it. Every single time we took a picture of Kevin, he would flip us off. He would just give us the middle finger. I decided this would be my constant. So, since 1995, I’ve made sure to get at least one picture of every actor I’ve worked with flipping me off, except Betty White. Having 86-year-old Betty White giving me a grimace and a middle finger would be worth the price of admission. I would love to do that.

One of the nice things about doing props on set is that I have a one-on-one relationship with the actors. Because I have physical contact with them we get to talk, so a relationship can develop.

Collectors Weekly: What sets Mad Men’s focus on historical accuracy apart from other shows set in a particular time period?

Buckwald: I don’t really know that anything necessarily does. First of all, I think that the promotion of the show has really highlighted its historical accuracy. Mad Men exists in a world that people still remember. You’ll have people who were working in 1960 going, “Oh, my God. I remember that item.”

Most people are not historians. Most people are not totally geeked out about any one time in history, so they really don’t know. If you do a Revolutionary War movie and you put in a weapon that didn’t come about until the War of 1812, the majority of people aren’t going to know. But part of the charm of a show like Mad Men is that it’s about our life. I wasn’t alive in 1960, but I was born in 1963, so I remember a lot of that stuff from when I was a little boy in ’68 and ’69. History doesn’t just change on a dime. Things that existed in 1960 also existed in 1970, and are still easily accessible thanks to photos. It’s still within our grasp.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us a little bit about that Mad Men advertising world of the early 1960s?

Buckwald: It was definitely a transitional time when America was losing its innocence. Mad Men takes place right before The Beatles. When most people say, “Oh, the 1960s were such a great time,” they’re talking about the period after February of 1964. Before February of 1964, Elvis was in the army, and popular music meant Bobby Vinton, Frankie Avalon, and that kind of bubblegum, wimpy rock.

A period lamp helps set a historically accurate tone in this scene from Episode 3 of Mad Men.

Rock and roll was on the way out and anybody who said Elvis was a fad was about to be proven right. America had experienced World War II and the Korean War, and now, thanks to the Cuban missile crisis, global destruction was pretty much at our doorstep. We were on the verge of nuclear destruction, more so probably than at any time in this country’s history. Vietnam was coming up and there was lots of sexism and racism—the world was a pretty scary place.

In response, I think we tried to see the world as we wanted to see it, not as it really was. That’s where advertising came in. For the first time, people realized that you could harness TV and radio to put out advertising—you could use these new mediums to try to convince people to do things that common sense would normally dictate they should run away from. For example, major actors advertised cigarettes, saying they soothed the throat.

Mad Men shows all of that. They’ve done episodes in which the ad men are trying to sell the virtues of smoking at a time when the surgeon general is about to release a report saying that the habit isn’t healthy. Still, Mad Men is a TV show, and TV shows are on the air to make money. Their principal mission is not to educate. If you get educational value out of a show that’s great, but it’s only a secondary benefit.

The 1960s aren’t as different from today as people may think. A lot of times people have the misconception that it’s totally different, and I know we had it from members of the crew. They’d say, “I didn’t know they had ballpoint pens in 1960.” I wanted to have T-shirts made that said, “This is 1960, not 1860.”

If you were born in 1987 and you and I joined hands and jumped into a time machine and went back to 1960, you would feel totally comfortable there. The cars were different. They only had seven channels on the TV as opposed to 500. The movie theaters usually only had one screen instead of 21. But the world was pretty much as it is today. People had the same hopes and desires, the same fears. Things that made people laugh then make people laugh today.

You had supermarkets, you had cars, you had airplanes. It was pretty much modern America, just styled differently. Hop on a jet in New York and you’re in Los Angeles six hours later. You can go to the supermarket and fill your grocery cart with 20 different brands of paper towels and four brands of shampoo. Same with dishes: There were different colors and different styles, but they were still basically the same dishes as today. Forks and knives and spoons didn’t look any different.

Collectors Weekly: Did you use vintage items on Mad Men or were they reproductions?

Buckwald: Usually if it was paper, like a magazine or a newspaper, I would reproduce it. I do a lot of my own graphics. I’ve remade Volkswagen ads on my computer, and I remade “Advertising Age” magazine. I’ve redone “TV Guides,” even if they don’t exist anymore or they’re very hard to find.

Buckwald recreates a lot of magazines for Mad Men, such as the copies of Life and Time in this scene from Episode 6.

When I get hired for a feature movie, I have 10 weeks of prep before the first day of shooting begins. On a TV series, you have a week. I get the script for the next episode and I have one week to start prepping it, so I don’t have the resources to find an issue of “Advertising Age” that looks now like it looked brand new in 1960. So usually the quickest, most direct route is to reproduce it. We’ll find pictures of it, or we might find an old pattern issue of a magazine, and then I’ll redo it.

I’m constantly redoing book covers. In one scene, a couple is reading in bed, and I couldn’t find a copy of the book that looked brand new—the pages were yellowed or it was faded—so I found a new book and remade the cover based on the original. But with hard goods like watches and rings, or if someone is supposed to carry a briefcase or have a gun, that stuff is easier to find, and I have sources for that.

There’s a prop house called History For Hire, but even there, we very often have to take the prop and make it look new again. For example, we may have to take an old bicycle and have it repainted and spruced up because sometimes things that sit on a prop-house shelf look like they have 50 years of age on them. If the show takes place 50 years ago, the item can’t show that amount age. It needs to look new, like it did back in the day.

So it’s a combination of vintage and reproduction items. A lot of times I’ll go on eBay and look for things. When I know I need a period item, I’ll buy it from another collector. One thing nice about working for the movies is that there have been times when I’ve called up somebody and said, “Look, I need this in three days, it’s for a movie.” And they’re like, “Wow. My thing is going to be in a movie,” and they get excited.

Collectors Weekly: Besides the paper items, what were some of the hardest props to find for Mad Men?

Buckwald: We had a wardrobe, which is essentially a big vinyl plastic bag that you would put your clothes in. It has a wooden hanger, and it hangs in a closet. You can still buy them at Target but the design is different. There was one scene in which the actress takes this wardrobe out of her closet, lays it on the bed, and pulls her dress out of it.

The problem was that these wardrobes were made out of very thin vinyl. Really, it was just a big vinyl bag, and it’s not collectible like an old Coca-Cola sign or a Barbie doll. It’s not the kind of thing that someone would put away and preserve. It’s as glamorous as the tube inside of a roll of toilet paper. When you’re done with it, you throw it away. There is no collectible value to it.

Props from Mad Men, Episode 7, include beer bottles, paper packaging for a six-pack, and a hobnail milk glass lamp.

So I have to find one of these wardrobes, which is not an easy thing. Unlike a paper product, I can’t just print one off my computer, and we don’t have the time to rebuild one from scratch. I searched everywhere, called every prop house, every wardrobe house, every costume house. It looked like we weren’t going to find it, but at the last minute, I found one on eBay.

Somebody had one and I e-mailed him and I said, “Look, I need this right away.” So he sent it to me right away, and it was brand new in the package. It was from 1959 or 1960 and the package had never been opened. I got it, opened the package, and the plastic was all dried up. The thing was falling apart in my hands! But it did give me a pattern. We took it to a manufacturer and they were able to take new vinyl plastic that was the same color and texture as the original and build that over the old, rotting-out one. So, $500 later, we had a new wardrobe, and it was vibrant. And there you have it. It was remade.

Again, on a feature film, you have more time to do it. It’s not as much of a crunch, but that’s part of being a prop master—ultimately, we are Aladdin’s lamp. All the director needs to say is, “Scott, I need one,” and then I find it.

There’s a prop house near Los Angeles called ISS; I don’t think you’ll find a better one on the planet. They have full manufacturing facilities, and there’s literally nothing they can’t build. I can’t even remember all the things I’ve had them build for me over the years.

They don’t just reproduce things. They made weapons for Star Trek. They made gadgets used in Race to Witch Mountain. They built all of these weapons and gadgets for me from scratch. Their facility is second to none. Taking a tour of their facilities would just blow you away.

The Changeling, the Clint Eastwood-directed movie with Angelina Jolie, is a period film, set in the 1930s, I believe. Angelina Jolie is a telephone operator, and you see the room with the patch board and all this old electronic equipment. ISS built it all, and they made it look brand new. To me, they created that scene. The set decorator might win an Oscar for creating the set, but it’s certainly a place like ISS that does the actual hands-on work to recreate the items.

Collectors Weekly: So it’s a collaborative process?

Buckwald: Of course—no one possesses all the skills to do everything. With a show like Mad Men, the writer comes up with the idea, the producer will work with his vision, and then it’ll come to me. I’ll draw it out, take photographs, find pictures of the thing when it existed, and talk to a production designer. Then the two of us will finalize what it should look like. Because Mad Men is realistic, coming up with the pictures and the design was usually more my responsibility because I didn’t need to have someone help me create what it should look like. If the item had existed, I would do the research and find a picture of what it looked like.

I’d submit a picture and say, “Here it is.” And then I would bring it to ISS, for example, and they would build it for me. But if it’s for a fantasy show, like if it’s a sci-fi movie and there is no intergalactic walkie-talkie in real life, the production designer and I will come up with concept drawings, and then we’ll make an initial model of it. The director will look at it and approve it or not approve it or make little changes to it, and then, finally, we’ll have one built based on the prototype. By the time it’s done, it looks like something real and off-the-shelf.

Collectors Weekly: Besides the wardrobe, what were some of the most obscure items you’ve had to find for Mad Men?

Food is considered a prop on Mad Men, so Buckwald works with Michael McDonald to create dishes for restaurant scenes such as this one from Episode 1.

Buckwald: There was one time when January Jones, one of the lead actresses, was supposed to be putting together a birthday celebration but she didn’t have a birthday cake, so she goes to her freezer and defrosts a Sara Lee cherry cheesecake. The cheesecake wasn’t hard to reproduce, but we had to make the box that it came in.

Getting the Sara Lee logo from 1960 was easy, but finding an actual cheesecake box was hard. Again, that’s not very collectible. Pretty much the second after the cake was taken out, the box would have been thrown away, so I looked through pictures of kitchen scenes, hoping to find a cherry cheesecake box sitting there. After looking through 3,000 pictures, I was able to capture every angle of the box and I was able to redraw it on Illustrator and tweak it on Photoshop and then print it out and rebuild the box.

Packaging often takes a lot of work because sometimes the original source material just isn’t readily available. It’s really hard to remake something when you don’t have pictures of what it actually looked like. There was an episode in which we had to redo a Volkswagen ad from “Life” magazine. That was easy because Volkswagen ads are collectible. You go to Google and you type in “classic Volkswagen ad 1960” and you get pictures of them. The source material is there, so it’s easy.

You also have a time clock ticking over your head with the producer tapping you incessantly on the shoulder saying, “Is it done yet? Is it done yet? Is it done yet?” Not only do you have to make the cheesecake box, a hundred other props are also needed for that episode.

Collectors Weekly: You mentioned looking at images of kitchens. How many different rooms from the 1960s did you have to study?

This period barber shop from Mad Men, Episode 6, is prop heaven.

Buckwald: The rooms are more set decorating, but the set decorator would certainly take the same steps that I would for each room. I own a lot of period movies from that time. I wouldn’t watch a modern-day movie about the 1960s, I would go back to original source material from the era.

“Life” magazine is great for that. “Playboy” magazine is fantastic for research, too, because unlike other magazines of that genre, “Playboy” was always very much into fashion. It really was a magazine that you could honestly buy just for the articles, and the articles in “Playboy” have always been terrific. They would publish articles about the latest and greatest stereo equipment and cars and fashion. It’s just a wonderful resource for stuff like that.

You have to go back and recreate the past. The nice thing about 1960 is that it wasn’t that long ago, so the world was photographed in color. There were movies and TV shows. There’s an amazing amount of information without having to dig too deep. You go back to a show I did like The Prestige, which I think is far more stylized than Mad Men, and the research material is not as readily available because it takes place in 1890s London. You can’t just go find movies of magicians that take place in the 1890s. It’s a great deal more work.

Collectors Weekly: So do you deal mostly with the hand props?

Buckwald: Yes. If you pick it up, it’s a prop. Also, for some reason, I don’t know why, decals on a vehicle are considered props. In Mad Men, if we did a 1960 police car, the transportation coordinator would get the actual vehicle, but it would be up to me to put all the police stickers on it. I have to make sure that the graphics are all period correct. If it’s an ambulance or a fire engine, all the decals on it are mine.

Food also falls into props. In Mad Men, there’s an amazing amount of food. Every episode would have a high-end restaurant and a home-cooked meal, and that’s totally mine to cook. You want to have food that’s right for the time period. You might have a burger, but probably not a bacon cheeseburger, because that just wasn’t in fashion yet. A white American family wouldn’t be going out for burritos and tacos in 1960. It just wasn’t there yet. So there’s an amazing amount of research just for food.

Collectors Weekly: Do you cook the food yourself?

Props in this scene from Mad Men, Episode 5, include a trivet, an egg carton, and food prepared by Buckwald himself.

Buckwald: It depends what it is. If it’s a home-cooked meal and it’s a smaller scene, I tend to do it. I’m a fairly competent cook for short-order food, but if the food is more stylized, like if it’s from a really nice, high-end restaurant, I have a very brilliant chef I work with. His name is Michael McDonald, and we’ve been working together for years.

The guy is an artist. He did all the period food on The Prestige, serving food that people actually ate in the 1890s, even keeping in mind that certain food wasn’t available at certain times of the year. For example, green salad wasn’t popular in the 1890s because they didn’t have a way to keep it fresh and refrigerated. I only learned that because Michael did the research.

A lot of the high-end restaurants served different styles of food in the 1960s than they do today. Michael got all that for me. For You Again, which I’m working on right now, we’re doing a million-dollar wedding, and the set decorator came up with this absolutely brilliant under-the-sea kind of theme. Michael came up with food, it was just gorgeous. Each hors d’oeuvre was a piece of sculpture.

Machine guns, handguns, and shotguns are also props. All weapons on movies are 100% real. When you see Saving Private Ryan or a Sylvester Stallone or Schwarzenegger movie, all those weapons are real. Those are not plastic toy cap guns.

Collectors Weekly: When it came to the Mad Men office scenes, did you have to get vintage typewriters and pencils and pens?

The producers of Mad Men decided to use IBM Selectrics, seen here in Episode 10, even though the typewriter is not true to the period. Naturally they heard about it from fans.

Buckwald: Well, pencils are pencils. There’s no change in the pencils, and a lot of offices were using ballpoint pens. Fountain pens had largely disappeared. Certainly for formal use, the fountain pen was still there, but not as an everyday office tool.

I thought Mad Men made a big mistake on the typewriters. They knew what the right history was, but they ignored it. The secretaries at that advertising firm would have still been using vintage-style typewriters, but they used IBM Selectrics simply because the producer liked the way they looked and they made less noise on set. So we got many letters about how they were wrong, but, again, that’s his call. And right or wrong, it’s his show. He can do whatever he wants with it.

There was a typewriter repairman in North Hollywood, California. He couldn’t believe it when all of a sudden someone deposited 24 vintage typewriters on his doorstep and said, “Make them look new.” He probably hadn’t had that much work in the last 25 years. He was probably just about ready to hang up the “Going out of business” sign and cursing the arrival of the laptop computer when all of a sudden here I come with 24 typewriters.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the other antique or vintage items that you’ve worked with on Mad Men?

Buckwald: We had a vintage rifle, which was a real gun. And I had to put meters in the taxicabs. How do you find vintage taxicab meters and make them look nice and new? But the show is about advertising, so it was mostly a case of recreating newspapers and magazine layouts more than anything else.

There’s an episode in which the firm was going to be promoting women’s lipstick, so we needed a department store countertop display case. My assistant made a lipstick display case from scratch. He found pictures of it, laid it out, designed it, and made it. It was brilliant. We’ve created little household items, little point-of-purchase trinkets, stuff like that. It was an amazing amount of work. You watch the show and you might not notice it because sometimes the camera doesn’t always capture the little things you do. Hopefully, as a whole, it all kind of adds up. You can’t expect every item that you make to be celebrated.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the advertisements that you recreated?

Buckwald: We created advertisements for Gillette shaving cream. We did advertisements for Volkswagen. We worked the campaign for Nixon versus Kennedy. We did advertisements for cigarettes. We created old Coca-Cola ads and a Coca-Cola ad photo shoot, which was a lot of fun because old Coke memorabilia is something that I’ve always been really fond of. I have a bunch of old Coke signs hanging on my wall. I’m not a super big collector, but I have a nice amount of stuff. It’s more for its beauty than anything else.

Collectors Weekly: You mentioned you are a Beatles collector. Can you tell us more about that?

Buckwald: I’ve been collecting probably since about the time I was 12. I collect both memorabilia and records. I have 25 Beatles Butcher covers in all different conditions. I have a first state of the Beatles Butcher cover album in beautiful condition, still with its original cellophane on it, never been touched. I have toys in the original boxes. I have advertising displays. I have movie posters. I have all the lunch boxes. I go for really good condition stuff. I have like six Beatles record players. I’m always on the lookout for those. That, to me, is really a crown jewel in a Beatles memorabilia collection. The record player is just like none other.

Collectors Weekly: When you collect props, you get them from the set that you worked on, right?

Telephones and booze, as seen here in Episode 7, are standard props on Mad Men.

Buckwald: It depends. If I have to buy it or build it, it’s being done with the studio’s money, so it’s not mine. My job is to get it for the studio, keep it clean, keep it in good shape, and make sure it’s in the movie. When the movie is over, sometimes I’ll ask the producer, “Do you mind if I keep this?” because we’ll always have doubles, if not triples. When you’re doing period work, if it’s a hero prop (in other words, something that the actor uses throughout an entire film or episode), I make two of them, because if one gets stolen, is lost, or breaks, we are still going to need it in the next scene.

Sometimes an actor walks down the street carrying something, and then he turns the corner and we see him come from another angle, and those two different shots may be filmed a month apart. If the prop gets broken over the course of that month or if the actor drops it in take one, I need to have another one ready to go for take two.

So when the movie is done, if I have a good relationship with the producer, a lot of times I’ll say, “You know what, I love this. Do you mind if I keep it?” and they’ll say yes or no.

I did American Pie 3: The American Wedding. In that movie, when Jason Biggs proposes to Alyson Hannigan, he gives her a diamond engagement ring. That ring is out of my collection. It’s a knockoff fake ring that was valued at $10, but it became famous because it got screen time, so now it’s been put aside and I display it. It’s on a shelf celebrating being a prop from that movie. So if it starts out in my kit and it becomes famous, then I usually set it aside and I don’t use it again in another movie. It’s becomes collectible to me.

Collectors Weekly: Did you get attached to anything in Mad Men?

Buckwald: The Coca-Cola stuff was terrific. Luckily a bunch of that stuff was from my own collection, which was nice. I rent my personal items to the production, and it’s great because it saves them money and it makes me a couple extra dollars. A lot of the things I liked in Mad Men were the household goods, like an old toaster, and the old cars. I just love looking at the old cars. It really brings you into the moment. I like a little bit of everything from Mad Men simply because it’s a period in time that I love. That pop culture, Americana feel is just fantastic.

Collectors Weekly: If someone is drinking Coca-Cola in Mad Men, would you have to get the actual Coca-Cola bottle from 1960?

Props in this scene from Mad Men, Episode 4, include various magazines, a coffee cup and saucer, and an ashtray.

Buckwald: Yes. Vintage Coca-Cola bottles are pretty easy to get, so I would get the bottles, fill them up with Coke, and use a bottle capper to press the original caps back on. We did an episode when the first canned Coca-Cola was coming out. Coke was trying to promote its first cans, but they were nothing like today’s cans. There’s nothing similar to it. Even the material of the can was different. It was steel as opposed to aluminum. So I had to remake the original Coke can, which was a blast.

Believe or not, we actually found a peanut jar in the New York area that was the same size and shape of a Coke can. It was metal on the top but the sides were cardboard. We made a decal of a Coke label and wrapped it around the jar. By the touch, you could tell that it wasn’t made out of metal, but on camera it looked like a metal Coke can.

It’s always turning one thing into another. That’s what I love about doing this. It’s always last-minute thinking and being innovative—being the mad scientist. It never gets boring because everything is different. In Mad Men, I was a 1960s advertising executive. In The Prestige, I was a 1890s magician. In You Again, I’m a 2009 wedding planner. I’ve been a policeman. I’ve been a doctor. I’ve been a lawyer. I’ve been a gynecologist. I get to step into other people’s lives.

Doing props is like being an actor in the movie because you have to create a character. If I ever went back in time, I might be able to be an advertising executive in the 1960s simply because of the research I’ve done. As a collector, it’s perfect for me because not only do I get to come in contact with a lot of the things I collect and the things I love being around, but I get to play with these things in their original surroundings.

It’s one thing to go to the zoo and see a lion. It’s another thing to go to Africa and run with the lion. And that’s what propping allows me to do.

Collectors Weekly: So what was it like to be an ad exec in the 1960s?

Buckwald: Very frustrating because there was never enough time to get my teeth into it as much as I would’ve liked. It was a different world. If you were a sexist swine, you didn’t cover it up. You were a sexist swine. Today, people will try to be far more politically correct and say the things that they think other people want them to say.

But again, it’s a TV show, and it portrays advertising executives the way the producer wants them to portray them. I’m sure there are many advertising executives who’d go, “I was nothing like that. I would never chase women around the office,” and “I would never consider having an affair.” So that’s why I said earlier that it’s is a TV show, not a history lesson.

If you want to learn about advertising in 1960, watching Mad Men might be an okay primer. If I had to write a college thesis on 1960 advertising, Mad Men would be a footnote. I would watch it, look at it, get a little bit of flavor from it, and then do my real research.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for someone who wants to collect props?

Buckwald: If you want to collect new props, going to the prop master is probably best because you want to get it from the person who knows where it was born.

These days, a lot of studios will hire an auction house to sell key items from a movie to help them recoup some of their production costs. Twenty years ago, the studios couldn’t care less what happened to this stuff. Usually after filming, they were happy for me to take everything back because then they didn’t have to worry about storage. Now, whether a prop belongs to a studio or an independent producer, they paid for it, so it’s theirs. I take great care in wrapping it up, inventorying it, and photographing it for possible reshoots or sequels, but at the end of the day, it belongs to the studio.

Unfortunately, even a prop bought from a studio is not an absolute guarantee of authenticity. I remember one movie that came out, it was a big hit, and an item from it was put up for sale. It turned out not to be the original prop. It was purchased from the same supplier, but for whatever reason the real item was no longer available. I don’t know whether the studio did this unintentionally or if they knew. They could’ve had the best of intentions, but that’s an example of why collecting props is so hard. The item was the same as the original, but its history was a lie.

No one works a prop like January Jones, whose Betty Draper character is outfitted in matching purse and sunglasses for Episode 7 of Mad Men.

Treat buying props the way you treat buying an autograph—even the most honest dealer could be selling you something that they think is original but may not be. Lots of people forge autographs, but forging a prop is even easier because you’re not really forging the thing itself, you’re just forging its lineage, and there’s really no way to trace that. Even with specialty items like a pistol from Star Wars, for example, there are so many people molding and re-sculpting things. I’ve seen items come up for sale when I know I own the only one.

Collectors have to be very careful. You can get props from auctions or from eBay, but most props are not specifically manufactured for a particular movie. Sci-fi props or the Indiana Jones kind of props—items that don’t exist in the real world—are specifically made for a film, but 99 percent of all props are just common household items that all of a sudden get famous. It’s a particular wedding ring that an actress wears, or a particular wristwatch. There’s nothing that gives it uniqueness other than its pedigree in a movie.

I worked on the Terminator TV series, The Sarah Connor Chronicles. There are websites devoted to reproductions of the props I made. I made driver’s licenses and passports, and we made a gun of the future. If you go online, you will find people who have watched the TV show, captured photos from it, and remanufactured different props that I made. You can buy Star Wars light sabers and Star Trek communicators, and even though they’re reproductions, sometimes they look better than the originals.

So really, I think the one key piece of advice is whenever you buy a movie prop, know its source.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you for taking the time to talk with us, Scott!

Kermit the Frog is a popular attraction at the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History.

My day begins with a visit to the office of Dwight Blocker Bowers, who has the enviable job of overseeing the museum’s entertainment collection, which includes the ruby slippers worn by Judy Garland in The Wizard of Oz, the chairs that Carroll O’Connor and Jean Stapleton sat in during the 1970s run of All in the Family, and just about everyone’s favorite Muppet, Kermit the Frog.

Bowers smiles as he looks up from the computer screen behind his desk. Today, among other things, he’s preparing interpretive materials to go along with a new donation to the collection—the Smithsonian, I was surprised to learn, has zero budget for acquisitions. It’s a costume designed by Bob Mackie and worn by Carol Burnett in her legendary “Went With the Wind” sketch, which aired on November 13, 1976. In that sidesplitting pinnacle of television comedy, Burnett and company parodied the scene from Gone With The Wind in which a determined Vivian Leigh sews a dress for herself out of a pair of curtains. In the 1939 classic, Leigh triumphantly descends a staircase wearing her gorgeous creation. For Burnett’s frock, Mackie sewed in a curtain rod across the shoulders and liberally trimmed the dress with drapery tassels. Hilarity ensued and TV history was made.

For Bowers, the “Went With the Wind” dress is a perfect item for the Smithsonian because it cuts across so many interest areas, in this case television, costumes, Carol Burnett herself, and the source of the parody, David O. Selznick’s iconic movie. With room for just five percent of the Smithsonian’s holdings to be on view at any given time, curators like Bowers have to be able to make a strong case for the appeal of an object before they will accept it into the collection, let alone lobby for its presence on the museum’s floor. The Smithsonian, as Bowers likes to say, is in “the forever business,” so he doesn’t accept or seek additions to the collection lightly.

These days, Bowers is on a mission to track down as many costumes as he can to showcase achievements in theater, film, and television. “Costumes bring things to life,” he says, adding that finding good costumes is not as easy as you’d think. While new material is readily available (the Smithsonian just received a Simba mask and Rafiki costume from the musical version of Disney’s The Lion King), costumes from older Broadway musicals are tougher to come by. For example, Bowers would love to get his hands on the cowboy skirt and vest worn by Ethel Merman, who he calls “as timeless as the Santa Fe Super Chief,” in Annie Get Your Gun from 1946. Trouble is, the costume no longer exists because back in those days costume shops routinely recycled the fabric in old costumes for new ones.

A gold Double Eagle pattern coin from 1907, just one of the 1.6-million objects in the Smithsonian's coin-and-currency collection.

From Bowers’ office I am led to the Smithsonian’s high-security coin vault of 1.6-million objects, which doubles as the offices for the coin-and-currency-collections staff. I am greeted by Karen Lee, an exhibit specialist, and we are quickly joined by Richard Doty, who is the Smithsonian’s senior numismatics curator and the author of the definitive America’s Money, America’s Story: A Chronicle of American Numismatic History.

For Doty, coins and currency are not just so many pieces of gold or scraps of paper. This is the history of the country that you are holding in your hands, and both Lee and Doty press rare coins into my palm to ensure that I catch their coin fever. They also want me to see, and feel, the difference between the sunken, incused surface of a 1909 $5 Indian Head gold piece and the raised surface of a 1907 gold Double Eagle, a unique pattern coin. I’m pretty sure the Double Eagle would be worth millions if it ever came up at auction, but Doty casually describes as a “high-relief failure.” My hands shake a bit, but my hosts are too polite to notice.

Next up is Bill Yeingst, Chair of the Smithsonian’s Division of Home and Community Life. It’s Yeingst’s job to recognize that a 1960s lunch counter from Greensboro, North Carolina is a fine example of mid-century chrome, vinyl, and linoleum design, as well as a snapshot of Woolworth lunch counters in countless American cities and towns. But for Yeingst, this counter is mostly important as piece of Civil Rights history. It was at this counter, in 1960, that four African American students were denied service due to the color of their skin. A sit-in ensued, followed by marches, protests, and a boycott of the store. Within six months the Woolworth lunch counter in Greensboro had been desegregated.

A section of the Woolworth lunch counter where, in 1960, Civil Rights history was made.

Not all of Yeingst’s social-history interests are so politically charged. For example, a few years back Yeingst traveled to Oregon to meet with the late Ken Kesey about bringing the author’s famous psychedelically painted “Further” bus from the 1960s into the Smithsonian fold. To hear a recent Wikipedia entry tell it, Kesey refused to sell or donate the bus to the Smithsonian, but for Yeingst the problem was simply one of space. Where would they put a 38-foot-long school bus?

As if to illustrate his point, Yeingst invites me to take a stroll with him down into the Smithsonian’s fabled basement, where the treasures of America’s Attic, as the institution is sometimes called, are really kept.

The scene is not quite like the final shot in Raiders of the Lost Ark, but close. Stretching from wall to wall, floor almost to ceiling, are rows upon rows of furniture and objects, packed eight-deep in places. There are bentwood chairs, trunks and chests, high cases, dressers, desks, dollhouses, lamps, prams, and on and on and on. In one storage room, Yeingst hands me a flashlight since the light from the overheads is obscured in places by the sheer volume of stuff. He points out a number of beautiful marquetry tables from the mid-19th century by Peter Glass, a furniture maker who lived in Scott, Wisconsin. He shows me a patent model submitted by J.T. Grimes in 1848, just one of the Smithsonian’s collection of 20,000 or so patent models. And high up on another shelf are a mismatched pair of George Nakashima chairs, which were purchased by the Smithsonian in the 1960s for public seating but are now part of guess-who’s collection. The reason for the mismatch? The Smithsonian only keeps one example of each object in its vast collection. Otherwise, I suppose, the things might breed.

As I say goodbye to Yeingst and head into the “Stories on Money” exhibit (which is fantastic, by the way), I can’t help but think of the tricky tightrope these Smithsonian curators must have to walk, balancing their personal passions and professional interests with the needs and limits of their institution. In the end, I think we are all pretty darned lucky to have such thoughtful stewards of our national heritage. My strong sense is that the stewards feel pretty darned lucky, too.

Rudy Franchi knows movie posters inside and out. That’s because he’s more than a poster dealer, more than an Antiques Roadshow appraiser, more even than a respected author on the subject. Franchi is also a film buff, as his years running the Bleecker Street Cinema in New York City attest. In this wide-ranging interview, Franchi talks about how he got his start in the movie-poster business, and the life experiences that prepared him for his trade. Franchi can be contacted via www.posterappraisal.com.

I worked at 20th Century Fox in the publicity department, so I was always fascinated with film, and then I moved to Montreal in late ’68, right after I got married. I was in the film business, and I spent all my free time going to antiques shops and buying all kinds of strange collectibles.

Pillow of Death, Universal Pictures, 1945. U.S. design. Image source: www.posteritati.com

Across from where I worked, there was a used bookstore going out of business, and everything was half-priced. When I walked in, I picked up an old magazine lying on the counter and said, “How much?” The woman who owned the place said, “Are you interested in old magazines?” I said, “Sure.” She took me downstairs, and the entire basement was filled with thousands of old magazines—Life, National Geographic, British and French periodicals—dating from the 1880s right through the 1960s. She said I could have the lot for $500. I bought the entire basement.

I hired a taxi for the afternoon and drove back and forth to my flat, which had a vast living room, and I filled it floor to ceiling with magazines. My wife, Barbara, came home from work and she said, “What is this?” and I said, “This is what we’re going to do for the rest our lives.” She said, “When do we start?”

I never went back to work. I opened a little shop and we sold old magazines and other stuff.

A lot of people don’t make it in the business because the first years are so difficult, but we stuck to it even though we were raising three kids. We focused on Art Nouveau and Art Deco collectibles because it was very trendy in New York at the time and people in Montreal hadn’t caught on to it yet. So we were able to buy things cheaply and sell them to people who came up from New York to visit Montreal.

As much we liked the Art Deco and Art Nouveau stuff, it wasn’t really what we enjoyed. So we went into old advertising and country-store stuff like die cabinets and spool cabinets and old signs. We added a lot of graphics and we sold travel and movie posters. Eventually we moved to a little downtown shop in Montreal where we became very successful.

In 1976 the separatist government, the Party Quebecois, came into power in Quebec and business went down to zero because of the upheaval. We had to change the English name of our shop, and there were a lot of restrictions on what you could do. If somebody entered your shop, you had to say hello to the person in French first. You couldn’t speak English until they spoke English, crazy stuff like that. We put up with it, but it really was disastrous for business.

Tourists weren’t coming up to Montreal because they didn’t want to worry about being insulted if they spoke the wrong language. So we looked for a place in the states. We picked Newport, Rhode Island because it was just starting to be a tourist destination. It had been a big Navy town, and the government pulled the Navy out of there and it really almost destroyed the city. But they decided to go after tourism because they had those beautiful Robber Baron-era mansions. We were lucky enough to buy a condo store cheaply right downtown. That first summer the boom started—we were there for 10 years and did very well.

The Thing, Universal Pictures, 1982. U.S. design by Drew Struzan. Image source: www.posteritati.com

After a while, my wife and I decided we were tired of small-town life and we were going to open a shop in New York, but any decent place in New York was too expensive. So we moved our shop to a storefront on Newbury Street in Boston.

We drifted more toward movie posters and memorabilia. We were about 50 percent movie posters and movie memorabilia when we launched a website. An Internet magazine reporter called me recently and said they thought we were the first commercial site on the Internet in 1992.

Frankly, at the time I thought the Web was going to be a big fad like CB radios in the 1980s. But about the second day after the site was up, I got a phone call. Somebody wanted to buy one of the six posters on the site.

It really was like the horse and carriage back then. There were no search engines at that time. People would poke around the Internet and type in different URLs they had heard about, and then somebody came up with the idea of links so you could actually go from one site to another.

As the Web became more and more sophisticated, my wife kept up with all the changes. She was really great. Eventually we were able to put up a site with hundreds of posters on it, and with our webmaster we developed the first shopping cart on the Internet.

Eventually, we had 250,000 posters, press books and press kits on the site—all the movie ephemera you could think of. For a while we had the whole market to ourselves, nobody else was selling movie memorabilia on the Web. Even when other people put up sites in the late 1990s, we were ahead of the game because we could charge sales through Visa and MasterCard.

The business grew, and we wrote a book about movie posters that was published in 2000. In the late ’90s, I was invited to be on Antiques Roadshow. When we were at our peak, before we sold the business, we had the largest selection of original movie memorabilia on the Internet.

Collectors Weekly: Was that the online Nostalgia Factory?

Franchi: Our URL was nostalgia.com. Back when we got the URL in ’92, you called up this telephone number and said you wanted a URL, and they said, “What do you want?” and we said, “Nostalgia,” and they said, “Okay, you got it.” And when I think back, everything was available. Exxon was available, Ford was available, Apple was available. Nobody thought about registering. They thought it was just a joke.

Collectors Weekly: And you focused on all different types of memorabilia, or just ephemeral stuff?

Franchi: We made a decision very early on that the Internet was a place to sell specific collectibles instead of a whole broad range of stuff. So we picked our favorite thing, movie posters, and then stopped dealing with all the other stuff.

Eventually we dropped our retail operation. The last three years, we were in this nice warehouse on the Mystic River in Charleston, which is just next to Boston. There was no retail there. It was way out of the way, and there was no signage or anything. If people wanted to look through posters or sell us stuff, that was fine, but there was no passing trade. We had a smaller staff that could focus just on taking the orders and shipping the material. Matter of fact, our biggest operation was shipping. The orders were automatically generated on the computer.

Collectors Weekly: Now you offer poster appraisals?

Franchi: It’s just a service I started. We do movie posters, travel posters, war posters, rock posters. When I sold the business, I wanted to stay in touch with the marketplace because I was still doing the Roadshow. I felt one way to do that would be to set up this site that offered free verbal appraisals of posters. I also suggest how people can realize a poster’s worth. I suggest whether to sell it to a dealer, which is usually my last choice because dealers are going to offer the lowest price.

But if you need cash right away selling to a dealer is a valid option. A dealer will stand there with pockets full of money, and he’ll buy the stuff on the spot. But usually I suggest the auction houses for getting the best price, especially in the world of posters. The top collectors and dealers prefer to buy from major auction houses because you get a certain guarantee of authenticity. Even online they have very sophisticated graphics where you can examine a poster inch by inch for any flaws.

If I recommend the person to one of the big auction houses and it sells, they sometimes give me what’s called an introductory commission. It’s a small percentage of the price, but that’s not why I do it. Basically, I’m trying to give something back after all these years.

Collectors Weekly: And you’re still doing memorabilia and posters for Antiques Roadshow as well?

A Woman is a Woman (Une Femme est une Femme), Unidex, 1964. French design. Image source: www.posteritati.com

Franchi: Yes. We just finished our 14th season. I’ve been on since the beginning.

I do movie posters and Nick Lowry of Swann Gallery does all the travel posters and war posters. I also look at country-store advertising which includes you name it—everything from Boy Scout collectibles to condom tins.

The rules state that you can’t just come to the show if you have a ticket. You have to bring something with you. So people will grab something as they’re running out the door because they really just want to see the show. They want to see the Keno brothers and get autographs from everybody.

Every once in a while they’re surprised by the thing they grabbed. That metal piece happens to be a colonial candlestick worth $18,000. But that’s a freakish accident. Most of the time, the stuff they bring is not of any value.

Some people bring in their collections and then they sit there and tell us about it. That’s not really what the Roadshow is looking for. The appraiser is supposed to tell them about what they’ve brought.

When you think that we get between 4,000 and 5,000 people and everybody is allowed to bring two objects, that’s 10,000 pieces that 70 appraisers evaluate. Well, the odds of something spectacular coming along are rather high, and it doesn’t have to be spectacular in price. It has to be new, interesting or have a story behind it.

Once this fellow came in with the original artwork for the logos from the fronts of locomotives and all the great rail systems from 1930s. It was just fascinating stuff, but it wasn’t that valuable. I think it came up to $8,000 or $9,000 for about 35 of them, but they wanted to tape it because it’s something we’ve never done.

Most of the stuff I looked at this summer was in the $5,000 to $10,000 range, but they were interesting pieces and they had educational value. After all, this is PBS. We’re rather heavy-handed on educating the public.

Collectors Weekly: Before you started the antiques shops, you were involved in the film business in New York?

Franchi: I started out in art films in the 1960s, independent films and revivals of old films. I ran the Bleecker Street Cinema, which was one of the three major movie revival houses in New York. We showed things like Casablanca and the French classics. That might sound cliché today but back in the early ’60s it was very hard to see these films. There was no TiVo or VCRs or DVDs. The only way to see them was in a movie house, and until we came along, movie houses just weren’t showing those old films. To show them, we had to find the prints and dig up the rights to them. It was real detective work.

We gave premieres to films like Kenneth Anger’s Scorpio Rising and Akira Kurosawa’s The Lower Depths. We showed independent American films, too. The Bleecker Street was a real meeting place in Greenwich Village. We had this huge backroom, and we used one of the corners as an office. On a Sunday afternoon, Andy Sarris, Jonas Mekas, Ralph Ellison, and all the young critics would gather there.

I published a little film magazine, and we were the first ones to translate material from “Cahiers du Cinema,” which was the new-wave magazine where Truffaut and Godard and Alain Resnais worked. We sort of became the American voice of the auteur theory. Andy Sarris was a major proponent of it, and he wrote for us. We were attacked by a lot of people. Pauline Kael said some nasty things about us. She never liked the auteur theory. But it became a very powerful force because it eventually led to the ’70s.

I distributed a few films and produced a few shorts. I was involved in that whole ’60s period of young, independent American filmmakers. The French cinema was my real love because I became very friendly with Truffaut. Whenever he came to New York, he would come to the Bleecker Street and hang out. We did two major film interviews with him about the auteur theory. Those films about the birth of the auteur theory in France have become seminal.

8 1/2, Italsky Film, 1964. Czech design by Bedrich Dlouhy. Image source: www.posteritati.com

We never knew who would walk through the door because all the new-wave directors had our card, and they would just walk in, and we would just sweep them up into our little, crazy world. We’d all go out to dinner together, and we’d swap stories and just enjoy each other. It was a very nice, open atmosphere.

Pauline, John Simon, Andy Sarris and I were always exchanging ideas. There was competition among us to be the first to write about something.

The only problem with running the Bleecker Street Cinema was we were always all broke. I had been working with the Montreal Film Festival as their U.S. representative. At one point, they wanted to open the festival with Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard, the film with Burt Lancaster. 20th Century Fox had the rights, so I went over to Fox and negotiated to open the festival with them. And I said, “Now, who’s going to make the opening announcement?” And they said, “You do it. Frankly, we really don’t care about this movie. It’s not going to make any money.”

So they gave me free rein to do the publicity for the Montreal Film Festival that year. I went to town on it, and I got a big break in the New York Times and Variety. And Fox called me and said, “How’d you do that?” and I said, “It’s what I do. I know a lot of people.” So they hired me to be their publicist.

Well, that turned out to be a disaster because as soon as I went to Fox, all my friends thought I had sold out and had nothing to do with me. I couldn’t get a word in any of the little magazines or anything. But it turned out that I was very good at putting on big events. When they needed a party or premiere, I was really great at finding different places to have parties and putting on publicity stunts for premieres. I did that for three years, but eventually I was worn out by the high life.

That’s when I met my wife. She had two kids, young children. And I didn’t want to raise them in New York. This was the late ’60s, and the city was a desperate place at that time. It was all right to be single but raising kids there was tough unless you were fabulously wealthy and sent them to the best private schools. So we moved to Montreal where I had a lot of contacts from the film festival and at the National Film Board. I worked in film up there for a while until I struck out on my own with the collectibles.

There is interest now in looking at the early ’60s when a whole bunch of the ideas that are now very important in the movie business germinated. At the time, Hollywood studios had lost their way; they didn’t know what people wanted to see anymore. They were making the same old spectacular Hollywood films, but nobody was coming to see them. And this bunch of young directors like Francis Ford Coppola and Steven Spielberg and George Lucas, Peter Bogdanovich came along and they said, “We want to make these kinds of films.” And the studios said, “Go ahead. Do something. Maybe that’ll work.” It did work, and it made the director the boss in Hollywood.

In the early ’60s there were a few noted directors like Alfred Hitchcock, but they would use the director to sell the film. They would say, “It’s going to be a Hitchcock film.” And because he was fairly successful, they left him alone to do what he wanted. Or let’s say it’s a George Cukor film. They’d bill it as a sophisticated comedy. But for the most part, Hollywood publicized the actors and actresses. They would give as much prominence to a producer as they would to a director back then. But eventually because of the spread of the auteur theory, the director became the king in Hollywood and still is today. They’re the ones who drive the industry’s artistic end. We were very influential in that.

Collectors Weekly: Does that kind of open atmosphere still exist with directors of independent movies?

Vertigo, Paramount Pictures, 1958. U.S. design by Saul Bass. Image source: Margaret Herrick Library Catalog

Franchi: It’s now a massive business. Directors get together at Sundance. There’s the famous story about the Venice Film Festival back in the early ’50s about Orson Welles, Alfred Hitchcock, and Roberto Rossellini sitting at a table talking. Some film critics were at another table and they said, “To be a little bird and hover there and hear these masters talking about cinema.” So one of the guys went over and asked Orson Welles, “Orson, what aspects of cinema were you talking about?” “Well, we were talking about how to recapture the Argentine percentage of our grosses that had been held back.” They were talking money.

What happens today is that all these independent filmmakers, they gather someplace like Sundance, and all they talk about is distribution and money. There’s no time to talk about art anymore. It’s too desperate, and the methods of distribution are shifting rapidly. Movies are streaming on the Internet because there’s just no way that all of these films can get through the usual distribution channels. There aren’t enough movie theaters to show them, and there aren’t enough people who want to see them in movie theaters.

When people want to do a night out at the movies they want something big. Even if it’s an offbeat, uninteresting film, they really want to see something that has been talked about and reviewed. There’s very little room now for the distribution of offbeat films. Through technology, though, they’re finding other methods for getting their movies out, but it’s hard to calibrate how many people are seeing films on the Internet.

People aren’t going to make films if no one looks at them. All the major studios had a division for independent films, and they’re closing them one by one. So production is dropping rapidly. There are a lot of young people making films, but they’re particular, strange films.

Collectors Weekly: What kinds of posters did you specialize in?

Franchi: When I ran the movie theaters, I handled tons of film posters and I knew the different formats. Aside from the basic poster which is called a one-sheet, there were lobby cards, special lobby cards, inserts, three-sheets, six-sheets, window cards, banners, you name it. There was just so much paper that was produced by the studios to promote films. There are hardly any one-sheets anymore because now they’re going to digital posters.

Today it’s 27 by 40 inches. It’s the poster that you see in a movie theater when you go in. Now they’re able to create digital posters that they can change every minute. They can change the language and the images. It’ll be impossible to collect those.

Collectors Weekly: So is movie-poster collecting strictly vintage?

Franchi: Well, there’s a big problem with modern posters because as soon as the poster comes out, it’s immediately reproduced and it’s just about impossible to tell the original from the copy. You can get some directly from the movie theater so that at least you know it was sent to the movie theater by one of the majors. But in the secondary market, it’s impossible to prove that to somebody who wants to buy it from you because it’s identical to the laser copy. So most people are buying them just to hang them up for a while because they enjoyed the movie.

Shock Corridor, Allied Artists Pictures, 1963. U.S. design. Image source: www.posteritati.com

But there’s a huge market in movie memorabilia. An auction house like Heritage sells the early Universal horror films for hundreds of thousands of dollars. So there is a tremendous market. It took a while for the big money to move into it. Some of the big directors like Spielberg and Lucas had been in it, but what you need is a lot of people with deep pockets bidding against each other on a wide number of posters. And that’s happening now.

The most that anyone has paid for a movie poster is $800,000, which was for the German three-sheet of Metropolis. I don’t think it’s going to be long before we see a $1 million movie poster. It’s most likely going to be one of the great horror films. That’s where all the big money is going—Frankenstein, Dracula, The Black Cat, all those early 1930s films. The Mummy, of course, all those early ’30s Universal horror movies pull in the big bucks. But there are people who will spend thousands on a single lobby card from a musical, a rare lobby card. It’s a very wide market. There are a lot of different collectors in it now, and they’re beginning to spend real money. So it’s become worthwhile for major dealers and auction houses to court these people.

The key to anything to do with movie posters is quality, and there are a lot of rogues out there. They’re reproducing the older posters very cleverly. I would never buy a movie poster now even with all my expertise except from a major auction house because any major poster has to be submitted to a whole bunch of forensic tests, black light, X-rays, and even chemical tests. The forgers have gotten very clever because they have all these other techniques at hand. They’ll take an old poster, some worthless poster from a C movie, and carefully scrape off the image on that poster and lay on a brand new image via laser printing, onto a classic poster with the old paper. It looks great, and it’s enough to fool even some experts. These are posters that are selling in the hundreds of thousands. So you have to be very careful.

My favorite story is back in about 1999 or 2000. A Mickey Mouse animation celluloid from the early 1930s, very rare, sold for $400,000. Steven Spielberg bought it. A dealer came to him and said, “I have another one from the same film with a different theme.” And Spielberg looked and he said, “I love this. I’d love to own this.” And the guy said, “Yes. Well, you can have it for $200,000.” Spielberg said, “You know what, if you ever put it at auction, be sure to call me.”

People with real money would rather pay more and be protected than be taken advantage of. For Spielberg, it’s about more than the $200,000 difference. He doesn’t want to be taken advantage of just because he’s Steven Spielberg.

Collectors Weekly: Other than Universal horror films from the 1930s, what other eras are collectible?

Dr. Strangelove, Columbia Pictures, 1964. U.S. design by Tomi Ungerer. Image source: www.posteritati.com

Franchi: 1950s science fiction, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Thing, all the great classic science-fiction movies from the ’50s because the graphics in the posters are wonderful. Horror stuff from the ’50s is the next biggest area. Those sell from the low thousands right up to $100,000 to $200,000 for some of the hard-to-find classic images.

There are people who collect the great musicals like The Wizard of Oz. It’s a highly collectible film. Surprisingly, some classics like Gone With the Wind aren’t as valuable because so much stuff was produced to promote it that it’s still washing around out there. Even with a film like Casablanca, the one-sheet only sells for $25,000 to $30,000. Now, here’s everybody’s favorite movie, but the problem is that it’s an ugly poster. It doesn’t capture the nature of the film. There are some French and Italian Casablanca posters that sell for a higher price because they’re more evocative. There are whole books now about that genre of collecting.

Collectors Weekly: How many posters were typically made for one movie?

Franchi: Everybody produced posters. And most countries would change the artwork. The French and Italians make much larger posters, and the English use a horizontal poster called a quad. It’s 40 by 30 inches, but it’s horizontal. Sometimes they would use, especially the British, the key art or the basic graphic elements of a poster, but often the British, Italians, and French completely changed the poster.

The most interesting foreign posters are the Polish ones. They did such advanced graphics that sometimes you can’t tell unless you speak the language what the movie was. Once you get hooked on them, it’s like a disease collecting them because some of the treatments of the titles are so bizarre.

People are collecting Japanese posters now, too. There’s really no end to what people will collect. There are Turkish, Czechoslovakian, and Egyptian posters.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the rarest posters?

Franchi:  The rarest of them all is Metropolis. Paramount bought the rights, and they released it in 1927 but in a very limited way, and various small pieces of released material have shown up, but never a full poster. I predict that a U.S. original of the one-sheet for Metropolis will be the first $1 million movie poster. There are quite a few posters that are lost. As a matter of fact, when you go back to the silent era, there are thousands of films that nobody has ever found a poster for. It’s also interesting that there are thousands of posters for films that have disappeared.

Collectors Weekly: When did they start making posters for movies? Was that always a way of advertising?

Grand Hotel, MGM, 1932. U.S. design. Image source: Margaret Herrick Library Catalog

Franchi: They started in the late 1890s. The first posters advertised movies in general. And they’re almost like stock posters. There was a beautiful poster with a woman usually and a projector flashing light and where the projector flashed, there was a blank space where you could put the title of the movie that was going to be shown.

The 1890s was one of the great golden ages of posters for theaters and restaurants. And there was a big fad back then to collect them. There was even a magazine called “The Poster.” The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ research library, the Margaret Herrick Library, has tens of thousands of movie posters in its collection. Their real big thing is to acquire a one-sheet from every Academy Award winning film. They were missing two as of 1998, Cavalcade and Grand Hotel. And when I was doing the auctions for Christie’s in New York, it popped up in the mail one day, a little photograph, 4 by 5 inches.

I open up this envelope, and it’s a picture of the one-sheet for Grand Hotel. I called the fellow up in Florida. His father had worked at MGM as a carpenter and that was his favorite movie. He wanted to know if it was worth anything. Well, eventually we put it into the Christie’s auction, and the Academy bought it for $50,000.

So, they’re only looking for one more. If anybody comes up with a one-sheet for Cavalcade, they know they have a customer for it. So you can see even though there were thousands upon thousands of posters produced for each film, they’ve just disappeared, most of them. They were thrown away. It’s surprising that on some horrible movies, people turn up a quantity of posters, like several hundreds in a box someplace, but nobody ever turns up a box of posters for Grand Hotel.

Collectors Weekly: Were people aware of the artists who made these posters?

Franchi: No. Until the last 10 years, people were not that aware. Saul Bass did Hitchcock posters, Vertigo and that type of thing. But there were dozens of artists who worked on movie posters, and it’s only in the last few years that a tremendous amount of research has been done about that.

Now there are people who collect by the artist because their work was so distinguished. In Italy, there’s Ballester. Dave Kehr, the New York Times critic, wrote a book a few years ago about Ballester called The Italian Poster. There are people like Reynold Brown who, in the States, did all of the great horror posters and science-fiction posters in the ’50s. Al Hirschfeld did movie posters back in the ’30s for MGM. He did most of the Marx Brothers posters. All this stuff is slowly emerging from the research. There are college courses on film, of course, and people are even doing PhDs about poster artists. So there’s a lot of attention being paid to the field.

Collectors Weekly: Besides posters, have you noticed any major trends in movie memorabilia?

Creature from the Black Lagoon, Universal Pictures, 1954. U.S. design by Reynold Brown. Image source: Margaret Herrick Library Catalog

Franchi: The trend is toward quality. It used to be people collected because it was fun, and it was cheap. And now that prices have gotten so high, condition has become very important. It used to be that posters would be heavily restored. When people first started collecting movie posters in the early ’90s, heavy restoration was accepted, but as other copies emerged, collectors became fussier about restoration.

For example, in travel posters and war posters, any kind of restoration is frowned upon unless it’s really necessary. The Margaret Herrick Library is no longer restoring movie posters—they are stabilizing them. They are having them paperbacked and leaving them as is. The standard had been to have the posters linen-backed with a duck canvas. It preserves the poster, but it doesn’t totally stabilize it. Paper backing is preferred.

But the collectors at the time wanted their posters to look really nice and they didn’t want to see those ugly lines because most old movie posters were folded, and there were little holes and tears, and they wanted all that patched up. Now, the more restoration a poster has, the lower its value. It’s very easy to spot the restoration with a black light. We used to say the early posters were dipped in paint. In other words, they were heavily restored. And you would actually see layers of paint on them, pieces where whole sections had been re-created. People paid a lot of money for those posters back then, in the thousands or tens of thousands. But now they come out onto the market and they sell for nothing because they’re over-restored.

So it’s a real fight for quality and purism. Nobody wants a poster that’s in tatters. But the problem is you have to find an original that’s in fairly good shape and then not fool around with it to any great degree. That’s the real key. If an old poster looks perfect, that’s a bad sign. Minor restoration is all right, but anything major—painting, big paper replacement—that’s death. You’ll have a hard time reselling that poster. If you want to enjoy it for yourself, that’s fine. It’s like a shelf piece. It’s like a cracked piece of valuable china. You can always turn the cracked part to the wall and enjoy it, but it’s not going to have any value. The same with an over-restored poster, you might as well buy a reproduction.

Collectors Weekly: Why is poster collecting so confusing?

Franchi: I get tons of people who say, “I just found a Wizard of Oz poster.” The problem is there were tons of reproductions. There was one company in the 1960s called Portal that reproduced hundreds of different movie posters. These things show up regularly at Roadshow. People e-mail me about, “Well, I have an original Frankenstein poster,” and I say, “Look at the lower left-hand corner. It says Portal Publications, California. And then there’s a zip code.” The zip code arrived in 1962, so it’s hardly an original poster.

Othello, United Artists, 1952. Belgian design. Image source: www.posteritati.com

Then there were posters that were re-releases. Now, these are original posters, but they were printed when the film was coming around a second time. Hollywood re-releases films three to four times over a period of decades. And at the beginning, they would put a little R next to it. For example, if Frankenstein was 1931 or it was ’32, then in 1939 they re-released it and they put an R39 at the lower right hand corner. That means re-released ’39. But in later years, they dropped that and they just did a whole new poster for it, and didn’t indicate that it was a re-release. That’s the expertise you need because you can pick up a poster and say, “Hey, I got a Frankenstein poster,” but it might be from 1958. That’s why it’s very confusing.

And then there are all the sizes. People think lobby cards are posters. They were the 11-by-14 cards that came in sets. But then again, not all of them came in sets of eight. There were sometimes sets of nine and sometimes sets of 12. It’s very arcane and specialized. I wrote a whole book about it. It’s called Miller’s Movie Collectibles. You can buy it on Amazon. I’ve seen it as low as like 89 cents. That hurts a little bit, but what can you do?

The introduction tells you all about the different formats of posters. There are values in there, but the book was published in 2000, so you have to use the values as sort of a scale. X is more valuable than Y. The important thing is it explains what the terms mean: insert, one-sheet, three-sheet, six-sheet. And it does the same thing for the foreign posters. As I say in the book, dealers try to blind you. They use arcane terms like a code. Well, if you can break the code, you have a good leg up on talking to dealers. If they don’t think you know what you’re talking about they will try and fool you.

It’s like the story about the scorpion and the frog. There’s a stream and the scorpion comes up to the frog and says, “Hey, Frog, will you take me across the stream?” He says, “Are you crazy? You’re going to stab me, and we’ll both die.” And the scorpion says, “Why would I do that? Then I would die too.” So the frog says, “Hop on.” They get halfway across and the frog feels the stinger come into him and he says, “Hey, why did you do that?” and the scorpion says, “I can’t help it. It’s my nature.” It’s the same with antiques dealers. They really can’t help themselves. I can tell you stories about selling things to my mother and finally getting the best price out of her.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Rudy, for taking the time to share your stories with us.

Dolph Gotelli is a professor emeritus of design at the University of California, Davis. Gotelli is well known in the Christmas community for his elaborate exhibits and seasonal displays, which feature items from his collections of ephemera, Santa Clauses, and Christmas-related toys. Recently, we spoke with Gotelli about Christmas in the Victorian era, which is his specialty and chief passion. A member of the Golden Glow of Christmas Past,  Gotelli can be contacted via his website, DolphGotelli.com.

I grew up in a home without any antiques. As a small kid, I started decorating my parents’ home for Christmas. I don’t know what influenced me, perhaps being alone and living in a rural environment might have had something to do with it because I engaged in a lot of fantasy play. I made a lot of ornaments out of stuff that I had lying around, and I decorated using things that I found in the garden.

This ring-toss game is part of Dolph Gotelli's collection of Santa Claus ephemera.

Through the years, I became more interested in Christmas decorations and met a few collectors, but my interest really took off when I was attending San Francisco State University. The major stores in the city had incredible glass ornaments.

One store that really went all out was Podesta Baldocchi in downtown San Francisco. It’s one of the city’s oldest and most famous florists. They would create their Christmas displays just before Thanksgiving—people would stand in long lines to get into the store just to see them. Podesta Baldocchi would fill its store with fresh, 14-foot silver-tip trees, maybe 20 of them, and each tree would be decorated in a special theme with its own ornaments. Craftspeople would work all year to make ornaments just for them. Glass ornaments came from Italy; some were made by local craftspeople. I had a friend who made some special sequin ornaments every year for the store.

The Emporium used to import wonderful glass ornaments, and that’s really how I got started. As I traveled, I got even more involved. At some point I joined Golden Glow of Christmas Past, and the rest is history. I’ve been collecting ever since.

I started designing exhibits with my collections, and in 1977 I organized what I think was probably the first major exhibition in the country on Santa Claus. The show was at the Crocker Art Museum. I received a grant to travel the United States to research Santa collections from major museums, including the Smithsonian, the Henry du Pont Museum, and the Margaret Woodbury Strong Museum. We published a little catalog, which is still being sold.

The exhibition had 800-plus Santa Clauses. I traced the origins of Santa Claus, starting with Saint Nicholas and working my way through how he came to America and all his different aspects. I think that had something to do with the mania that happened afterward. It got national coverage—I would go back to the East Coast and I’d see people with my little catalog. All of a sudden, everyone was more interested in Santa Claus because I showed every type—from 1880s Germany to occupied Japan, right up to the 1970s.

We also had a section of work by contemporary artists like Bob Arneson and Joan Brown, who I invited to do a Santa Claus art piece. It was a wonderful show.

My main focus now is paper. I think I have a world-class collection of ephemera based on imagery of early Santa Clauses and early celebrations of Christmas from late 1850s and 1860s. I cut off at about 1919—I don’t really collect from the 1920s or ’30s onwards. That’s just too new for me.

I started buying antique toys and dolls and other related childhood things, which I would use in displays and installations. I did a lot of work for Macy’s in San Francisco. I’ve done a lot of museum installations with Victorian trees and toys and all that. And I do a lot of lecturing on the subject. This year [2009] I am creating an exhibit in the town of Folsom for their history museum.

Collectors Weekly: Do your current displays focus on your ephemera items?

Gotelli: No. The title of this year’s show is An Enchanted Christmas. I designed shadowboxes that are installed into a wall, like the mini-windows that you might have seen at the turn of the century. They’re filled with scenes of my antique toys and dolls in little settings. There’s a Christmas kitchen with animals preparing Christmas dinner. There are old Santa Clauses. So I take my objects and arrange them to tell little stories. It’s very popular.

I did a display at the Crocker in 2001 called “Compliments of the Season: A Victorian Christmas.” That was a phrase used in the Victorian period for Merry Christmas. They didn’t say “Merry Christmas” as we do today. And that’s what the show was about. It was all Victorian pieces, a huge show in three galleries. Again, I created display cases where I showed activities from the Victorian period, such as women sitting in a parlor and working on scrapbooks.

My main focus and interest is how people celebrated Christmas during the Victorian period, because that was the time when Christmas really excelled. That was the real renaissance.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us a little bit about the spirit of the Victorian Christmas?

An antique Christmas board game. Image source: Golden Glow of Christmas Past.

Gotelli: Prior to that period, children were expected to be quiet in their homes, but as the impending visit of Father Christmas became more and more important, children became more involved in the events leading up to the holiday. Games started to appear during the latter part of the period, as well as Christmas-themed gifts for children.

Children’s books had Christmas covers. There may have been standard fairy tales inside, but the cover would have a Santa Claus on it and a title like Santa’s Book or Santa’s Fantasy Christmas Voyage. Some had stories that were specifically about Santa Claus. Puzzles were Christmas-themed, and big block Santa Claus puzzles made of paper were very prevalent. They were printed on wooden square blocks.

Board games in which you would move little icons were also very popular. There were many different Santa Claus-themed board games, as well as wall games. I have a game called Santa Claus Party from the time when children had Christmas parties for their friends. These were very elaborate gatherings where the children would play party games themed around Santa Claus, like the one in which blindfolded children would try to put a pipe into Santa’s mouth. It was like pin the tail on the donkey, basically.

Jack-in-the-boxes, or “surprise boxes,” were popular toys of the period, so there were Santa Clauses that would pop out of boxes. The boxes had Santa Claus imagery on them and were made out of celluloid or other materials. Pyrography, which is a wood-burning technique, was another big thing. You would give or get your gifts, and sometimes there’d be Santa Clauses burned onto the outsides of the boxes.

Food was a really important element, as was the experience of sitting at the Christmas table with the Christmas poppers or crackers, as they’re called in England. People would pull on them and they would pop. Inside would be a hat and some little tokens.

Then there was twelfth night, when the family would enjoy a special cake with a Christmas fairy on it. Little tokens were baked into the cake, so if your Aunt Lucy was a spinster and she got a wedding ring in her slice, maybe she’d get married.

In Victorian times, Saint Nicholas was often portrayed as a tall and thin man.

The gathering of the greens was another important event of the Victorian period. People would go out to the countryside and cut fresh greenery. This was done last-minute and the greenery wasn’t put up until Christmas Eve, not the day after Halloween like it is now. There were all kinds of rituals and stories about how certain types of greenery brought good luck, et cetera.

The Victorian period was a time when a lot of our Christmas customs were formalized. We still take a lot of our influences from that period, but much of the Victorian view of Christmas has disappeared. Even Santa Claus has disappeared to an extent. For example, children today have an entirely different image of what Santa looks like. In Victorian times, the Saint Nicholas figure was tall and thin. Our children today who see these antique objects don’t even know that he is the original Santa Claus.

I’m trying to keep Santa Claus alive. That’s one of my goals. I think that a lot of stories have dismissed him. I know a lot of collectors who are very upset that the word “Christmas” has disappeared. “Holiday” is not the same. It’s not a holiday tree; it’s a Christmas tree. This goes back to tradition. It’s not just religious, even though there is a religious component to it and the basis does go back to a Christian origin. It’s still a Christmas tree. That’s one of my pet peeves. Last year, I noticed that Macy’s started using “Christmas” again, which I thought was really good. For a while it was politically incorrect to use that word.

Of course, the Christmas tree has evolved, too. That’s another area entirely. I have a great deal of early photographs showing original trees, and they were very different from the ones today. The Victorians put their gifts on the tree, but it wasn’t a plethora of gifts. Each child would get one or two gifts at the most, and Mother and Father would have a gift. And they would hang these on the tree, unless it was something large.

That’s what I do in my displays. I’ve been very influenced by all my research, so when I do trees, I always put dolls on them, as well as all the other things that would have been hung. It’s not just a tree of ribbons like today. The trees were literally decorated.

Collectors Weekly: Besides actual presents on the tree, there were still ornaments, right?

Gotelli: Yes, of course. Glass ornaments and glass lanterns were used. Candles were used, but they were only lit on Christmas Eve and maybe on Christmas Day. All the wonderful glass lanterns were invented during this period. You would put a candle inside of them, and that was better than just having the candles dripping on the tree, even though they did have open candleholders as well. Most collectors have both. Some candleholders were made of metal with printed images of Santa Claus and angels to hold the candles. Oftentimes families would place a bucket of water near the tree because there were a lot of fires.

A lot of paper was used on the trees. If the ornaments weren’t glass, they were made out of paper. Of course, if a candle hit a piece of paper, it was a disaster, so glass ornaments became popular. If the family was wealthy they would buy pressed cardboard ornaments, the Dresdens, which are highly sought after today. That’s probably the most sought-after ornament in the world of Christmas collecting. They’ve gotten very pricey because they were made out of cardboard—children played with them and then they were thrown away, which is why they are so scarce.

Collectors Weekly: Was Christmas always focused on children or did that come about during the Victorian era?

Gotelli: No. It has always been about children. Dickens wrote that Christmas was a time for children and when everyone can be a child.

It was always a family holiday, but there was more focus on children during the Victorian period. People spent more time with their children. We’re talking about different classes. The wealthy homes, of course, had nannies or someone who would look after the children.

Collectors Weekly: Are Victorian traditions practiced all over the world?

Dolph Gotelli's collection of Victorian Christmas ephemera includes countless early, and varied, depictions of Santa Claus.

Gotelli: I travel a great deal and if I haven’t been to a certain spot, I always ask people what the traditions are like there. It’s interesting to see. The Christmas tree is becoming more important in Europe—it never had been before. A friend of mine who travels to Italy frequently said that they put up Christmas trees, and the Japanese do as well. I went to Japan many years ago, and they had huge Santa Clauses on the facades of their department stores in October. Every store in Singapore is as decorated as a department store in New York City. Asian countries really pick up on Christmas. They don’t celebrate for the same reasons, but it is part of their environment now.

I have a big collection of international Santa Clauses that were done in obscure countries that have their own versions of Santa. A lot of them were made for export, but they still display them in their own country.

Of course, movies have had a huge influence, but a negative one. People see what I call the “bad images.” Santa movies make me crazy. They don’t have anything to do with the real Christmas idea. Usually, the Santa Clauses are very mean-spirited, which is something that I don’t condone. That’s what the average child sees today. That’s all they see. They see all these movies at home on their screens, and that’s all they have to go by.

The Night Before Christmas is probably not read much anymore. That was very traditional. As a child in the late 1940s, you always had someone who read you that poem. It was important. I don’t know why that hasn’t stuck around. I’d like to find out how many people even have that book anymore. I know it’s still around and you can buy it, but I just wonder how many parents actually read it to their children.

Collectors Weekly: During the Victorian era, who made Christmas items?

Gotelli: England had a small Christmas industry, but most items were made in Germany. That’s why the German stuff is the most sought after. The Germans really started the tradition. They got into Christmas more than anyone else. They had cottage industries, especially in East Germany. This was the only work that they would do. They would make wooden ornaments and toys to hang on the tree. The glassblowing started in East Germany and is centered around the village of Lauscha. They worked all year on Christmas ornaments. Women would sit at home and do detail work on Dresden ornaments. Everything was handcrafted.

Woolworth was the first U.S. retailer to get really smart and import glass ornaments from Germany. German glass ornaments were first sold in America at Woolworth five-and-dime stores.

So it started in Germany. Now, just about all contemporary Christmas items are made in China, although there is a small group of American artists who are still producing handmade ornaments.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us a little bit about the ephemera items you’ve collected?

A Victorian Christmas postcard showing two characters pulling on a Christmas popper.

Gotelli: I have primarily early greeting cards. These came out before postcards, which are very popular with collectors today. Postcards have pretty much stayed collectible whereas a lot of the other Christmas stuff has been dropped. There are not a lot of people collecting it right now. Through the years, I’ve noticed some things get very hot and everyone wants them, and then they drop off and something else picks up. Like teddy bears—they are no longer the major collectible items they were 20 years ago.

I like the pop-up cards. You would open them up and there would be scenes like a Santa Claus coming out of a forest, all on different layers like in a pop-up book. This is what I mostly hunt for. They’re hard to find because paper is very fragile, and through the years the layers would break off. Every time I show one in a museum, little edges come off because they are so old.

I also collect Christmas-related toy pieces that are made of paper, like little stand-up Santa Clauses. They were mostly produced by Raphael Tuck, who was a major manufacturer of wonderful paper toys. His company made jumping jacks out of paper with Santa Claus imagery and dressed animals—they were called marionettes.

Chromolithography was the earliest form of printing. It was the best quality, with beautiful colors. It was used for paper favors that were put on tables, like little place cards with an image on them or cards that had been diecut into shapes. Many diecuts were designed with tinsel decorations to hang on the tree. There were paper garlands that were also put on the tree that said “Happy Christmas,” with letters made in the shape of holly, all diecut.

Another thing I collect are diecut paper ornaments with images of Santa Claus, angels, snow, children dressed in snow costumes, etc. They look like little toys. There were diecut men and women dressed in colored paper and various kinds of fabric that were designed to be hung on the Christmas tree. So there are all kinds of paper-related items in a whole range of categories. I’m probably forgetting some others, but these are the main ones.

Collectors Weekly: Is that all from the Victorian era?

Gotelli: Yes, most of it. Some of it went through the teens up to the 1920s. Paper ornaments were made in the ’20s and ’30s. But yes, most are from the Victorian era, and I usually only collect from that period. At some point you have to draw the line because there’s only so much you can collect. You can’t do it all.

Less easy to find are the window-display pieces that were put in store windows to advertise the diecuts, but I have many of those. They were over-scale versions of the small ones that you could buy inside the store. They’re about 33 inches tall. And then they also made paper window displays that actually moved, like the paper Santa Claus doll. His head and his eyeballs would move back and forth. These are called trade stimulators, and they were put in the windows of general stores, department stores, wherever Christmas stuff was sold, to lure people into the stores.

A lot of people collect Christmas ads, point-of-purchase designs, ads with Santa Claus themes. So this is another area of Christmas ephemera that’s also collectible. That’s actually an important one. And a lot of advertising collectors like those pieces, too. All these collections overlap.

Collectors Weekly: How do adults react to your displays?

One of Dolph Gotelli's popular Christmas tree displays.

Gotelli: It’s wonderful. My exhibitions pull in all ages. People my age or older come to these exhibits with their grandchildren, or parents bring their children. They tell the stories and there’s a great sense of nostalgia when you see generations looking at the exhibits. I’m very much into rituals and celebrations and wanting to keep all of this going.

A lot of people go back to the exhibitions many times, and bring new people. I think we need that in our society right now. I think we’re going through a difficult time, and fantasy is important. Now more than ever, we really need this kind of imagery, so I’m hoping that a lot of people will come this year. I think it’s a way of just getting back to childhood. People ask me all the time, “Why don’t you take all these wonderful toys and animate them?” Well, that’s completely against my philosophy, because I believe that each individual, whether it’s an adult or a child, should imagine what’s happening in the scenario.

Using our imagination is missing today. The technological toys are doing everything for the child, so there’s no opportunity for them to make links using their imagination. They sit in front of their screens, watching videos and movies and playing video games. Even the toys are electronic, most of them. I call them hard toys. There are very few soft toys left.

Every time I talk to a group, I ask how many people grew up with teddy bears. My UC Davis students were 18 and older, and it was amazing how many fondly remembered having a soft toy as a child. I have a lot of friends who don’t allow their children to watch regular television and limit their games, but they are in the minority. The majority of children now are used to seeing a lot of imagery. They don’t have to imagine what the story is going to be. It’s presented to them.

So I don’t want my exhibits to be animated because that’s the most boring thing in the world. You go to the mall and you see this elf moving his arm back and forth. That’s it; it’s over. But if you can look at something within a scenario, you can imagine what the story is or make up your own. That’s what I do, and that’s why I intentionally use a lot of detail in my work. This one room, for example, is 36 inches wide and four feet high and maybe 35 inches deep, and it might have 300 or 400 little objects in it. There are little things that I put into it that I want people to look for and find. I want people to spend time looking closely at these vignettes.

Collectors Weekly: When is your next exhibit?

Gotelli: The show at the Folsom History Museum runs from November 21, 2009, through February 7, 2010, and there will be 30 or more vignettes. Folsom, California is in an early gold-rush area that’s now a suburb of Sacramento. There’s a historic street with buildings from the gold rush, and the history museum is on this street. So it’s a perfect venue for me because I like to work in historic areas. It’s fun.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for someone who is just starting to collect antique Christmas items?

Detail from one of Dolph Gotelli's Christmas scenarios.

Gotelli: You need to be very wealthy if you want to start collecting today. It’s very difficult for young collectors. People want to buy the best of the best and you really have to have money because this stuff is real art. There are some major auction houses that deal primarily with Christmas items—if not for them, you probably wouldn’t find certain items.

There are very few young people collecting. I think that younger people today, Generation X, are not interested in antiques. They’re more interested in technology. I think it’s a real diminishing field for collectors.

But if you were going to start out, you could try to find some bargains. You have to be very cautious today because a lot of stuff is being replicated, and it’s very hard to tell the difference unless you’re a seasoned collector. I have friends who have bought Santa Clauses that were supposed to be from the turn of the century, and they turned out to have been made yesterday in Germany. If you’re going to pay $1,500 for a Santa Claus, you want it to be what it’s supposed to be and not a reproduction.

So you really have to be cautious and educated if you’re going to get into some of these fields. It’s a sad thing to say. Maybe that’s why we don’t have a lot of new people coming up. It’s not easy to find stuff that’s really old. You can still go to flea markets and find newer things, so you still can collect Christmas, like ornaments and figures that were made in the ’40s, ’50s, and beyond. And you never know when a surprise antique Christmas ornament might appear.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you so much for talking with us about Christmas, Dolph!

(Unless noted, all images in this article courtesy Dolph Gotelli of DolphGotelli.com)

Jerry and Darla Arnold know how to do Christmas right. With thousands of antique Christmas ornaments in their collection, it takes almost two-dozen trees just to showcase a fraction of their bounty every year. Recently, Jerry spoke with us and shared his deep knowledge of German Christmas ornaments in the United States and the variety of materials used to make them—from the embossed cardboard ornaments made in Dresden to the wire-strung glass-bead ornaments of Czechoslovakia.

About 42 years ago, my wife, Darla, went to a very large white elephant sale and found a box of antique Christmas ornaments. She thought they were wonderful, so she bought them, and that’s been her passion ever since. Eventually, ornaments became my passion, too. We’ve been collecting for 42 years now. Our collection’s not the biggest or the best, but it’s very nice. We put up 23 antique feathered Christmas trees and they all have antique Christmas ornaments.

A "flat" Dresden. Dresdens came in three types, flat, double-sided, and three-dimensional. He is toting a bag of toys, a tree, and a group of "smackers" or switches that were meant for the bad children.

For a long time, we were very much against doing themed trees, but when you have several thousand ornaments and you’re trying to do something different every year, you eventually have to start doing themed trees. A few years ago, I had this idea to do a blue tree decorated only with blue ornaments, so I started setting aside everything that had blue on it. That turned out to be very successful tree. Many people liked it.

We also do a tree with birds and anything bird-related—glass birds, Dresden paper birds, tinsel birds, birdcages. I even put some real bird nests inside the branches. That makes it a little different.

We take a great deal of time with our displays. We don’t have a terribly large house, and with 23 trees, you have to be able to have friends come in and walk around without bumping into them, so we try and do clever arrangements. My wife particularly likes to create little vignettes on the shelves. If we have a small tree, she’ll put a little village around it with some tiny animals.

We have friends who come by every year because they like to see what we do, and we belong to a club called The Golden Glow of Christmas Past, so we invite other members to stop by, but we don’t host large groups. We’re not really open to the public, per se.

Collectors Weekly: Do you specialize in a specific type of ornament?

Arnold: No, we like everything. We have antique cottons, kugels, figural glass, Sebnitz ornaments, just anything and everything that’s antique. We collect from all over the world, but we find the best things primarily come from Germany. They seem to be the most creative, and they must be of the highest quality because they’ve lasted so long. They’re from the late 1800s through the 1920s.

It’s not so much the craftsmanship that attracts us to German Christmas antiques; it’s their ingenuity and cleverness, as well as the things they chose to make. They produced unusual things, sometimes very comical. I’m fairly certain they never thought these pieces would last as long as they did. They probably just had a very high work ethic.

My favorite items in our collection are the Dresden Christmas ornaments. They’re made out of very thin embossed cardboard and they were only made for a relatively short time, from about 1870 to 1910. When you first see them, they look like celluloid because of all the detail, but they’re actually embossed cardboard. You can actually see the fur on the animals, and with some of the birds, you can tell exactly what species they are. There’s an endless variety. There are transportation items, animals, people, household objects, and even candy containers. They don’t have candy in them anymore, but when they were originally purchased, they would have. Sometimes they would’ve had a little gift inside, too.

The Dresden factories would stamp out the parts, and then cottage workers would assemble the pieces at home. Some are painted. Most are either gold or silver, so they almost look like metal when you first see them. The cardboard has held up extremely well, although the ornaments as a group are relatively rare. The majority of them were made for export to America.

Collectors Weekly: Were American manufacturers making their own ornaments as well?

Arnold: That came much later on. That probably began in the 1930s and ’40s. Of course, during the world wars, that’s when America started to make its own ornaments.

Before that, everything was imported. Czechoslovakia had a large bead industry, and they made their ornaments out of small beads. That was one source. Italian ornaments started being imported in 1950, and the Japanese made ornaments, too. But, again, this was much later. Virtually everybody copied what the Germans were doing.

Collectors Weekly: How far back do Christmas ornaments go?

Arnold: There’s some written documentation of a decorated tree in the early 1600s, but broad popularity came much later. Virtually every little community in Germany and many countries in Europe had their own type of celebration and their own little figures that they made for Christmas. Eventually all those traditions and decorations came together into what we now call Santa Claus and Christmas.

German Dresden ornaments are embossed cardboard with very fine detailing.

The religious aspect of Christmas has stayed basically the same, but Santa Claus and the way we celebrate the holiday have evolved over the years. Santa Claus did not look like he does now in the late 1800s.

That’s one way to tell the age of a Santa Claus figure. The earlier ones had different colored coats—green coats, blue coats, brown coats. As the years progressed, he had a red coat with green pants or a red coat with blue pants, and then eventually he became all red.

It evolved slowly, but there were certain aspects that really helped it along, one of which was Sundblom’s Coca-Cola Santa. That version really changed America’s view of what Santa Claus should look like. He became jolly, overweight, and dressed entirely in red.

A version of the German Santa was called the Belsnickel. He was very stern and usually dressed in furs, and the parents would use him to try and keep the children in line at holiday time. They would say, “The Belsnickel is coming. You better behave,” because he was known to actually whip children and to give them lumps of coal instead of candy. In some areas, he was also known to take bad children away. That’s my favorite part, that scariness, and that all evolved into what we think of as the kind and generous Santa now who has lots of presents for all the children.

Presents weren’t always part of the tradition. That also evolved. In the early 1900s and earlier, fruit or some little pieces of candy were all a child could expect as far as presents were concerned.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us a bit about the Czechoslovakian beaded ornaments?

Arnold: They made many designs, from what I refer to as a simple snowflake type of design to baby carriages, cannons, bicycles, baby pacifiers, butterflies, spiders, and spider webs. These were made out of tiny beads strung together with wire, and then hand-shaped into ornaments. They’re very unique because no one else made beaded ornaments.

Collectors Weekly: What kind of glass did the Germans make?

Arnold: A lot of people think that the glass kugel balls were the first true Christmas ornaments. In fact, the German Christmas ornament industry evolved out of glassmaking. A lot of the Germans were glassmakers who made scientific equipment, test tubes and vials, that sort of thing. But there was also a glass-bead industry for fashion, particularly for hats and dresses. When glass beads for fashion went out of style, German glassblowers started making these round balls called kugels.

The story is that they would hang these from the rafters in their cottages—some of them were as large as basketballs. Then they made smaller ones, and those eventually found their way onto Christmas trees. Different shapes followed. There was a teardrop shape, fruits such as strawberries, and even vegetables. The kugels all had a decorative brass cap that’s probably anywhere from the size of a dime up to a quarter or a 50-cent piece, depending on how the size of the ornaments. They were very distinctive.

The first kugels were made out of colored glass and silvered on the inside. Figural Christmas ornaments came later. They were made of clear glass, silvered on the inside, and then painted with lacquers on the exterior.

Collectors Weekly: What other types of materials did the Germans use to make Christmas antiques?

European clear glass monkey ornament holding a rifle.

Arnold: We talked about the cardboard and the glass. They took some of the glass ornaments and wrapped them in wire. Those are called wire-wrapped ornaments. This was done more during the Victorian times when they wanted something a little bit more gaudy looking. Those pieces tend to be all tarnished today, so they have a rather drab look to them now, but they were very fancy and very shiny in their time. They reflected the candlelight from the Christmas tree.

Spun cotton was used to make cotton ornaments. Objects ranged from fruits to vegetables, but the most sought after cotton ornaments are the little animals and people. Many of them were dressed in crepe-paper clothes and they had little painted features. The cotton ornaments were generally hung around the bottom of the tree because they didn’t break, which is also why children were also allowed to play with them. That’s probably why not many of them survived. They were also very prone to soiling and discoloration, particularly if they were stored in the attic, and they stained very easily.

Ornament makers produced every kind of Santa figure you can imagine. They also used papier-mâché to create reindeer and all sorts of animals. They weren’t all necessary hung on the tree, but many of the smaller objects were.

Collectors Weekly: Did the little villages that we have today exist in the late 1800s?

Arnold: Those are called putz scenes and were also a German-inspired thing. The Germans who came to America, particularly in the Moravians in Pennsylvania, would have competitions between cities and neighbors to see who could create the most elaborate village scene. That just kept growing and growing. In the center of the village would be the nativity scene, the crèche, with the baby Jesus. Around that, people would arrange little farms, villages, and cities, each filled with little figures and animals. Some scenes actually had running water, and they would bring in rocks and moss to make them look realistic.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell us about the snow babies?

Arnold: That was an offshoot of the porcelain-doll industry. Dolls were made everywhere in Europe, but somewhere along the line the Germans started making these little figures. They would chop up pieces of porcelain clay into tiny pieces called granules until it looked like snow, and then they would add this porcelain snow to porcelain figures and objects. Themes ranged from transportation—trains and boats—to children, babies, and animals, particularly polar bears. They would use the granules to make it look like everything was covered in snow. They made lots of little figures in sledding or skiing poses. Some played musical instruments. The most rare pieces were dusted with colored snow, like blue or pink.

Collectors Weekly: Are there other dolls that are associated with Christmas antiques besides snow babies and Santa Claus?

Arnold: Later on, probably in the 1920s, when newspaper comics like Buster Brown, Happy Hooligan, and Foxy Grandpa started coming out, they made glass ornaments and little composition figures of those characters. Whatever was happening in the world, let’s say hot air balloons—when those became the rage, manufacturers started making decorations and ornaments that looked like that. When the automobile came in, automotive ornaments such as cars and trucks appeared. So whatever was popular at the time, manufacturers tried to incorporate it into their decorations.

Collectors Weekly: You mentioned that America started to make its own ornaments because of the wars.

40" tall antique feather tree decorated with German "Dresden" ornaments. The tree has built-in candle holders and has an early round wooden base. The ornaments are all embossed cardboard dating ca. 1870 thru 1910.

Arnold: The First World War ended our association with Germany, but people still wanted Christmas ornaments. U.S. manufacturers were already making electric light bulbs, so they just changed them a little bit to make Christmas decorations out of them. A lot of the domestic ornaments were made out of clear glass and then painted on their exteriors. Since this industry evolved during the two world wars, U.S. manufacturers couldn’t use a lot of metal, and they couldn’t silver our ornaments or use metal caps, either. That’s why you see paper caps on U.S. ornaments and various types of paints and lacquers on the outside.

After the war ended, we started making the silvered ornaments again. At first, the majority of these were simple geometric shapes, but then America really got into it. Different shapes were produced, figural ornaments of comic characters, whatever was popular at the time.

During the wars, many of Germany’s best Christmas ornament collections were destroyed. So today, Germans come to America to buy antique German ornaments at auction, or they buy on the Internet, trying to get some of those wonderful things back into their country. That’s helped to escalate the prices. East Germany was basically where the ornaments were made, but when that part of the country was off limits to the West, they didn’t make them. Once it opened up, a lot of the original ornament molds were found. Today, Germans are making new ornaments using some of these the antique molds.

Eventually those will become collectible, but they’re making them in much larger quantities now. It may take a while but I think eventually they’ll become collectible.

The aged patina on an old ornament is unmistakable. The new ornaments are all very new looking, very shiny, no flaws, no imperfections, and they have different types of caps on them. The little metal caps are different now.

Collectors Weekly: Are there well-known German ornament artists?

Kugels glass Christmas ornaments that are made using colored glass and then silvered on the inside.

Arnold: Artists never made the antique ornaments. Cottage-industry workers did. The whole family was involved in the production of ornaments. The grandfathers and the fathers were the glassblowers. The mothers and daughters did the silvering. Sometimes children were given the job of painting the ornaments. It was pretty much a one-room kind of business. Everyone slept, ate, and worked in the same room to create the ornaments.

When F.W. Woolworth was first approached about selling German Christmas ornaments, he was a little hesitant, but he ordered some and they were huge success. And so he would go over every year and place his orders from cottages in the different villages and towns. Of course, every little cottage wanted him to pick their ornaments, so they were always trying to outdo one another. What might Mr. Woolworth want this time? This is where the creative part came in. What can we do that’s better and different? So that helped stimulate creativity.

Collectors Weekly: When did Christmas lights enter the picture?

Arnold: The first Christmas trees had candles on them. In the United States, we used candles up through the 1920s when the electric light bulb took over. The Germans used their glassmaking abilities to create figural light bulbs. The earliest ones have exhaust tips. They have a little point on them so the air inside could be extracted out. Once those became popular, the Japanese made very similar light bulbs out of milk glass—they painted colors and decorations on the outsides.

Collectors Weekly: What was a nodder?

Arnold: That was a little figure that had some action to it. Generally the head was on a spring or a little balanced-wire mechanism so that when you touched it, it nodded back and forth. Most were made out of a composition material, and they covered every subject matter. They made snow-baby nodders. There were doll nodders. There were animal nodders like elephants or donkeys. Donkeys were very popular. Some nodders became even more elaborate in that the body nodded, too, so it had a double action.

Collectors Weekly: Were themes big in the German Christmas tradition?

Arnold: I think themed trees and the idea of themes is probably more of an American thing. One of the first themes I ever heard about was right after the Victorian era when the style of the day was an absence of color. There are stories about people washing their ornaments so that they were either white or just silver, which is horrifying to me, but they did do that. So I think those were probably what I consider the first themed trees, when they tried to do away with color to create a simpler all-silver or all-white tree. Of course, birds are very popular Christmas ornament, so it’s really easy to do a tree that’s just all birds.

Collectors Weekly: Where do you find your antique ornaments?

Arnold: The majority of our collection has come from house sales and garage sales. We do go to auctions. We have always tried to go to antique shows and to antique malls. We’re always looking wherever we go. The Golden Glow has a convention every year, and that’s always a good place. If you’re looking for something in particular, you can generally find it there because we have members from all over the world who bring things to sell.

Golden Glow is held in a different part of the country every year during the end of July or the first part of August, in between Christmases.

Collectors Weekly: What books would you recommend for someone interested in Christmas collecting?

Arnold: George Johnson’s Christmas books are wonderful. He has produced three volumes. He covers all the key subjects and he covers a great deal of history. There are price guides. John Lightner has done a wonderful book on glass figural ornaments. There are several holiday books by the Schiffer publishing company, and Bob Brenner has one or two Christmas books.

I’m just giving you the top few. There are a lot of good Christmas books dealing with antique Christmas items. Many of them have price guides, and many of them cover all the different subjects, from Santas to glass ornaments to lighting.

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

German Dresden ornaments are embossed cardboard with very fine detailing. Most are either gold or silver but some are hand-painted.

Arnold: Do your research. Get some of these Christmas books. Just make sure of what you’re buying because the antique holiday items have escalated in price and there are disreputable dealers out there who will try and tell you that a new ornament is old. They will switch caps. You need to know what to look for, and it’s a matter of self-education, just like any collectible.

One thing that I find upsetting is when people who have antique Christmas items choose not to put them out. They just keep them in boxes. If you’re going to have Christmas stuff, at least put it out at Christmastime. We put all our Christmas stuff away after the holidays, and then when Christmas rolls around again, we get it all out. It’s special every time we do that. What’s the sense of having it if you don’t display it?

That’s just a petty gripe of mine. You don’t have to open your home to the public, but your friends and your family will enjoy it. We didn’t inherit any Christmas ornaments from our families so the things we have that are related to the holiday came from other families who treasured them. So that’s an important point that we like to think about—that these pieces were all loved and taken care of, and that’s why they’ve lasted. We’re preserving that legacy, too.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Jerry, for taking the time to speak with us.

(All images in this article courtesy Jerry and Darla Arnold)

This article discusses household silver in the first half of the 18th century, noting its foreign influences in style (especially French) and silversmith Paul Lamerie, of whom the most information has been preserved over time. It originally appeared in the January 1946 issue of American Collector magazine, a publication which ran from 1933-1948 and served antique collectors and dealers.

Possession of silver articles has always been considered as a step up on the social ladder; something to be proud of and something to bolster self-respect. Even today we see people, making more money and making it faster than ever before, acquiring silver objects of all kinds. The market seems to be definitely a seller’s market.

George I cream jug, 1721-1723, Anthony Nelme, London.

Probably in no other country has so much fine silverware been produced as in England, and nowhere has the collecting of it been keener and its use more widespread. For several reasons this may seem strange, with no adequate source of raw material on the British Isles.

But with the growth of the nation, the war against competitors, such as Holland and Spain, for the domination of foreign territories and riches, more silver came to victorious Albion. And so we witness an evolution that not only brought to the churches gifts from the faithful parishioners, silver for the official use of kings and nobility, the plate of the liveried companies, but also an ever-growing quantity of so-called household and decorative silver.

Of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries fine examples of church silver and representative silver of the kings, the nobility and prominent institutions have survived, but pieces of household silver earlier than the sixteenth century are extremely rare, much of it probably perished in the long years of internal struggle, though a few pieces grace the collections of museums and private collectors.

George I tankard engraved with the Newland arms, Petley Ley, ent. 1715, London.

The history of the guilds of the goldsmiths, their standing and responsibility, the history of the acts to protect the quality of the silver, or the coin of the realm, the history of the system of hallmarks and date letters, of makers’ marks and of assaying have been exhaustively explored and ably described. The profession of the goldsmith always was held in high esteem in England, well-organized and watchful to keep up the quality of the work and the honesty and integrity of its members.

It was obvious that such diligence and precaution guaranteed a high level of work and protected the public as well as the guilds themselves from any attempt at counterfeiting or other fraud. The trustworthiness of the goldsmiths was of course reflected in the ever-growing spread of the use of fine silver and it attracted many able artists and craftsmen to this honorable and lucrative profession.

Silver as an easily workable precious metal always has fascinated the artist, but there were very few in England during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. The fine early English plate as far as its style and form goes owes much, if not everything to foreign influence. Of these early times, the Tudor-Gothic and the Renaissance, we will remember the drinking horns, remnants of a more ancient past, and other kinds of drinking vessels as the mazer, a bowl mostly of wood mounted with a band of silver to protect the edges, developing into the cup, and we have the tankard and the beaker.

George I caster with repousse decoration, John Bignell, ent. 1720, London.

Practically in the same class are the porringers or caudle-cups introduced into common use in the early seventeenth century for possets and hot drinks, very much in vogue at that time. The posset, a kind of hot sack with spices, milk and eggs was practically universal as a beverage; of course it was somewhat thicker than mere spiced ale or hot wine.

We can quote Shakespeare from the Merry Wives of Windsor, “Thou shalt drink a posses tonight in my house.” And we hear the devilish Lady Macbeth saying, “I have drugged their possets that death and nature do contend about them, whether they will live or die.”

At the time of King George 1, 1714-1724, a great variety of household silver was already fashioned and used; forks, spoons and knives, candlesticks, snuffers and snuffer trays, casters, cruets, soup tureens, wine tasters, bread or fruit baskets, and of course snuff boxes; more and more was added, first as a luxury and then as a necessity.

It may be of interest to note that for the style of the early Georgian silver, England is heavily indebted to France. With the repeal of the Edict of Nantes a great number of prominent French artists and craftsmen sought refuge from religious persecution, and we have a long list with imposing names of refugee silver-and-goldsmiths coming to England as early as during the last years of Queen Anne’s reign, and during the reign of the first two Georges, starting with men like Simon Pantin, Pierre Harache, John Chartier, Isaac Ribolau, Pierre Platel, Le Sage, Pileau, Courtauld, Willaume and culminating in the most famous of all, Paul Lamerie.

George II loving cup, Samuel Courtauld, ent. 1746, London.

In the time of King George I, the dominating figure at the head of any European nation was Louis XIV of France, the Roi Soleil. The manner and style of his court were imitated in one form or another by many minor potentates and beginning in France, started the victorious spread of the Rococo style.

The word Rococo probably comes from “Rock-Coquille.” The forms originated from Italy and were then developed in France. We know that the director of the royal factory in Paris, Meissonier, published several works about Rococo style in 1723. The motifs fundamentally were Oriental with a prevalence of shells and marine subjects. We see them together with the Gadroon or other borders, the acanthus and lanceolate leaves, together with tritons, dolphins, sea-monsters, grape-vine leaves and grotesque masks.

When this style was introduced into England where a natural restraint and the gift for understatement quieted the exuberance of the French style in a very healthy manner, many works of excellent taste resulted, and some of the finest silver in this style was created by Paul Lamerie.

George II salver, 1730-1731, Paul Lamerie, London.

It seems that very little is known of the life of the famous silversmiths of that period. Probably they lived uneventful, regular lives as good citizens, devoted to their profession and at times also active in some kind of civic work, but none was outstanding in their personalities or artistic achievement to be recorded and passed on by contemporary writers or later historians. There is the one exception of the just-mentioned Lamerie, who although not attaining high honors in any official capacity became so famous for his work that much data of his family and life have been assembled and published.

On the fourteenth of April in 1688, Paul Jaques, the son of Paul Souchay de la Merie was baptized in the small town of Bois le Duc, according to the register of the Wallon church of this little town in southern Holland. When the little family left for England in March, 1689, they did not forget to take this baptismal record with them and it served them as a kind of religious passport together with attestation papers as members of the Wallon church. The head of the family, a French nobleman, had been accepted in the service of the army of the united provinces of the Netherlands. In England the name of Souchay was dropped.

We find the first mention of a Paule Lemurre in 1691. In 1701 this was changed to La Merie and finally in 1702 to the name Lamerie. The nobleman had the idea that any kind of craft was below his personal standing and the dignity peculiar to his class; he managed to get a small pension for a while from the crown but died a pauper in 1735. For his son the goldsmith’s craft was all he would accept as becoming to a member of a noble family, and little Paul accordingly was apprenticed to another refugee, Pierre Platel, in 1704.

George II sugar bowl with repousse decroation, samuel taylor, 1751, London.

Eight years later he became a freeman on September 4, 1712, and entered his maker’s mark the next day. We have two additional marks of Lamerie, a second dating from the year 1732 and a third from 1739 which complied with a new law of King George II ordering all working and manufacturing goldsmiths to change the form of their maker’s mark and register a new form forthwith at the goldsmith’s hall. It should be noted that during this period also the old silver standard, raised since 1697 to stop the melting of coins for the use of silverware, was revised in 1719.

A few years after the establishment of his own shop Lamerie married Louise Juliott in 1716. He had six children, four daughters and two sons, but the sons and one daughter died at an early age.

In his civic career Lamerie was known as Captain from 1736 on and was later styled “Major”. Probably he was a member of some private volunteer organization of military character yet not recognized officially, organized in companies, having its own equipment at its own expense, but never called upon to carry out any duties by authority and probably not considered as a body of troops for any length of time. Only by courtesy were its officers allowed to assume the title of their representative ranks. It was a private volunteer organization of this sort that Lamerie joined in a patriotic spirit.

George II cake basket, 1745-1746, Paul Lamerie, London

His rise in the Guild hierarchy was rather rapid. In 1738 he was appointed to a committee for “The Parliament business of the goldsmiths company” drawing up a petition and bill to be offered to Parliament.

With the rise of good business and widespread recognition, our master moved from modest quarters to a new address in 1738 where he became neighbor to many persons of high degree, and it is here, at Garard St. where he was to grow to fame and eminence in his profession, where he saw one of his daughters married and where his mother died.

It seems that the French refugees kept close together, because the husbands of Lamerie’s daughter, Joseph Debaufre, the son of a watchmaker of renown also had come from abroad. At the time of this marriage in 1750 Lamerie became seriously ill, but he managed to attend a meeting of the goldsmith’s company where his able and sound advice carried weight and we know that the activity, ability and power of artistic expression which had been his for forty years were not lost at that time.

George II soup turreen, 1758-1759, John swift, London.

One would expect to find some recognition for the creator of such outstanding work in the form of an appointment as goldsmith to the crown, but in royal collections not one piece by Lamerie can be found. As during his lifetime Samuel Smithin and later Thomas Minor were crown goldsmiths it may be that Lamerie’s foreign origin prejudiced against such nomination.

The master’s life span came to an end in 1751. In the London Evening Post, August 3rd to August 6th, 1751, we find the following obituary notice: “Last Friday died at Daventry in North Hampshire, Mr. Humphrey Paine, formerly an eminent goldsmith at the “Hen and Chickens” at Cheapside, but having acquired a handsome fortune, he quitted trade to his son a few months ago, to whom he has left the bulk of his estate.

“The same day died Paul D’Lamerie, Esq. an ancient goldsmith in Garard St., Soho; they both were ancient members of the goldsmith’s company and had each of them been upwards of fifty years in trade, wherein they would be very largely concerned. The latter was partly famous for making fine ornamental plate and has been very instrumental in bringing that branch of the trade to the perfection it is now in.”

George II cruet frame and cruets, 1758-1759, Samuel Wood, London.

In his will Lamerie made specific provisions and left directions for the disposal of his estate, evidently in order to avoid any possibility of dispute between his wife and unmarried daughters. His business was to be closed, the goods to be put to public auction, and there were also instructions as to the disposal of his leaseholds.

No catalogue of auction sale has been found, only two announcements of forthcoming sales, one of plate, jewels and watches, the other of patterns, tools and shop fixtures.

The status of the artist and master craftsman, Paul Lamerie is known universally. We know that at the start of his career the so-called Queen Anne style, with its unadorned simplicity, was still in vogue and that the Rococo style was widely favored, bringing new forms and new decorative motifs.

Accordingly, Paul Lamerie’s career falls practically into two parts, the first from his original registration to his second mark where he worked already in the so-called new silver standard. His pieces of this period are more delicate and less elaborate. The ornate Rococo work in the later period of the old silver standard has a different and probably not so high an artistic quality. Sometimes details are not handled with care and the pieces become really “compositions” seemingly by “chance” in silver, with a touch of genius.

When we try to find out if other artists or craftsmen of the period crossed the path of Paul Lamerie we come to the famous engraver and painter, William Hogarth who was first apprenticed in 1712 to Ellis Gamble, probably an engraver of silver. He did some work for Lamerie and also engraved Lamerie’s bookplate with the three “Souches,” meaning “tree stumps.” These Lamerie had chosen for his own arms, probably adopted from the arms born by another branch of the Souchay family.

We have dwelt at length on this eminent master because he is the most representative and the greatest of his period, and in his case we are fortunate that family and other records have been preserved, but we must not forget that during the reign of the first two Georges other splendid silver was created by famous refugees such as Pierre Harrache, David Willaume, Augustine Cortauld, Peter Archambo, Peter Plata just to name a few, and also by some English-born artists, such as Anthony Nelme and Benjamin Pine.

The silversmith’s art, of course, was not confined to the city of London. In England proper, Norwich, Exeter, Newcastle and Chester were centers for the production of fine Plate. In Scotland, Edinborough and Glasgow were prominent, and in Ireland the same held true for Dublin and Cork.