Tziporah Salamon is used to being photographed—by everyone from New York City tourists to famous “New York Times” street-fashion photographer Bill Cunningham. She’s impossible for shutterbugs to resist, when they catch her riding around the city on her turquoise Bianchi, often a symphony of lush colors, decked head-to-toe in exquisite, embroidered, antique fabrics. Salamon also caught the eye of 30-year-old photographer Ari Seth Cohen, who made waves in the fashion world when he launched his Advanced Style blog in 2008, a site devoted to the elderly and impeccably elegant fashionistas who grace the streets of Manhattan. Salamon, at 62, will be one of the youngest women featured in the Advanced Style book, coming out this month, and the Advanced Style documentary, set for this fall.

While all of the Advance Style ladies have fabulous vintage or retro-inspired pieces in their repertoires, Salamon, hands down, has the most impressive museum-quality collection of antique and vintage clothing. Her apartment, and two storage units, house more than 200 hats, and “endless” numbers of other accessories, shoes, and items of clothing, from 1860s Japan to the Art Deco era to postwar America. For the fashionably challenged, the style consultant hosts a regular class called “The Art of Dressing” and occasionally puts on a one-woman theater show called “The Fabric of My Life.”

Collectors Weekly: How do you come up with your outfits?

Salamon: I work on the outfits as I go along, and I don’t wear the outfit until it’s totally complete. For example, I got a wonderful Comme des Garçons jacket, probably 20 years ago. It was killer, but I had nothing to wear it with. It’s this very particular brown, a reddish brown, it’s shiny, and it has tails.

At top, Tziporah Salmon pairs a red antique Catholic priest's chasuble with a red vintage hat from Tibet. Above, she heads to a meeting in a 1930s jacket under an ostrich-feather coat with Haider Ackerman pants. Photo by Ari Seth Cohen, from Advanced Style.

But it was the hardest color to work with, and it took seven years for that outfit to complete. First, I found the pants. Then, I found the shirt to wear underneath, and the shoes. They had to be a particular shape of shoes because I was doing Middle Eastern look. Next, there’s always a hat, and it took years until that came. Then, there’s a scarf around my neck, and I always wear earrings and a bracelet. There has to be a shawl because it gets cold at night, even in the summertime because of the air-conditioning. The gloves have to work with it, too, because I ride my bike.

I didn’t just wear the jacket when I got it. It was an incredible jacket, and I could’ve just worn it over black pants. That’s not what I do ever. I won’t plop on a piece just because it’s new. Every component has to be as wonderful as all the other components. Once it all comes together, that’s the outfit for me. I don’t change it up. It is a painting for me.

Salamon wears a tasseled cloud collar from the Qing Dynasty over a 1930s Chinese coat with a 1920s straw headband and earrings made of antique ivory-and-bone Chinese game pieces. Photo by Martin Scott Powell, martinscottpowell.com

Collectors Weekly: Do you ever worry an outfit might be out of style by the time it’s completed?

Salamon: No, I’ll have on an outfit that I created 20 years ago, and people will say, “Oh my God, it’s fabulous!” Or “You’re so fashionable!” And I’m not fashionable at all; I’m stylish. Fashionable is of the moment. Fashionable is the latest Prada, Gucci, or whatever is “in” this minute, and I rarely have what’s in-the-moment. In fact, when I buy new clothes, which I do, the more you can’t tell who it is, the better. I’ll never wear something with someone’s initials or name on it.

Collectors Weekly: What is generally the percentage of pieces that are antique or vintage compared to contemporary in each outfit you have?

Salamon: I would say 80:20. Of course, I buy contemporary shoes, unless I find a perfect vintage pair. Sometimes I do. I’ll find men’s vintage shoes that work much easier than women’s vintage shoes because I have large feet. For one outfit, I was lucky enough to find needlepoint men’s slippers from the 1800s, and they were never worn. Oh, my God, I felt like Cinderella that day. Also I’ve found Victorian men’s boots, and they fit. The advantage of vintage is it’s usually so well made. The shoes are kid leather that are so soft and fine.

This outfit is mostly Chinese antiques, from the 1920s blue finial on the top of her head to the 1930s mustard velvet coat and the Victorian blue shirt. The shoes are contemporary German.

Collectors Weekly: How did you get into fashion?

Salamon: My father was a tailor, and my mother’s a dressmaker. From Day One, they made all my clothes, everything. I was sleeping, and they were sewing. My father would make the constructed stuff like coats and pants. My mother made the feminine stuff, accordion-pleated skirts, jumpers, dresses, and blouses. And they made my pajamas. They dressed me both as a little boy and as a little girl, so I was equally comfortable in both.

Growing up in Israel, in Judaism, there’s a holiday called Purim in which you get dressed. My mother went all out for my Purim outfits over the years. I started off being an Arabic girl, and then I was a Persian princess. I was Snow White one year and, the next year, I was one of the seven dwarves. I was an abacus once, and I was a doughnut. Every outfit had a hat, exactly like what I’m doing today. Oftentimes, I say I do Purim every single day.

The 1920s coat is Chinese hand-embroidered silk, and the gloves are '20s Chanel. Salamon wears black-and-white agate earrings and a mix of contemporary and vintage ivory bangles. Photo by Martin Scott Powell, martinscottpowell.com.

My parents, both Hungarian Jews, were Holocaust survivors. My father came from a family of 10, and five of them came back from the camps, and five did not. My father was sent to labor camp, where he sewed the Nazi uniforms—that’s how he survived. His sister was sent to Auschwitz, and after Auschwitz, she ended up in Switzerland. Then she came to New York, while my father went to Israel. They didn’t see each other for over 25 years. When she came to New York, she met this German Jew who took her to San Antonio, Texas, where he was vice president of Neiman Marcus.

“I don’t have to invite you to my studio to see my painting. You get to see it on me. I get to wear it, live it, be it.”

Now, she knew that my father, her favorite brother, had these two little girls, me and my sister. Twice a year, we would get packages from her, via Neiman Marcus, with the most amazing little girl’s dresses in the world. Money was no object with her, because she got the discount and she was a very wealthy woman. At the time, the clothes that were sold in Neiman Marcus were the best clothes in the world. Between the clothes that my parents made me and the clothes from Neiman Marcus, I had a remarkable wardrobe. That’s what I came into this world with.

Of course I’m going to travel through life, loving clothes and playing with clothes and knowing how to dress. My family moved to New York City when I was 9 years old, and I was always very well dressed. In high school, I would show my mother “Vogue” magazine, the cover or whatever outfit I liked inside. I would buy the fabric, and she would make me the cover of “Vogue” over a weekend. My mother was incredible. Not only a seamstress, she could also crochet, knit, and embroider.

On the left, Salamon compliments her Gaultier cardigan with '20s Turkish needlepoint cap for a boyish look. On the right, she does feminine in all '20s clothes for the Jazz Age Lawn Party at Governors Island.

In my 20s, I was in Berkeley getting a Ph.D. in psychology and teaching high school. Since it was the ’70s and I was a flower child, I dressed very artistically but very hippie, in Mexican peasant blouses and wide skirts. Then I decided I didn’t want to be a therapist and I wanted to pursue fashion, since I always loved clothes. So I quit grad school in ’79 and moved back to New York.

Collectors Weekly: How did you first discover vintage clothes?

Salamon: Well, I realized if I was going to be in fashion in New York, I needed a new wardrobe, because the Berkeley hippie look wasn’t going to fly. But the new clothes that I loved, already in 1979, were selling for $1,200 a piece. The Japanese were fresh on the scene, and Comme des Garçons, Issey Miyake, Yohji Yamamoto, and Mitsuhiro Matsuda were my favorites. My first job back in New York was as a Barneys salesgirl making $7 an hour. There was no way I could afford these clothes. Even with my 30 percent employee discount, I couldn’t buy a $1,200 jacket.

Standing in the Washington, D.C., dressing room of Marjorie Merriweather Post, Salamon wears wide Greek pajama bottoms, a Matsuda top, a 1940s checked handbag, and a polyester turban.

But I met this woman, Renee Lewis, who had been a vintage dealer. She had been collecting her whole life, and she actually started selling antique clothes when she was a teenager. Her whole apartment was filled with antiques, and her clothes were all vintage. Renee, who has been a great influence in my life, had and still has amazing taste. But at the time, her boyfriend was moving up from Atlanta, Georgia, to live with her, and she had to empty out the closet of her tiny studio apartment to make room for him. Also, Renee had gained some weight, so she had all these antique clothes that didn’t fit her. She said to me, “Do you want them? Here.” That was the start of my antique collection.

Collectors Weekly: What do you love most about dressing?

Salamon: For me, dressing is so much fun because I get to design. I’m creating a portrait, and I have very different looks. I could do Chinese empress one day and Persian princess another day. Pierrot (a standard mime character from 17th century European Commedia dell’Arte) is one of my favorite looks. Another day, I could do ‘20s woman or little boy or Edwardian whites or Victorian jets. It’s painting with cloth and hats and capes and shawls.

Salamon has 12 pairs of striped, tapered men's pajama bottoms from the 1940s. She's also wearing a Persian lamb collar, apple juice Bakelite bangles, 1920s hat and glasses, and 1950s sandals. Her green Prada ostrich handbag is particularly rare.

That’s the other real benefit to dressing is that people actually come up to me and thank me for making their day. They send me love, and I, in turn, send them love, so it’s a whole loop of love. Some people say, “So what’s the difference between you and Lady Gaga?” The answer is: I don’t do it to shock. I’m always a very refined lady so that people would never turn me away.

“Hats, to me, they’re like the exclamation point. They polish and finish off the outfit.”

It took me a long time to own this gift and to accept that this is what I do best. I struggled with dressing being superficial. I still want to make a difference on the planet. I actually asked God, “What am I meant to do?” Then I had a dream in which Glenn Close calls me and says, “Tziporah, I hear you’re a fashion consultant. I hear you’re the best in the business. I want to hire you.”

Then the day after the dream, I end up going to a Broadway show where Glenn was appearing. Long story short, I get in and get to tell her this, which is a whole miracle because you usually don’t get in to see the star, unless you have an appointment. I realized that God gave me that dream for a reason, to tell me I’m meant to dress the stars. But I had a real hard time with that—this was in 1984—because I thought it was very superficial and that it just wasn’t important enough.

Salamon wears an Afghani coat with two hats. The small hat on top with the silver amulets is a Bai phoenix hat from the Yunnan Province in China. Ari Seth Cohen took this photo for "Vogue Japan," posted on Advanced Style.

In 1999 and 2000, I spent 10 weeks of two summers at a Jewish renewal center, as part of a work-study program. Every week a different guest, at least one but usually around 5 to 10, would come up to me and thank me for dressing. One woman told me that she actually looked forward to my entering a room because I elevated the energy in the room. That’s when I got that what I do, the dressing, is important and that it’s my way of contributing to the world. It is a gift, and the way God expresses herself through me. I’m so grateful for this art form because I don’t have to invite you to my studio to see my painting. You get to see it on me. I get to wear it, live it, be it. As a bicyclist, it’s great fun because I bike all over the city, and I give them all a show.

At left, the Egyptian vest and hat are adorned with coins, as is the '40s handbag. Middle, Salamon, in a bamboo hat, had to have the long Ottoman Empire vest fully restored. Right, she wears a red hand-embroidered 1800s Middle Eastern jacket and hat sewn with white pearls.

Collectors Weekly: How do you recommend women save money using vintage?

Salamon: Well, first of all, vintage is so much cheaper than new clothes. I’m not talking about clothes from H&M, which are throw-away, right? Today, to be really well dressed and to buy well-made garments, it’s at least $1,000 for an item. You can get a fabulous vintage jacket for $200 or $300 and sometimes much less. This is in New York—I’m sure in other parts of the world, in flea markets and thrift stores you can get vintage clothes even cheaper. I have amazing vintage clothes, pieces that are beaded or embroidered, and there’s not even a label in most of them. Flea markets are like bakeries; they’re so much fun. Just go. It’s not about spending a lot of money. Experiment. Play. Give yourself permission to play dress-up.

Left, the long vest is an adapted Armenian jacket, and the fez adorned with glass beads is a flea-market find. Right, a black velvet jacket is accessorized with a Victorian ruffle scarf, jet jewelry, a 1930s hat, and coral Bottega Veneta shoes.

Vintage is better quality than anything that you’re getting new, and it helps the planet. If you buy new cashmere, it pills in a minute, no matter what designer it is. The cashmere that I have, my twin sets from the ’30s and ’40s, even the ’50s, don’t even have one pill. So if you need a good sweater, there’s plenty of them in flea markets and antique clothing stores. It’s the hunt. You never know what you’re going to find. And you can take risks because you’re spending $30 on a sweater as opposed to a new sweater, which is at least $300—unless it’s H&M, but that’s not going to last you very long.

Sure, some vintage clothes wear out, like black pants. You need more than one pair of black pants, and it’s not so easy to find pants that fit you well. I also have clothes made. Once I had a pair of knickers that I got in 1982, and they just worked on my body. Those were my favorite pants, and I can do a lot with knickers as far as different looks. So I had those pants copied over and over in different colors in different weights of wool.

Salamon turns a Gaultier jacket, a Victorian collar, and an accordion hat into a Pierrot silent film look. The red diamonds in the cuff bracelet echo the jacket.

You have to have your clothes altered for you. Fit makes all the difference in the world. You have to know what you’re comfortable with, too. I can appreciate, let’s say, a fabulous pencil skirt that’s to the knee. I love that look, but that’s totally not me. The Jackie O look, that’s not me. I love it on someone else. For me, it’s just it’s too “lady.” I’m much more artistic and edgy, but “edgy” goes in many ways. “Edgy” could be punk, and that’s not me either. I don’t do harsh at all. I also don’t show cleavage.  For some women, it’s important that they look sexy. That is not important to me at all.

In 1984, Salamon was featured in a New York magazine fashion spread. Left, she's wearing a red, black, and white Charlie Chaplin look. Right, she's wearing a '20s-style dress and hat handmade for her from contemporary Carolina Herrera fabric. Photos by Cheryl Koralik.

Collectors Weekly: How many items of clothing are in your collection?

Salamon: Endless. Storage is an issue. My dream is to build a real closet, like a whole room for just my antique and vintage clothes where it’s controlled, temperature-wise, the way a museum does it. I talk to my clothes. I tell them, “One day, I’ll do right by you.” I miss my clothes that are in storage. I miss just playing with them.

Collectors Weekly: What do you need all of these clothes for?

Salamon: I use them not only to wear, but I use them in my class called “The Art of Dressing” and in my one-woman show called “The Fabric of My Life.” To my students, I’ll say, “You see this hat? It’s a great hat. So what would you pair it with?” The hat tells this story, so the rest of the outfit has to tell the same story. I ask the ladies, What happens if you wear this with this? What happens if you break it up with a belt? Why doesn’t it work? What happens if you put on high heels? What happens if you put on flats? Why does this work better with this?

Left, the '20s look here is achieved with modern clothes, except for the vintage agate-bead necklace, the fully collapsible basket bag from the 1940s, the Arts and Crafts fabric handbag, and the straw hat, originally the back part of an 1880s bonnet. Right, the cape is 1920s black velvet, and the black wool hat is adorned with jet beads.

The first class is all black. I’ll say, “This is black, and this is black. It should work. Why doesn’t it work?” It’s because of the texture, the proportion, or the silhouette. All of that is important. What happens when I put it on with skinny black pants, as opposed to wide black pants? Should they be cropped or should they go down to the ankles?

“Better overdressed than underdressed. Let’s raise the bar.”

I show it on my body so that they get to see it and go, “Ahhh!” It’s about balance. A woman who knows how to dress just knows how to do it instinctively and naturally. Those who don’t, need help, and I can teach them so that they become better dressers, whatever level they’re on. Some women, they’ll go this far, no further, because it’s too much attention. They couldn’t put on a hat; they wouldn’t feel comfortable. And that’s fine. But I encourage women to take it up a notch, to get out of their comfort zone.

Salamon tours a holy mosque in Egypt in an 1800s yarmulke, a silver cuff bracelet from Turkmenistan, and an early 1900s Egyptian wedding shawl woven with real silver. "God was with us that day," Salamon says.

Collectors Weekly: You also rent some of your pieces out?

Salamon: Well, to designers, yes. They copy it. That’s what they do in general. But I don’t necessarily see my exact pieces on the runway, because they may only take the idea of the pants and translate it into a skirt. They might take the shape, the pattern, or the technique they like, such as the embroidery.

This orange-wool-and-black velvet flamenco skirt often inspires Salamon to dance. The hat is from the Museum of Seville, and the coral beads on her neck are on a fabric collar.

Collectors Weekly: Do you ever worry about something getting stained, or say, a hat flying off your head on a windy day?

Salamon: Believe me, it does. I have to stop the bike a million times to go pick up the hat that’s on the floor. For sure, I’ve ruined stuff. The hat has fallen so many times that it’s got a hole in it because it’s made of bamboo and it’s fragile. The skirt has gone into the spokes of the wheel, and I tore it or I blackened it. I ruined a bag because it got all scratched up. But I live in the world, and I’m a bicyclist. Do I want to not bike and not wear my clothes? No. I try to be as careful as I can be, and things happen.

Collectors Weekly: Some collectors, though, would put these things in a vault. Would you consider that?

Salamon: Oh, no no no no. I have to wear them. I buy them to wear them, absolutely. I don’t have to keep them forever. I repair things. I don’t mind mending, and I don’t mind seeing patches on things. It doesn’t have to be perfect. It just adds more texture, more life. I have wrinkles. My face isn’t perfect anymore. It’s part of living.

The pattern of her Victorian ribbon jacket is complemented by her contemporary sandals from Bergdorf's.

The responsibility of the upkeep of the clothes can feel overwhelming because it’s expensive to pay the seamstresses to do it well. Even the changing of the closets from the winter to summer, it’s work. Of course, it’s easier to just put on jeans and a T-shirt. It’s work in the morning to take it out of the closet and see it needs ironing. Here’s another rip, so I have to first have it mended again. Because it’s vintage, that happens, and especially on the bike, things really rip. So I have to take it back to the seamstress. She just brought it back, and it ripped somewhere else now. It’s a lot of time, it’s a lot of effort, and it’s money.

Collectors Weekly: And you have 200 hats?

Salamon: At least. I love hats. I happen to have the perfect head for hats. I have over 200 hats, and in fact, the hat often starts the outfit. I’ll get a great hat and then I’ll build an outfit for the hat, solely around the hat. Hats, to me, they’re like the exclamation point. They polish and finish off the outfit.

First of all, a hat with a big rim protects you from the sun and the elements. Men love women in hats. Women think that they need to show tits and ass. Put on a hat, and you’ll get noticed much quicker. It’s true! And there are so many great hats out there.

A plaid Ralph Lauren jacket is combined with plaid Comme Des Garçons pants and scarf. The beads originated in Baku, Azerbaijan, the pin is Bakelite and wood, and the gloves (now lost) are paisley and red leather.

If you look at old pictures of women—and men—in the ’30s and ’40s, they all have hats on, and they all look better than we look. It’s not that they were any prettier or handsomer. But they were better dressed, for sure. They looked elegant, not sloppy the way people do this day and age with the jogging clothes, the baggy jeans, and the fat bellies that are hanging in the sweatshirts. It’s not a good look. Whereas a suit for a man or a woman hides a multitude of things. So if you’re wearing a suit for a man and a fedora, oh, my God! You look great no matter what goes on underneath.

Collectors Weekly: Do you see yourself as a rebel in this casual culture?

Salamon: Absolutely, yes. I’ve always dressed, even when it wasn’t politically correct to dress. I went to school as an undergrad from ’68 to ’72 to Buffalo. In ’70, the Kent State massacre had just happened, and in Buffalo, we took over the administration building. That was when the girls were encouraged to wear jeans, burn their bras, and wear T-shirts, and most women, that’s what they did. Then I showed up in the culottes and capes that my mother made me. No matter what was around me, I dressed. To this day, I don’t look at what most people do.

I’ll have people who are apologetic. My friends will say, “I feel terrible because next to you, because you’re all dressed.” I’ll say, “That’s not a requirement of mine that you be dressed. It’s a requirement of mine that I be dressed.”

Salamon got this 1940s peplum jacket for $100 in 1980. She wears it with a Persian lamb hat and collar, and a brown crocodile belt with opal stones on the buckle.

Collectors Weekly: Some people also feel self-conscious about being overdressed.

Salamon: Better overdressed than underdressed. Let’s raise the bar. When people say, “But that’s not the norm,” and people don’t like it, I’m not coming down to their level. Let me raise the bar so that they’ll come up.

Collectors Weekly: People tend to think that fashion is for young women, but if you look at young Hollywood, it seems they’re failing at fashion.

Salamon: Totally failing at it. It’s dying, and we’re the last generation who’s doing it. We have always done it, and do it well, and we have lessons to teach the younger generation. The beauty of the Advanced Style blog is that the younger generation gets it. Most of the people who write in, comment are younger kids who are grateful and appreciative of what the older women are doing.

Salamon does a feminine Grace Kelly look in Egypt, with a '40s green silk jacket, a '40s silk head scarf, and a three-tier moonstone brooch.

Collectors Weekly: What are your plans for the future?

Salamon: Because of the dream I had about Glenn Close in 1984, 30 years later, I want to move to L.A. to dress the stars. I want to make a difference in how women dress, and so many women emulate the stars. The whole world is watching the Academy Awards. Wouldn’t it be great if we were all inspired by what they are wearing?

It’s not about spending a lot of money. Experiment. Give yourself permission to play dress-up.

I’m not saying that what they wear is not nice. It’s always some gorgeous gown, but it’s so predictable, the same strapless gown. Even if it’s vintage, it’s a vintage strapless gown. I’d like to see other things on them. Let’s mix it up. Let’s give them wonderful pants or a Persian or Chinese style. Let’s cover them up a little, and let’s give them layers. Will all of them go for it? No. I’m sure I’ll only work with a very select few, but that’s fine.

I’d also teach them how to be stars every day. In all these magazines, you see celebrities at the airport or coming out of Starbucks in their jeans, T-shirt, and backwards baseball cap. What is that? There’s comfort, certainly. They dress the way everyone else does. You’d never see stars like that in the ’30s and ’40s. They were always glamorous. It doesn’t even have to be uncomfortable. I’m dressed every day, and I’m very comfortable on the bicycle. What’s nice is that people notice. It puts a smile on their faces.

Salamon gives an air kiss to New York City in a '40s Mexican skirt with nesting Bakelite bracelets on her arm, a '30s flower clip in her hair, and a yellow Chinese parasol.

To reach Tziporah Salamon, visit her site, www.tziporahsalamon.com/. Catch a preview of Tziporah getting dressed in the Advanced Style documentary, shot by videographer Lina Plioplyte, here:

This week, a few of us from Collectors Weekly will be in Brimfield, Massachusetts, for the first of this year’s Brimfield Antiques Shows. We’ll be in the Central Park field, booth #58, from Tuesday, May 8 through Friday, May 11. Here’s a map showing the location.

If you are planning to attend Brimfield, please stop by and say hello. We’ve got limited numbers of Collectors Weekly T-shirts (two styles!), three types of buttons (collect ‘em all!), and cotton tote bags to help your carry around all your impulse buys.

Hope to see you at the show! Follow our posts on Show & Tell here.

(Photo by James Cogliantry)

The multicolored, drug-soaked, psychedelic aesthetic of the mid-1960s has never been more popular, or misunderstood. In March, “Mad Men” time-traveled from the cocktail cool of Mid-Century Modern, circa 1962, to that dope-smoke-filled hothouse known as Pop, circa 1966. And in April, Donovan, whose “Mellow Yellow” was released that same year, was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Not bad for a guy who was singing a song that many people have long assumed was about getting high off dried banana peels. In fact, it may have been about vibrators, which makes it about the “sex,” rather than the “drugs,” in “sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll.”

This spring also saw the publication of a new book titled “Electrical Banana: Masters of Psychedelic Art,” by Norman Hathaway and Dan Nadel. Featuring an introductory interview by Hathaway with Paul McCartney, the 208-page paperback shines a bright spotlight on psychedelic artists from Europe, Australia, and Japan, some of whom were never comfortable with the term that came to define them. On Sunday April 29, 2012, the authors and graphic artist Gary Panter will be at MoMA PS1 in New York to talk about the book and show a few film clips provided by some of the artists.

“In the ’60s, I was scorned as a psychedelic artist, especially when seen in the company of Tim Leary.”

Taking its name from a line in Donovan’s famous tune (McCartney played bass on the recording), “Electrical Banana” features interviews with, and artwork by, seven highly influential artists, such as the late Heinz Edelmann, who conceived the landscapes and characters in the animated feature “Yellow Submarine,” even though he describes himself in the book as being “allergic” to many of the most common tropes of psychedelia. Then there’s Tadanori Yokoo, whose collages took their inspiration, in part, anyway, from traditional kimonos. Believe it or not, some of these artists didn’t even take drugs.

“The book originally had about three or four other artists in it,” says Hathaway, “but a couple people kind of fell by the wayside. It wasn’t until later that I noticed that there wasn’t a single American in the book, which I ended up being kind of happy about. Usually when people think of psychedelic art, they primarily think of the Fillmore stuff and not a lot else. It’s always Wes Wilson, Rick Griffin, and Victor Moscoso, but there was a lot going on outside of San Francisco, too.”

Heinz Edelmann's artwork for The Beatles' "Yellow Submarine" included this sequence that accompanied the song "Nowhere Man."

The book begins with Heinz Edelmann, a Czech-born graphic designer who was living in Dusseldorf when he got the call to work on “Yellow Submarine,” an animated feature for The Beatles that, much to his chagrin, became his legacy. After all, this was a man who was influenced by artists as diverse as Picasso, Saul Steinberg, and Ben Shahn, and here he was, being asked to draw characters for a film that did not even have a script.

To hear Edelmann tell it, “Yellow Submarine” was a colossally frustrating experience, so much so that he almost didn’t see it through. The breaking point came on one Friday night. “I was full of hate at everybody,” he tells Nadel, “and thought, ‘Well, I’ll resign, but I’m not going out with a whimper, I’ll go out with a bang.’ That is when I did the Meanies, and the Meanies were originally supposed to be Communists. I always wanted the Meanies to win, but I didn’t get my way.”

Martin Sharp's homage to Bob Dylan, "Blowin' in the Mind," was silkscreened on foil in 1966.

If Edelmann was a reluctant participant in the psychedelic aesthetic (“I don’t like the smell of incense,” he deadpans), Australian Martin Sharp was an active one, who admired the San Francisco rock-poster artists and cartoonist Robert Crumb in particular. Sharp, who lived in London for a few years before moving back to Australia, even contributed lyrics for “Tales of Brave Ulysses,” which was eventually recorded by Eric Clapton’s band Cream.

“I didn’t know who he was,” Sharp tells Hathaway of his first encounter with Clapton. “I learned Eric was a musician, so I told him I’d just written a song. He replied he’d just written some music. So I wrote the lyrics down for him.” The song appears on Cream’s second album, “Disraeli Gears,” whose 1967 cover was drawn freehand by Sharp at its actual size.

Paul McCartney wrote "Hey Jude" and other hits on a piano painted by the design group Binder, Edwards & Vaughn.

Other artists were more like art directors and the set decorators for the pop-music scene. Dudley Edwards was a member of the London design group Binder, Edwards & Vaughn, which made a business of custom-painting dressers, chairs, and other pieces of furniture, treating them, essentially, like three-dimensional canvases. One of the group’s first non-furniture pieces was a 1960 Buick convertible, which eventually was used by the Kinks on an album cover. That led to a commission for Paul McCartney in 1967.

“I remember I first saw a photo of their painted car in the ‘Sunday Times Magazine’ and thought it was really cool,” recalls McCartney in his interview with Hathaway. “So I got in touch with them and asked the guys if we could have a meeting. We did, and I told them ‘I’ve got a little piano I’d like you to decorate in that same style.’ And at first they were a little bit reluctant to do anything, but I persuaded them. So they measured it all up, took the panel dimensions, and worked up some designs. Then they painted it and did a lovely job. It became my psychedelic piano, which I wrote a lot of songs on, including ‘Sgt. Peppers Lonely Hearts Club Band,’ ‘Fixing A Hole,’ and ‘Hey Jude.’ It’s in its rightful place in my music room in London.”

Marijke Dunham was hired to create outfits and paint the guitars for Cream's first U.S. tour.

If Edwards was the guy who customized the fixtures enjoyed by Londoners, including city walls that were transformed into traffic-stopping murals, Marijke Dunham and her group, The Fool, did all that (a fireplace for George Harrison, a piano for John Lennon), and also clothed them.

In a weird way, Dunham’s psychedelic inspirations were most traditionally psychedelic. “Drugs were a big part of it,” she admits to Hathaway flatly, arguing that the aesthetic, “has a bad name due to that. I mean Van Gogh painted his strange paintings and there’s been no mention of drugs, but drugs definitely had an influence as far as the cause was concerned, with the strange moving lines, definitely … and since I’m not ashamed about it I don’t have to hide it. That’s where it comes from.”

Keiichi Tanaami was not a fan of the Monkees, but a gig was a gig.

Meanwhile, in Japan, Keiichi Tanaami was harnessing the disturbing, traumatic childhood memories of the fires in Tokyo during World War II for saccharine album covers for The Monkees, whom he never cared for. He was also producing graphics for magazines, but it was a 1968 visit to New York, where he met Andy Warhol and saw the Jefferson Airplane, for whom he’d do an album cover, that really opened his eyes.

“I visited America in 1968,” he recalls, “at a time when the country was full of turmoil—the assassinations, the protests. I saw underground comics then, like Robert Crumb. I also discovered pornographic newspapers. Both were extremely shocking for me.” That led to projects for “Playboy,” one of which was a feature called “Wonder Girl” for the Japanese version of the magazine. “I was very influenced by ‘Superman’ and ‘Wonder Woman’ comic books,” he tells Hathaway. “I found them in stores close to my university. I loved ‘Wonder Woman’ the most.”

Tadanori Yokoo chafed at the cold modernism that grew out of graphics produced for the Japanese Olympic Games in 1964.

Another artist from Tokyo, Tadanori Yokoo, was making dense posters characterized by rich colors and a deep sense of perspective. As Hathaway says of Yokoo, he “was affected, but not absorbed by the Sixties. He passed through it, impacted it, and moved on.”

In “Electrical Banana,” Yokoo recalls commissions that were rejected (a cover for “Time” magazine of the prime minister of Japan being strangled by an American flag necktie), as well as the influences he was rebelling against (the “true path of modernism” that came out of the 1964 Olympics). And he also remembers the one that got away.

“Bob Dylan once took a bunch of my work, collaged it together, and his manager brought it to me and asked me to make something similar to it for a cover, and it was awful. It was the day before I had to leave with my family on holiday to Italy, so I had to refuse. But I wish I’d kept the sketch—it was Dylan drawing my images.”

This 1962 painting by Mati Klarwein became an album cover for the Grateful Dead's Jerry Garcia in 1971.

Rounding out Hathaway’s and Nadel’s collection of seven artists is the late Mati Klarwein, who was born in Hamburg, Germany, but fled with his family to Jerusalem at a very young age at the onset of World War II. In the 1960s, Klarwein was commissioned by Jackie Kennedy to paint a portrait of her late husband, and he also did portraits of such living luminaries as Leonard Bernstein and Brigitte Bardot. Somewhere along the line, his surreal paintings became album covers for Santana (“Abraxas”), Jerry Garcia (“Hooteroll?”), and Miles Davis (“Bitches Brew”).

Of all the artists in “Electrical Banana,” Klarwein is the hardest to pin down, as he described it some years ago. “During the Abstract Expressionist epidemic of the Fifties, I was dismissed as a latent Surrealist illustrator. In the Sixties, when the Pop Art revolution swept the globe with its tidal waves of whimsical garbage, I was scorned as a psychedelic artist – especially when seen in the company of Tim Leary – too close to LSD for the straight culture-vultures of Madison Avenue. In the Seventies, when Conceptualism was the magic word (what else is there, anyway?) and a work of art was called a ‘piece,’ I was haughtily snubbed as an old-fashioned easel painter from Montmartre. It’s only in the Eighties, now that conservative senility has entrenched itself in the marrow of Western culture, and good old-fashioned easel painting is being resuscitated as high-funk nostalgia, that the art-mart world is beginning to treat me with a little respect for the first time.”

(Images courtesy Norman Hathaway)

Amazing! Incredible! Unbelievable! Eyeglasses that let you see through clothes. The secrets to super-human strength. Scary seven-foot tall ghosts that do your bidding. All of this could be yours for a dollar or two. At least, that’s what vintage comic-book ads would have you believe. Six years ago, artist and historian Kirk Demarais, who runs the brilliant Gen X nostalgia site, Secret Fun Spot, became determined to uncover the truth behind these comic-book ads published between the 1950s and late ’80s. Last fall, he published “Mail-Order Mysteries,” a book that reveals what you really got when you ordered any one of 150 supposed marvels.

“Harold von Braunhut, who pushed X-Ray Spex and Sea-Monkeys, was the guru of comic-book mail order.”

Demarais, who is 39, became fascinated with mail-order comic novelities as a kid in small-town Siloam Springs, Arkansas, where he’s lived most of his life. The impact these ads had on his imagination is spelled out in his 2004 short film, “Flip,” about a boy who dreams of the wonderful life such $1 products could bring him. The film led to his dream job: redesigning the S.S. Adams novelty company’s catalog and writing a 2006 book on the gag-maker’s 100-year history called “Life of the Party.”

Recently, Demarais has also made a name for himself with his color-pencil drawings depicting TV and movies families, like The Cosbys and The McFlys, as if they’d gone to Sears and had a portrait done, earning him famous patrons like Kristen Wiig and Jonah Hill. This May, Demarais will have his first two-man art show at Gallery 1988 in Los Angeles.

Collectors Weekly: How did you first come across comic-book ads?

Kirk Demarais: The first time I ever saw comics for sale was in 1979, when the place we called “the Icee shop” got a comic rack. I was in the first grade, and I decided to spend my candy money on a “Micronauts” comic book instead. But it was definitely not made for first-graders to read. I was uninterested in the story itself, but the ads were so mysterious and amazing: Gorilla masks were across the page from a hovercraft. They offered pranks like S.S. Adams’ Snake Nut Can and spooky stuff like monster hands and a skull key chain. I was completely blown away.

Of course, X-Ray Spex caught my attention because I loved the idea you could see through things like that. That’s when I approached my dad, asking for that stuff, and he informed me that most of it was a rip-off. I wasn’t allowed to get any of it until I grew up and eBay came along, with the rare exception of the items I would come across in souvenir and toy shops. Anytime I saw a comic-book prank like the Joy Buzzer while I was on vacation, I would definitely snatch it up.

Collectors Weekly: Isn’t it funny how when your parents tell you something is a rip-off, it just makes you want it more?

Demarais: Oh yeah. Suddenly, it was the forbidden fruit. I trusted my parents in general, but something about that, I thought, “How did they know?” They didn’t order it. It’s also the first time I ever encountered dishonest salesmanship. I thought, “With all the other commercials I see on television, you get what they show you.” Part of me had a hard time fathoming that people would just out-and-out rip you off, especially kids. That’s the coming-of-age lesson behind it.

The author, Kirk Demarais, in the fourth grade, displaying his toy collection. Image via "Mail-Order Mysteries."

Collectors Weekly: The hilarious part is that it only cost you a few dollars to begin with. If you bought a real X-ray, it would cost a lot of money.

Demarais: Right. Yes, but there’s always that hope that somehow they’ve developed this technology for dirt cheap. Somehow it’s the best of all worlds. They have developed the ability, and it’s practically free. But as a first-grader, I wasn’t thinking in those terms.

Collectors Weekly: Why were these things so appealing?

Demarais: They weren’t just toys. Things like X-Ray Spex and the Charles Atlas Fitness Program could improve my life. If I had ordered something from a comic book, I wouldn’t just play with it. No, it could actually bring admiration from others. Even in first grade, I faced bullies, and so I thought these things could help me stand up for myself. I definitely wanted to know karate, and that was the first time I ever desired something that wasn’t a toy.

This "Hey Skinny!" comic strip sums up the fantasy the Charles Atlas Fitness Program was selling. Image via mailhiot.com

There was something about these ads: They seemed like a tantalizing gateway to sophisticated and mysterious adult worlds. Sadly, they still appealed to the most basic desires, glory and money and sex. They’re not selling the kind of things that bring the true fulfillment that adults should be pursuing.

Collectors Weekly: What was your first experience with an actual comic-book mail-order item?

Demarais: I was misled, because my early encounters with comic-book novelties were resoundingly positive. When I was a teen, a novelty shop opened up in downtown Siloam Springs for just a couple of weeks, and I got the Snake Nut Can there. The can is solidly constructed, made out of metal. If you shake it, it rattles, so it sounds like it has something in it. The snake, a spring covered in a fabric sheath, pops out really well. I had loads of fun with it.

The Coffin Bank, also sold as Spooky Bank, is creepy and fun.

Then, I was given a Spooky Bank, which is shaped like a coffin. You wind the bank up, and a skeleton pops up and grabs your coin. Again, that was a blast. I loved the artwork on it. It was funny, mysterious, and it did what the ad said. Another, the Switchblade Comb, I found while on vacation. It looks like a switchblade, but instead of a blade, it has a comb on it. But that thing is so fun and satisfying when you pop it out.

Because I was three for three, it was incredibly deceptive. Probably the main reason those particular novelties made it into stores is that they’re decent products. Whereas, with a lot of the stuff sold through comic-book mail order, no one in their right mind who can pick it up and inspect it is going to buy it.

Collectors Weekly: X-Ray Spex were your first real disappointment?

Demarais: Yeah, you don’t actually see through clothes or skin. Thankfully, by that time, I was an adult, and I was expecting that. X-Ray Spex were literally the first thing I ordered online. It was ’98, and I didn’t even know about eBay; I had found a site that sold pranks and magic tricks.

Feather veins stuffed inside X-Ray Spex diffract light and give the illusion you can see the bones of your fingers. Image from a web commercial for "Mail-Order Mysteries."

The lens is made up of two pieces of thin cardboard, more like cardstock, with a hole in the center, and in between those cardboard pieces is an actual feather. It’s hard to explain how it works. I have the book here. Let me read. I said, “In the original Spex, the X-ray illusion occurs as the viewer looks through genuine feathers which are embedded between the cardboard. … The feathers’ veins diffract light, creating the appearance of two offset images. A darker area forms where the images overlap which can be interpreted as bone in your hand or the curves of a lady.”

Collectors Weekly: Can you imagine how disappointed you would have been?

Demarais: I never felt the true sting of shady mail order when I was a child. It would’ve been pretty upsetting if I had spent my allowance on that stuff. I’ve talked to a lot of people who did order this stuff as children. And at lot of times, they say that, yes, there was a sting of disappointment at first, but once they got over that, they found a way to enjoy the products.

Unlike normal toy soliders, the soldiers sold in comic books fell flat. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

It makes sense. Kids can use their imaginations to make anything fun, even plain cardboard boxes. Even though these X-Ray Spex don’t work, they look cool. Even though these toy soldiers are smaller than you thought and they’re flat, they’re still toy soldiers. You can still set them up and use your imagination.

Collectors Weekly: But as an adult, you were able to go crazy and buy the things you were denied as a kid?

Demarais: After I bought the X-Ray Spex online, I started accumulating a little bit at a time. Then when the notion of the book came about six years ago, that’s when I kicked it into high gear. Even though the book wasn’t a sure thing, I thought, “I’m going to go ahead and get serious about tracking this stuff down.”

A designer I admire once told me that it’s a dangerous thing when you can justify your obsessions. I had done just that. It was no longer just for fun. It told myself, “Well, this is a dream of mine and an art project.” Because I had a goal in mind, I was able to spend more freely.

Probably when mankind was less developed, this instinct was more practical. We collectors probably had a strong, important role in gathering food or collecting old bones and rocks for tools. Now, it’s a misspent obsession—just these weird flights of fancy. It’s very odd.

Clayton Moraga, in 1967, in his Polaris Nuclear Sub, a glorified cardboard box, that could be destroyed by anything remotely wet, even dewy grass. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

Collectors Weekly: So you ended up spending a lot more on these items than they were originally sold for?

Demarais: If you added it up over from age 14 to now, it may be a couple thousand. But most of it is relatively cheap. Most of the rare stuff in the book, that belongs to a fellow up in New Jersey named Eddie Guevarra. I flew up there and photographed his collection. He’s equally obsessed, and he was able to purchase this stuff when he was a kid, and he had the wherewithal to keep most of it. In the book, I talk about the Seven Giant Dinosaurs, which are just balloons. Still, Eddie kept those balloons. During all my eBay-ing all this time, that’s the only time I’ve ever seen those.

A couple months before the book was done, I saw the U-Control Ghost on eBay. I’d never seen it in my entire life. I had a couple of freelance jobs lined up, so I was willing to spend a bit more than usual. To add to the drama, I was teaching an evening computer course at John Brown University when the auction was ending. As I was lecturing, I could see my eBay auction on my screen. And I was the only bidder up until 12 minutes before the auction was to end. Then, I see it start going up. So for a while, I’m trying to act like I’m not interested in this. I’m trying to struggle through the lecture, and finally, I couldn’t do it anymore. I said, “Okay, class, let’s take a break.” Then I sat down for those last 10 minutes and bid it up to $365. But the other bidder swooped in at the last minute and beat me.

Monster Size Monsters: They're really two-dimensional seven-foot-tall vinyl posters. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

I was very disappointed. I emailed the seller and said, “I would pay if you would send me some high-res photos of this item that I just lost because I’m working on a book.” Well, he didn’t respond, but he forwarded my request to the winner of the item, which was Eddie. And so Eddie writes me, “Hello. I understand you’re interested in some photos. Yes, I can do that for you.” And I wrote back, I’m like, “Eddie, it’s me. Don’t you recognize the email?”

It was amazing because I already had tickets to go up to New Jersey and photograph his collection at that point. Even though I got outbid, I was able to get the U-Control Ghost in the book. Eddie and I may be literally the only two people in the world who care that much about it. It’s ironic because if either one of us didn’t exist, the other could’ve gotten it for the opening bid of $10.

Collector Weekly: Another ad that everyone remembers is the Charles Atlas comic strip.

Demarais: That one is a fitness course, one of many fitness courses offered through comic books. The Charles Atlas plan is unique because it doesn’t use dumbbell training. It all has to do with exercises you can do without additional equipment, like stretches, pushups, and sit-ups, because Mr. Charles Atlas thought that weightlifting was not the way to go. It is, by far, the most popular mail-order fitness course, because it was one of the first, originating in the 1930s. But also because of that comic strip, which paints the whole fantasy of the formerly skinny guy facing a bully; it makes a lasting impression.

Bodybuilder Charles Atlas calls bunk on the "naturally skinny." Image via mailhiot.com

As far as its effectiveness, yes, there are many, many satisfied customers who claim that the Charles Atlas course did indeed work. But that’s the thing. Almost any fitness course, if you have the wherewithal and the discipline to do it, will work. There were 12 individual lessons, as well as bonus lessons on eating right and exercising. That was all it was.

Collectors Weekly: When I was little, I was totally creeped out by the Sea-Monkeys ads.

Demarais: That’s hilarious. Yeah, the drawing on the ad makes it look like Sea-Monkeys are living beings with human faces that can look at you and weird crowns on their heads. And they’re naked—that’s what got me. They’re supposed to be a family, and the whole family is naked together. That always weirded me out, too.

Sea-Monkeys are actually brine shrimp. They’re one of first comic-book mail-order items I bought. I think I got them at Toys R’ Us in Tulsa, Oklahoma, when I was a kid. They start out disappointing. After waiting 24 hours for the water to become purified, you put the eggs in and they do hatch, but the Sea-Monkeys are almost microscopic at first. You can only see them with a magnifying glass, and they look like little particles in the water. But then if you look real close, they have this little tail flickering around.

Actual Sea-Monkeys, magnified, which look nothing like creepy humanoid water pets, thank goodness. Image via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

At first, there is this initial disappointment, but if you keep your Sea-Monkeys alive, they do grow, and they get to where you can see them quite easily. For me, the real turning point in my Sea-Monkey experience was when they each develop this little eye, a dark spot on each of their heads. They do tricks, too. Sometimes, they’ll respond to your finger or light. So yes, I would play with them and I did become attached to the Sea-Monkeys. In the end, I think they’re pretty cool, and they’re not scary. But they don’t have human faces, they don’t look like naked people, and they’re not grouped in nuclear families. The ad definitely took massive liberties.

Sea-Monkeys were marketed by the late Harold von Braunhut, who also pushed X-Ray Spex. He was the guru of all comic-book mail order. Von Braunhut developed the X-Ray Spex in 1964, and he’s the mastermind behind Sea-Monkeys. I’ve read some interviews with him where he talked about how hard he tried to sell his idea of Sea-Monkeys to toy shops, and no one wanted it. Then, it dawned on him that with mail order, you completely do away with the middleman. He launched his business in 1960 and became a multimillionaire because, as my book says, “The relatively affordable ad space proved to be a tremendous success, and instant life produced instant wealth. In their prime, the ad appeared in 303 million pages annually.”

The Ventrilo Voice Thrower, two pieces of metal wrapped in a ribbon, is more of a choking hazard than anything. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

Collectors Weekly: Who drew these ads?

Demarais: The X-Ray Spex in particular were drawn by a professional daredevil named Henri LaMothe, who is the in the “Guinness Book of World Records” for making the world’s “Highest Shallow Dive,” from 28 feet into 12 inches of water. Some of the military ones, like the ad for Revolutionary Soldiers, were drawn by a famous comic-book artist named Russ Heath. I think he made $50 to do this one ad, and yet it turned out to be his most famous piece of work because the same ads were reprinted for decades.

But aside from those exceptions, I have no idea who drew this stuff. I know that some of the art was supplied by the people who made the items. Some of the art was probably drawn by in-house layout artists at Johnson Smith & Co. and novelty companies like that. But I’ve never been able to track it down.

It’s very frustrating for me as a historian. When I was working with S.S. Adams on the book, I realized no one bothered archiving all that information, like who did what. Of course, they’re a business: All they’re worried about is getting the art, putting the products together, sending them out, and making the money. Any information that happens to remain, it’s almost accidental. S.S. Adams knew the name of one of their artists, and the rest were no-name guys who would do the drawing and be gone.

The Air Car Hovercraft actually made good on its promises, even if it's not large enough to ride. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

Collectors Weekly: Now that you’re old enough to be cynical, did some of the products surprise you?

Demarais: The Air Car Hovercraft will hover on water, which still blows me away. One of my favorite items is the Secret Agent Spy Camera, because actually it takes photos, but you still have to get the film developed. In the book, I mentioned that when you’re a kid, this seems to be a big challenge and extra expense and you have to involve your mom or dad. It’s just a miniature camera. They take only black-and-white, and they do have a very grainy, spooky look to the photos. You can now find groups on Flickr of artistic photos taken with these spy cameras.

The Spy “Pen” Radio is cool because it doesn’t take any batteries, for one. It looks like a pen with wires hanging out of it, but it has a working crystal radio inside it. You’re supposed to hook it up to something metal, like phone cord or a radiator, both of which are hard to find now. Then it has a little earpiece, and you tune the radio by pulling or pushing a little antenna sticking out of the bottom. It’s not fooling anyone because it’s not like you can put it in your pocket and no one could tell that it’s a radio. In that sense, it’s a failure. But I can only imagine being a kid in the late ’60s or ’70s and actually having this very portable radio that works and requires no batteries.

The Spy "Pen" Radio doesn't pass as a pen, but works as a portable battery-free radio. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

Collectors Weekly: What about Count Dante’s World’s Deadliest Fighting Secrets?

Demarais: The fighting techniques are indeed deadly, but they’re obvious. Like, it’s no secret that its deadly to gouge someone’s eyes out, or to break their spine. And, yes, you are a murderer if you use anything out of this book. That’s obviously a problem. There are several self-defense books in “Mail-Order Mysteries,” and that one is by far the most sensational. If I would’ve had this as a kid, I would’ve been fascinated because it’s not playing around. It’s not promoting a healthy or smart way of life. It’s telling you how to kill people. I think I would have appreciated that, like, “Wow, this is really how to do it.”

When you’re a kid, no one else is showing you detailed methods, with photographs, of how to mortally wound someone, so it’s definitely a cut above the typical self-defense program. The others, they have this honorable philosophy that insists it’s only for defense, and you should never use it on someone unless you absolutely must. Whereas Count Dante is more brutal. It’s that adult factor. It’s like, “For the first time, I’m going to tell you how it is, kid. I’m not going to sugarcoat this. Here’s the deadly stuff right here.”

Collectors Weekly: What were the biggest disappointments, aside from the X-Ray Spex?

Demarais: The Ventrilo Voice Thrower is, I would say, a terrible disappointment mainly because the ad suggests that you’re going to make it sound as though you’re in a giant vase or a suitcase, and you’re completely throwing your voice. In truth, even if you use that thing correctly, you’re making a sound, and you’re not speaking audible words. Not to mention the fact that it’s this tiny, little metal thing you’re supposed to put in your mouth. It’s very dangerous. If you swallow it, it could kill you.

The other is that U-Control Ghost. The ad says, “U-Control 7-foot life-size ghost. It obeys commands indoors and outdoors, acts life-like, soars 30 to 40 feet. You control in secret, conceal in your pocket, ready to operate, floats, dances, spooky effects, 7-foot head and body, white shroud, secret control.” Well, it’s a balloon and a trash bag, basically, and some string. That would be the ultimate disappointment because that ad paints such an elaborate image in your mind, and even the picture shows a boy fleeing from this huge specter. I’m envisioning this remote control thing that’s massive and scary, and then you find out it’s just a balloon. Well, what’s horrible is one of the faces that was printed on the balloon is none other than Casper the Friendly Ghost. It’s supposed to be this terrifying thing, and it’s literally the friendliest ghost there is.

U-Control Ghost: A trash bag, string, and a balloon with Casper's friendly face. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries"

Collectors Weekly: A lot of it sounds like stuff you could’ve made yourself.

Demarais: Some of them you could make. In truth, there aren’t a ton of them that you could actually make from scratch, but they’re pretty cheap.

Collectors Weekly: Since these things were so disposable, does it make them harder to find?

Demarais: Yeah, the Frontier Cabin is the one that still eludes me. In the ad, it has the little boy in the Davey Crockett getup and it looks like he’s sitting in front of a wooden playhouse. But as I described on my blog, it’s actually a vinyl sheet with a cabin-like exterior printed on it. The idea is you take it and put it over a card table like a tablecloth. I have never even seen a picture. You can see why: It’s a piece of plastic. I could see it getting ruined very easily and being thrown away. That one is still out there, a mystery waiting to be solved.

Collectors Weekly: So your short film, “Flip” was inspired by the U-Control Ghost?

Demarais: In “Flip,” we called it the U-Control Monster, and that’s a combination. Comic book ads also sold a Monster Ghost, which was the same thing. They also sold things called Monster-Size Monsters, but those are posters.

“No one in their right mind who can pick it up and inspect it is going to buy it.”

The film came about in 2002, when some coworkers and I realized that we all had a dream to try our hand at filmmaking. I had just created a “Flip” web cartoon for my web site, because I had learned Flash animation. So we went for it: We decided to use the cartoon as the basis for a movie, and my friend Todd’s son happened to look like the main character.

Todd also happened to have a rental house that he was renovating. In my house, I have a bunch of vintage furniture, and so does Todd. We dug into our collections and redecorated his house all Mid-Century Modern on the inside. In some scenes, he even created fake wood-paneled walls, and we would borrow ’60s carpeting. I also have a friend who owned a stretch of buildings downtown that had a bunch of old retail equipment inside. So we were able to cobble together a dime store, too. That was the fun part, building the sets and buying stuff for the movie.

Packages for S.S. Adams products, designed by Kirk Demarais.

What’s cool is that if we hadn’t had done that, “Mail-Order Mysteries” wouldn’t exist. “Flip” created a chain reaction. “Flip” got me my job with S.S. Adams. I had sent the owner a copy of the movie because I put some Adams novelties in one of the scenes. He noticed that I had designed the DVD cover. He said, “Hey, you want to do some sort of retro modern design for us?” and that was that.

Collectors Weekly: Can you tell me more about the book you wrote for the S.S. Adams company?

Demarais: It’s a visual history of S.S. Adams. My wife and I traveled up to New Jersey. and we got to spend a week at the Adams factory and dug through all their archives. I photographed and scanned everything I could find, and that’s what that book is. S.S. Adams funded it and they distributed it themselves. It was only available in magic shops and places like that.

Kirk Demarias as an adult, pictured with two of his Hollywood family portraits in Gallery 1988.

Collectors Weekly: In the blurb, designer Chip Kidd called your S.S. Adams book, “a heartbreaking secret history of 20th century America.” How so?

Demarais: Mostly, that’s a comment on the quality of the design and the craftsmanship. The company was 100 years old at that point, and that’s why we did the book. The turn-of-the-century products and catalogs were all beautifully hand-illustrated. Real artistry and craftsmanship went into both the printed materials as well as the items themselves. The Joy Buzzer is solid metal, same with the Snake Nut Can, et cetera. Then you see it degrade.

Back then, adults were buying the pranks. They weren’t sophisticated, but they were made for adults. By the mid-century, the adults were over it, but kids discovered it. It’s the same with movie monsters. When “Frankenstein” came out, originally it was scary for the general public, but by the ’60s, he was showing up on afternoon television and then the kids got it. It’s the same with pranks: Kids went crazy over that stuff in the mid-century. As you look at the packaging and all of the promotional material, everything got really chintzy, as the products were starting to be made overseas. Then by the ’80s, they’re using awful gradients, and it’s really ugly stuff. That’s why it’s heartbreaking: It’s the death of craftsmanship.

The Bag Full of Laughs has a mechanical device, at right, inside it. Images via "Mail-Order Mysteries."

Collectors Weekly: Well, do you know anything about the other companies that made the mail-order products in comics?

Demarais: One misconception is that the people selling them in the comic books are the ones that made them. What you see in the comic books, those are just the distributors, the most popular being Johnson Smith & Co. There’s also Honor House and American Circle. Most of the items were made overseas, in places like China and Hong Kong. So as far as the actual manufacturers, they’re foreign manufacturers, and I know very little about them.

Collectors Weekly: I wonder if kids today would still be tantalized by these ads, as they have so much stimulation in their lives, thanks to computers.

Demarais: My son already prefers video games to television. I’ll say, “Why don’t we watch this show?” and he’ll say, “Why would we watch a show when we could play the show?” But then again, if you go to a standard toy aisle, there are still some very simplistic, classic toys that haven’t gone away. My son can appreciate it when we’ll pull out plastic toy soldiers, and he will play with them as long as he can.

Collectors Weekly: I think there’s a special thing that happens when you grow up in a small town where you have nothing to do.

Demarais: That’s how it was with me and those comic-book ads. There weren’t as many other distractions to pull me away from that obsession. Aside from television, when I found something that caught my interest, it could fill my world indefinitely, and I could take all this time to ponder it and pore over it.

“They weren’t just toys. These things could improve my life, and bring admiration from others.”

We never had a lake house, but some of my friends did. I love how you get out there, and you’re cut off from everything. If you’re digging around and you find a board game stashed under a bed, you say, “Let’s play this!” And you have the greatest time of your life playing Parcheesi or some dumb, old game that would never be fun otherwise. But because the stimulation is so limited, it’s elevated.

The other place that I discovered comics was going to the barbershop with my dad. They had this stack of “Archie” comics that had been there for at least 10 years, and they were completely ratty. They were missing covers and pages. That’s the perfect example, you’re a little kid in a barbershop where there’s nothing to look at, no TV on, and your dad’s just sitting there, staring at the wall. Then, “Whoa! What are these?” The shop had a soda cooler right there, the kind where you have to lift the top of it and reach down in. I’d have a bottled pop and read an “Archie,” and it was bliss.

Since then, I’ve bought a big stack of damaged “Archie” comics just to have them. There’s something so magical about how worn they are and the smell of them. It takes me back to that time of discovering them when there wasn’t a whole lot else going on.

Watch this preview to see Kirk Demarais demonstrate several mail-order mysteries in action:

Watch “Flip” here:

For more information, visit Kirk Demarais’ Secret Fun Spot and Secret Fun Blog.

With the return of “Mad Men” to AMC this Sunday, Sterling Cooper’s attractive staff will raise the bar for contemporary cubicle-dwellers for the fifth season in a row. Along with the show’s cast, we’ll be thrown into the turbulence of 1966, when neon-colored plastic and the ubiquitous Twiggy kicked Mid-Century Modern to the curb. No doubt the characters will weather radically shifting social norms, a polarizing foreign war, and all kinds of inappropriate office politics with the grace of dapper, blueblood New Yorkers, martinis always in hand.

We don’t necessarily recommend boozing on the job, but here are 10 Mod essentials, circa 1966-ish, to smarten up your workday and make you feel worthy of Roger Sterling’s approval.

1. Bust through that glass ceiling feet first, girls! Show off those gorgeous stems with a pair of leg-loving go-go boots (or in the case of this eBay seller, 10 pairs).

2. Display your brand loyalty with this handy Lucky Strike cigarette lighter, great for keeping your business partners, or rivals, at arm’s length. Let’s just say it was a gift from a friend during Season 1.

3. Brighten that boring conference room with this amazing purple lava lamp. Warning: Its sensual glow might make you feel as though you’re in a cozy bar and not at work, but isn’t that where you’d rather be anyway?

4. This colorful plastic bangle would look amazing in Sterling Cooper’s new space-age office. Its simple shape and popping color make it the perfect ’60s throwback.

5. Hemlines are up and hosiery is out: this polka-dotted mini-dress is tons of fun, but still serious enough to get you hired. With its red and navy spots and subtle bust-detailing, this baby means business. Watch your co-workers’ heads spin.

6. These days, water-cooler conversation is all about what music you’re listening to. In 1966, the truly hip kids dropped those square Beatles for more rebellious bands like The Who. Dust off your turntable and drop the needle on “My Generation.”

7. Really want to impress your boss? Ditch your iPhone and show her you remember how to talk to clients the old-fashioned way, without a smiley face at the end of every sentence. This cherry-red Ericofon adds a splash of color to a bland desktop (no, not the one on your computer), and conveniently includes a dial right on the receiver.

8. Colleagues think you’re a slobbish slacker? Show them that you’re sensible and chic with this black Girard Perregaux wristwatch. You’ll be classic, elegant, and always punctual.

9. Sick of being pigeonholed as a prudish Peggy? Say goodbye to that neutral workspace and turn up the fun with this Chromcraft chair! Designed after the famous chairs by Charles and Ray Eames, this fiberglass seat has been updated with a hot-pink color that’s sure to get even the most timid wallflower noticed.

10. Finally, the ultimate in office cool is this vintage Smith-Corona Cougar (yes, that’s its real name). The sleek white typewriter comes in a bright teal case that’s stylish enough to catch Don Draper’s eye.

When I was invited into collector Rick Synchef’s home several months ago, I was drawn by the promise of signed rock posters from the San Francisco music scene, as well as first-edition copies of Beat poetry by such luminaries as Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti. But it was Synchef’s collection of flyers, pamphlets, and other ephemera, distributed by groups such as the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and the Yippies, that made the greatest impression on me.

“I was tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed about 30 times.”

At the time, Occupy Wall Street protestors had made the disparity of wealth in the United States a presidential campaign issue, while protestors in Oakland, California, shut down that city’s port, albeit briefly. As I looked at Synchef’s collection (only a tiny fraction of which is shown here), carefully removed from flat files stored beneath his bed and archival boxes packed into closets, it seemed as if the blueprints for the Occupy movement were being laid out before me.

Synchef began collecting political paper while still an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin in Madison. “Madison was often referred to as the Berkeley of the Midwest,” Synchef recalls. “I thought I was politically aware, but Madison was an eye-opening experience.”

Top: A Eugene McCarthy for President event, 1968, signed by the candidate. Above, left: A Yippie flyer promoting events during the Democratic National Convention, 1968. Above right: The cover of an SDS booklet timed for the trial of Yippie and other leaders arrested at the August event.

Although the lightning-rod issue for student activists in the late ’60s was opposition to the war in Vietnam, Synchef remembers the motivation of the movement as being more far-reaching. “It was about human rights in general,” he says, “about trying to make people’s lives better and more meaningful.” It was also about challenging the power structure, particularly the incestuous relationship between government agencies and the corporations that benefited from their policies.

Sound familiar?

By 1970, demonstrations at Madison and many other universities were nearly constant, especially after May 4, when National Guard officers shot and killed four students at Kent State University in Ohio. “I estimate I was tear-gassed or pepper-sprayed about 30 times,” Synchef says of his four years at Madison. “Not me personally, but I’d be in situations where the cops would just fog the area with pepper spray. They’d drive by in vans and pepper-spray masses of people.”

These days, such events become instant Internet memes.

This 1969 flyer for an event in San Francisco advertised one of several peace marches around the country that day.

Against this backdrop, Synchef began collecting leaflets and other pieces of political ephemera. “I just started saving things, like handbills that had been stuck to telephone poles, or flyers used to promote events and speakers on campus. I knew we were going through a really significant and unique period in American history. I had a gut feeling that it might never happen again. This was before e-mails, before fax machines. Those pieces of paper were how people found out about events; they were never intended to be permanent. I thought, and I still think, that these things needed to be preserved. They’re a really important part of American history.”

Later, after graduating from law school at Northwestern University in Chicago, Synchef added to his collection by purchasing, “an occasional poster here and there,” as he puts it. “But what really spurred me on,” he says, “is that in the late 1980s, I happened upon a catalog of bohemia and ’60s literature—first editions and signed works. I call them cheap but meaningful pamphlets, but they were treated with respect in a catalog ordinarily reserved for rare books and manuscripts. Someone was making a real attempt to categorize and define these things in a logical and coherent way.”

Two posters were produced for the Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park. The one on the left was designed by rock-poster artist Stanley Mouse and "Oracle" art director Michael Bowen. The one on the right is by rock-poster artist Rick Griffin. Synchef's copies have been signed by many of the day's participants, including Timothy Leary and Allen Ginsberg.

Synchef bought a few pieces from the catalog, “and then it became obsessive,” he says. “I actually ran a couple advertisements in paper-collector magazines, and learned how to preserve things in Mylar and archival cardboard boxes.”

Before long, he had collected ephemera produced by numerous branches of the counterculture, from underground newspapers such as “The East Village Other,” which served residents of that New York City neighborhood, to handbills promoting the famous Human Be-In, which was held on January 14, 1967, in San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park. Some events were tied to political causes, while others seemed more about the human spirit. “It’s all a continuum,” Synchef says. “The Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee [SNCC] helped the summer freedom riders that went to the South in the early ’60s to register black voters. It’s really hard to draw boundaries between all the different types of, shall we say, human-potential movements.”

One of the earliest student-activism documents in Synchef’s collection is a copy of the Port Huron Statement. “In 1962, approximately 50 student leaders met from around the country in Port Huron, Michigan, to put together a declaration of principles, if you will, advocating for participatory democracy. Primarily written by Tom Hayden, the Port Huron Statement was a seminal document in student activism.”

An anti-war protest march greeted President Richard Nixon on inauguration day.

Some of its tips, specifically the one to “make debate and controversy,” sound like tenets of Occupy Wall Street. “I went to a few Occupy events,” adds Synchef, “and I felt surprisingly like I did in the old days. People were really sincere. They were really trying to make a difference.”

Like many social observers, Synchef sees numerous parallels between the 1960s and today. “In the ’60s, the country was incredibly divided. You were either a hawk or a dove; there was no middle ground. Same is true today.” And just as certain wings of the Occupy movement appear more radical to outsiders than others, the various groups within the student-activism movement of the 1960s had their different approaches, too. “There were the Students for a Democratic Society,” says Synchef, “as well as the Yippies started by Paul Krassner, Abbie Hoffman, and Jerry Rubin. There were also the Black Panthers and the Weather Underground.”

Written in 1962 by Tom Hayden and others, The Port Huron Statement (click to enlarge the front and back covers) became a blueprint for political activism in the 1960s.

Each group had its own particular agenda, and today, each is remembered differently in the popular imagination. “I don’t want to say the Yippies were not as serious as the SDS,” says Synchef. “They were absolutely as serious, but they engaged in a kind of demonstration that was a little more like street theater. They did things to get attention, like when Abbie Hoffman and others threw dollar bills on the trading floor at the New York Stock Exchange, just to create the spectacle of everybody scrambling for the money. They staged events that were good at garnering publicity.”

Other groups such as the Weather Underground took more drastic measures to make their case. “They engaged in property damage to bring attention to what was going on in the country,” he says. “I certainly can’t speak for them, and I hate to try to say what they did in one sentence, but basically they were unsatisfied with the pace of progress. Their goal, I think, was the same as other groups—to achieve a more-just society and end the war—but they wanted to get results more quickly.”

The Weather Underground was a more radical spinoff of the SDS.

At the other end of the spectrum were organizations like Clergy and Laymen Concerned About Vietnam, and Mothers Against the War. “Everyone helped in his or her own way,” Synchef continues. “People did what felt comfortable.”

Just as these groups in the 1960s and early ’70s drew attention to the war in Vietnam, Occupy Wall Street has had a major impact on today’s public discourse. “If one year ago you had told me that wealth inequality would be one of the focuses of the presidential campaign, I wouldn’t have believed it,” Synchef says. “Now, the disparity between the haves and the have-nots, along with the disappearing middle-class dream, is one of the main discussion points in this election.”

In 2011, the band Moonalice commissioned a number of artists, including Winston Smith, to produce posters supporting the Occupy movement.

Equally surprising, perhaps, is the notion that old pieces of paper associated with groups that often espoused anti-materialism views would become a genre of collectibles. Indeed, Synchef’s collection contains hundreds of signed items, often bearing the scrawls of numerous people involved with a particular event. But for Synchef, those signatures are less about collecting autographs in the celebrity sense than they are a desire to connect the documents in his collection with the people whose actions inspired them.

“In order to get those signatures,” he says, “I got to meet some absolutely fascinating people who were involved in a significant period in American history. The signatures link people to the movements they were involved in, like Paul Krassner to the Yippies or Ken Kesey to the Merry Pranksters. Whether it adds value to a piece of paper, I can’t say.”

(All images except the last one courtesy Richard Synchef, who can be reached at rsynchef01@yahoo.com; Occupy poster courtesy Winston Smith and Moonalice)

Compared to their Colonial neighbors, Vermont silversmiths got a late start. That’s because the first permanent non-Native American settlement in Vermont (Bennington) was not established until 1761, about 140 years after Europeans settled the surrounding areas. Prior to the founding of Bennington, Vermont was the home and hunting ground of the Abenaki, as well as a buffer zone between the French in Canada to the north and the English governing their Colonies to the south.

Despite this disadvantage, or perhaps because of it, some people are drawn to Vermont silver and its unique history. Jonathan Vincent is one such person. Vincent is an architect by training but a collector by passion and lineage—his parents collected, but his handsome and talented son Will, who is a colleague here at CollectorsWeekly.com, claims not to have been bitten yet by the collecting bug. Vincent has scores of Vermont silver spoons, as well as numerous Ukiyo-e woodblock prints, a fine selection of pre-1850 furniture, and a respectable collection of toleware, a type of painted tin. In fact, Vincent is an amateur tinsmith, which probably accounts for his related cache of tinsmithing tools from the mid-19th century.

The shoulders of these spoons are rounded, which dates them after the 1820s.

But Vermont spoons have a special place in Vincent’s heart, in part because he now calls the state home and in part because of their, well, economy. “I had moved from Massachusetts to Vermont for a job,” he remembers, “and I discovered that silver spoons made in Vermont were really inexpensive. They were $7 to $20 apiece, maybe a little more for special pieces, but reasonable and readily available from dealers and at shows. I satisfied my collecting urge by picking up spoons.”

“My wife thinks I have too many spoons. For that matter, I think I have too many spoons.”

What really drew Vincent to Vermont flatware was the history that could be teased out of each piece. “English silver pieces have lots of hallmarks on them,” he says. “The hallmarks tell you where the silver was tested and taxed, the date it was assayed, and often the maker. You can tell a lot about a piece of English silver just by looking at the marks. American silver makers copied the English, but there was no assaying office, no federal tax. Some American silver pieces had faux hallmarks that looked like English marks to give the impression of quality, but those marks were just fakes.”

Within American silver, Vermont silver is unique because of the predominance of spoons. “In the Colonial and post-Colonial era,” he says, “when a young woman married, she would have her dowry, as well as a set of silver teaspoons, tablespoons, and maybe tongs so she could serve tea to visitors. That’s typically what you find today; lots of spoons and ladles and tea items. They survived because they were only used on special occasions.

Top: Ira S. Town worked in Montpelier from about 1825 to 1852. Above: Brinsmaids was a silversmith in Burlington.

“These teaspoons and tea sets were made in lots of little towns in Vermont,” Vincent continues. “From the name of the owner engraved on the front of the handle or the name of the town stamped on the back, you can identify where and approximately when something was made. Some of these towns aren’t big enough to support a Wal-Mart today, but they had their own silversmith back in the 1800s.”

Just about all silver from the late 18th and early 19th centuries, including pieces from Vermont, was made out of coin silver. “Coin silver is any silver that’s made from 90 percent silver and 10 percent copper,” says David Perrin, whose “Coin Silver: Is It a Vermont Mark? A Collector’s Dilemma” is the last word on the subject. “At one point, Mexican and English silver coins were of good enough quality to use as flatware, but I suspect quite a bit of Vermont coin silver was made by starting with pure copper and silver rather than silver coins, although I don’t know that anybody really knows for sure.”

Top: A salt shovel by W. M. Root and Brother of Massachusetts. Above: A sugar shovel from H. M. Nichols of Lyndon Center.

People like Perrin and Vincent naturally use the incised and impressed marks on spoons to identify them, but they also frequently try to dissect a spoon’s design. “Very early on,” says Vincent, “in the 17th century, there was a thing called a trefid spoon. You don’t find those in Vermont, of course, but you can find examples from Massachusetts and New York. It had a rounded bowl and a three-pronged handle. Sometimes the spoon would be set face down on the table so people could admire the engraving and the patterns on the back of the bowl.”

“Some of these towns aren’t big enough to support a Wal-Mart, but they had a silversmith in the 1800s.”

Coffin-handled spoons came later. “Those coffin-ended spoons were typically made between 1800 and 1810,” says Perrin. “Some accounts say they were made to mourn the death of George Washington. I don’t really believe that, but that’s how they’re frequently attributed.”

Another clue is the shape of a spoon’s shoulder, which is the junction between a spoon’s bowl and its handle. “Earlier spoons didn’t have a shoulder,” continues Perrin, “and then around 1800 or 1805, they started to have quite a sharp shoulder. As time went on, by 1820 or so, they had rounded shoulders, and after about 1850, the shoulders of some spoons disappeared again.”

Vermont is not known for hollowware. This coin silver helmet creamer was made by Daniel Bloom Coen of New York.

One thing Vermont was definitely not known for was its hollowware. “Teapots, bowls, and larger items were typically found in the big cities like Boston, Hartford, New York, or Philadelphia,” Vincent says. “People in little Vermont farming towns didn’t have that kind of money, and if they did, they’d go to Boston to buy it. So silver making was strictly tied to the economic fortune of the area, which is why little towns in Vermont like Lyndonville might have one man who made some spoons for the local ladies who were just about to be married, and that was it.”

According to Perrin, there was another reason why Vermont silversmiths stuck to flatware. “Vermont silversmiths were mostly former apprentices from other states such as Connecticut and Massachusetts,” he says. “They needed to find a place where they could make a living without competing with their masters. Vermont offered that, and flatware was relatively easy for these apprentices to make.”

Vincent has spoons by many of these early former apprentices, as well as the silversmiths who came later in the mid-19th century. “The Bailey family was very prominent,” Vincent says. “R. H. Bailey practiced in Woodstock, Bradbury M. Bailey was in Ludlow and then Rutland. I have five teaspoons by him with my wife’s name on them, although they were obviously not made for her at the time. I also have some pieces that were made by Bailey in Woodstock and then marketed by a business associate of his in Boston. Those I didn’t have to buy; I got them from my mother.”

Vincent has traced these six coffin-handled teaspoons from their origins in Connecticut to their settlement in Vermont.

Other histories have required a bit more sleuthing. “I recently bought six American teaspoons,” Vincent says. “All they had on them were the initials of the owner, but with a little bit of research into the town they came from, I discovered that they were probably made in Connecticut in the 1790s for the wife of one of the original founders of a town in Vermont. I can’t prove it, but I have a strong suspicion they were made for her marriage in Connecticut just before she moved to Vermont with her husband, where she stayed the rest of her life. That’s the kind of thing I like to do.”

These days, Vincent goes to three or four auctions a month looking for pieces to fill out his collection. “They’re still not very expensive,” he says, “and they’re light enough in weight that people aren’t melting them down that often. That’s the problem with collectible silver nowadays,” he adds. “If it’s not by a famous maker like Tiffany or if it’s not a special or finely made piece, a lot of times people are buying the pieces just to sell them for their raw silver value, which is really sad because you’re losing a lot of American history.”

In a way, Vincent is protecting Vermont’s history by collecting it. “My wife thinks I have too many spoons,” he admits. “For that matter, I think I have too many spoons. I definitely have enough for all three of our kids. They could each give a big tea party and still have plenty of spoons.”

(All photos courtesy Jonathan Vincent. To order a copy of David Perrin’s book, visit the Vermont Historical Society)

Are you a thrifter, collector, or antiquer in the San Francisco Bay Area? Do you regularly use CollectorsWeekly.com? If so, we’d like to buy you dinner.

On Thursday March 29, 2012, we’re opening our San Francisco offices for the first in a series of special events. Space is limited, so if you would like to attend this event, or any other, let us know how we can reach you.

Thanks!

Oh. My. God. I’ve just been given the location of the largest stash of Golden Age Hollywood jewelry in the world. Worn by stars like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, Grace Kelly, and Greta Garbo, thousands of gems have apparently been gathering dust in an unmarked warehouse, unmolested for half a century. It sounds too good to be true.

What are the chances, I wonder, that the treasures are still there? Wouldn’t they be in the world’s biggest museums by now? Worn by the stars’ great-granddaughters? Divided up and sold at auction?

I have to see for myself, so I book a flight to L.A. Here’s my story.

First Impressions

This entrance doesn't do justice to the treasures found inside.

As the cab drops me off deep in industrial land, I wonder if I’m in the right place. This is purportedly the longtime studio of Joseff of Hollywood, jewelry maker to the biggest Golden Era movie stars.

Could this really be it? From the outside, it looks like any other drab warehouse. Then, I notice the weathered door and spy the metal lettering bearing the signature “Joseff” logo. There’s no doorbell, so I knock.

Tina Joseff, the daughter-in-law of company founder Eugene Joseff, greets me at the door with a hug. An old-fashioned chime sounds as I step into the lobby. The humble gray entry only hints at the treasures inside: Movie stills hang in frames. To me, it feels as though nothing has changed since 1940.

We explore Joseff's original workshop. Click image for a larger view.

Tina leads me to the studio, and—whoa! The tiny space, maybe 100 square feet, is entirely painted a startling turquoise blue. A crowned Buddhist-inspired god of jewels welcomes me from the back-wall mural, where he is portrayed dusting the sky with stars (real Swarovski crystals). Another wall is lined with bright blue drawers, topped with golden and bejeweled crowns, tiaras, scepters, and armor, some of which peep out of pirate’s chests. As I walk onto the faded palm-tree carpet, it dawns on me that I am entering a truly magical space.

Michele (left) and Tina Joseff in front of trays housing thousands of famous jewelry pieces.

Tina’s daughter, Michele, and her assistant, Dawn, meet us there, and soon we are joined by Cameron Silver, co-owner of the famous L.A. vintage shop, Decades Inc. I don’t know why I am surprised the studio is so small; jewelry doesn’t take up a lot of space.

Here, thousands of pieces of Hollywood history are crammed into drawers and trays. Open up one blue drawer, and you might find snakes; another could be all bejeweled daggers. The opposite wall is stacked floor to ceiling with black velvet-lined trays. This is where the most coveted pieces have been carefully catalogued, ordered first by type, and then by gem color.

The "most spectular necklace in the world," a giant bib worn by Ona Munson in "Shanghai Gesture."

With all the pieces of history around me, I feel completely overwhelmed. I don’t know where to start or what to ask to see, but Tina and Michele know where to begin. They take out the breathtaking “topaz” bib necklace first worn by Ona Munson in 1941’s “Shangai Gesture.” Dubbed “the most spectacular necklace in the world,” this “wow” piece has appeared in more movies than any piece in the whole collection. I can see why. I can’t take my eyes off it.

The Crown Jewels

The crown jewels of Hollywood, including the snake bracelets worn by Rita Hayworth in 1947's "Down to Earth," the leaf brooch worn by Jean Harlow in 1936's "Libeled Lady," and the bird bracelets worn in 1944's "Desert Hawk." Click on the image to take a closer look.

“This is where we keep the most famous pieces,” says Michele, pointing to a circular glass display case in the corner. There’s Elizabeth Taylor’s serpent belt from “Cleopatra,” Marilyn Monroe’s pearl earrings from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes,” Scarlet O’Hara’s necklace, and Rhett Butler’s cigar case. Not to mention Jean Harlow’s glamorous “Libeled Lady” brooch, Judy Garland’s “Ziegfeld Follies” lariat necklace, and the exotic bird bracelets from “Desert Hawk.”

The reason this stuff is all here, I think to myself, is a testament to Joseff’s business savvy. Instead of letting the studios keep the best pieces, he held on to them and rented them over and over across the decades. Moreover, since it is “only” costume jewelry, it wasn’t regarded as particularly valuable until very recently.

Open one of the turquoise blue drawers at the Joseff studio, and you might find bejeweled daggers.

I want to absorb everything, to drink it all in. This is my only chance to see all these glimmering bits of history and hear the stories straight from the mouths of the family. Tina and Michele bring me back to earth, offering to let me have a closer look at items in the case. They even let me try a couple of pieces on, including the snake bracelets worn by Rita Hayworth when she played a goddess in 1947’s “Down to Earth.” Right away, I can tell those were definitely made for tiny wrists, as I can barely get them on.

Next, I take a closer look at the snake belt famously worn by Liz Taylor in 1963’s “Cleopatra.” Tina explains that Joseff and his wife and business partner, Joan Castle Joseff, worked mostly with the costume designers. But at times, they got to fit the stars directly, as with this belt.

Elizabeth Taylor insisted that this Joseff of Hollwood snake belt, which she wore in 1963's "Cleopatra," had been measured wrong. It now lives in the glass display with other Joseff treasures.

“Joan had gone out to the studios and measured Liz Taylor for a belt for one of the costumes,” Tina recalls. “By the time the belt was created and she took it back for the fitting, it was about 2 1/2 inches too small. Liz Taylor was known for her fluctuating weight back then. But she blamed it on Joan and said that Joan had not measured her correctly. Of course, Joan didn’t argue with her, but she told me, ‘I know I measured right.’ The rule is measure twice, cut once, and Joan was very thorough.

“Those are things that happen in Hollywood,” Tina continues. “She would go with the flow and do whatever was needed to make it work. That was the way both of them were.”

At left, the giant nine-strand faux pearl necklace worn by Bette Davis in 1939's "The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex." At right, the choker Greta Garbo refused to wear for 1936's "Camille."

Going back to the black velvet trays, Tina and Michele bring out a tremendous necklace, worn by Bette Davis in 1939’s “The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex” and the manly Tyrone Power in 1939’s “The Rains Came,” which may be my favorite thing I’ve seen so far. It has nine long strands of faux-pearls, connected down the middle by crystals set in Joseff’s trademark golden-plated filigree. It’s just so classy, and with a backless gown, it could definitely be red-carpet worthy. I start to wonder: If today’s stars knew about Joseff of Hollywood, would they dare wear it in the spotlight?

With all the pieces of history around me, I feel completely overwhelmed.

As I’m pondering this, the Joseffs take out the elaborate “emerald” and “diamond” necklace that Greta Garbo refused to wear in 1936’s “Camille.” It’s beautiful, but I can see her objections: It appears to be a tight-fitting choker, with uncomfortably pointy sterling silver leaves. “In the scene where she was going to wear the necklace, she was required to have a cape over it,” Tina says. “The necklace cut her from the weight of the cape, so she wouldn’t wear it. The scenes filmed with the necklace ended up on the cutting room floor.”

One thing I don’t see was the single pearl drop Errol Flynn wore in “The Adventures of Don Juan.” Top costume jewelry expert and antique book publisher Judith Miller had told me a particularly amusing story Joan Castle Joseff relayed to her about Flynn, who was rumored to be gay, and this particular earring.

Katharine Hepburn wore this Joseff dual brooch, meant to look like an arrow going through her heart-shaped dress, in 1947's "Sea of Grass." The set is one of Tina Joseff's favorites in the collection.

“Joan told me, ‘No, he really did love the gals, especially between takes,’” Miller said. “They ended up making him 22 of those earrings. Apparently, he lost 21 with the ladies in his dressing room.”

Joseff didn’t mind the hard work. Some movies required hundreds of pieces, Tina explains. “In ‘Anna and the King of Siam,’ the king had multiple wives and 67 children, and they all had to have jewelry,” she says. In fact, 1942’s live-action “The Jungle Book” demanded Joseff provide thousands of pieces.

A thief's armor for 1942's "The Jungle Book."

From the top of the ledge of drawers, Tina and Michele take down a large, red breastplate from “The Jungle Book,” with swirling bejeweled strips of golden metal and golden faces, and put it on the mannequin. This is from one of the sets of armor made for the three thieves in the movie. Tina says that several times a day during the filming, someone from Joseff would have to replace rhinestones that had fallen off the armor due to all the jumping and wrestling the actors had to do.

“For ‘The Jungle Book,’ there were metal vests, large cuffs, and big, heavy belts with a lot of chains that were created specifically for that movie,” she says. “But then, for the treasure trove the thieves discover in the cave, it was full of scrap or broken jewelry pieces and regular coins that were plated to look bright and shiny.”

Michele explains that the jewelry in the trays wasn’t all made by Joseff. Some of it is Trifari. “When he couldn’t make it or even when he just was out somewhere, he bought jewelry just to have it in the rental collection,” she says. ”There were thousands of pieces that are ours. There’s probably hundreds of pieces that are by other makers.”

Eugene Joseff dons the crown and scepter worn by Ronald Colman in 1937's "The Prisoner of Zenda." Seventy-some years later, Decades Inc. co-owner Cameron Silver poses in the same crown.

Cameron Silver, a big player in the current Hollywood vintage scene, says he walked in having no idea about Joseff of Hollywood—which tells you something about how out of the spotlight the company’s been in recent decades. But as the magnificent pieces come out, one by one, he gets more and more excited, and begins to bubble with ideas about how to make the company’s legacy known.

Silver dons the crown and scepter worn by Ronald Coleman in 1937’s “The Prisoner of Zenda.” Amusingly enough, an old image of Eugene Joseff shows him looking regal in that very same crown. When Silver puts it on, he resembles Joseff an uncanny amount. “I’m going to call this one “Crowning Around,” Silver declares.

From left: Tina and Michele Joseff, me, and Cameron Silver. I'm thinking, "Please don't let Shirley Temple's crown fall off my head!"

Inspired by Silver, we decide to get a picture of all of us in crowns, everyone picking one from the stash on the ledge. Michele says to me, “Here, do you want to wear Shirley Temple’s crown?” and hands me the tiara and scepter the child star wore in 1939’s “The Little Princess.” It feels very precarious on my head. I nervously imagine it crashing to the ground, but it doesn’t.

How It All Started

Crowns and scepters were probably the last things on Eugene Joseff’s mind when he started working in the advertising business in Chicago, where he also did an apprenticeship in an art foundry. There, he learned how to forge statuettes and other decorative items out of bronze. He left in 1928 to make his future in California, specifically, Hollywood.

Thanks to his “outgoing and wild personality,” Eugene Joseff quickly fell into the movie-making crowd when he landed in Hollywood in the late 1920s. “He just was the type that attracted people to him,” says Tina, who started working for the company in 1972.

Joseff and his brother Jimmy Glaser look at their wares. The huge acrylic headpiece was worn by Virginia Bruce in 1936's "The Great Ziegfeld."

The year after his move, the Great Stock Market Crash sent the economy into a devastating tailspin that left a large number of Americans broke and jobless. Fortunately for Joseff, Hollywood was the place to be during the ’30s and ’40s, when impoverished Americans found refuge in films. For a couple dimes, they could fantasize about times of wealth and glamour.

“Eugene Joseff revolutionized the way jewelry was used in movies.”

Joseff’s Hollywood-insider friends, like costume designer Walter Plunkett, would take him to the movies they made or invite him to visit their movie sets. Instead of being intimidated, Joseff would loudly mock the jewelry the costumers put on the actresses.

“He wasn’t shy,” Tina says. “He was criticizing the use of modern jewelry in period films. It became a challenge—what can you do to make it better?—and he did.”

Joseff accepted this challenge, and set out to make the most historically accurate costume jewelry possible. He dug into historical books and piles of bound magazines like “Ladies Field”  and “Harper’s Bazar” from the Victorian Era. He traveled, visited museums, and studied pieces from the Renaissance and ancient times in detail.

“He wasn’t shy. He was going on set and criticizing that they were using modern jewelry on period films.”

At his Sunset Boulevard home in Hollywood, Joseff began experimenting with processes for making costume jewelry in his garage. With his brother Jimmy Glaser, he founded Sunset Jewelry Manufacturing. After a couple years Jimmy—who was married to Hollywood costume designer Leah Rhodes—left the company, and Eugene began to look for jewelry craftsmen to work with, while continuing to tinker on his own.

“He did a lot self-taught and through trial and error,” Tina says. “He had a creative mind, and he didn’t mind making mistakes. When he first started out, he was gathering leaves and little acorns and bugs and cabinet knobs, turning those into castings. He was doing a lot of experiments with what he could accomplish with pouring metal.”

Groundbreaking Innovations

Grace Kelly wore Joseff of Hollywood chandelier earrings in 1956's "High Society"

According to Tina, he started perusing industry publications like “Hollywood Reporter” or “Variety” to find out what films were in the works. Then he’d call up the studios to say, “I think I can provide jewelry for this. Give me a script,” or “Give me some sketches.”

“Jewelry didn’t really appear in movies too much before he came along,” Tina says. “I think the costumers had either just gone to a department store and bought the jewelry, or in many cases, it probably belonged to the star herself and she just accessorized her own outfit.”

At first, Joseff was working with a limited budget, making pieces to order, which inspired him to start renting his jewelry to studios, a concept he pioneered.

Vivian Leigh wears Joseff in a dining scene with Clark Gable in 1939's "Gone With the Wind."

“When he started out, he didn’t have a collection; he only had pieces as he made them.” Tina explains. “So he thought, ‘I spent so much money making this piece; how am I going to get my money back?’ Then it occurred to him, ‘I can make it once, and rent it 10 times.’ If he had just sold it, he would’ve been out the piece, he wouldn’t have developed a collection, and everything would’ve been back to square one.”

In the ’30s and ’40s, Joseff was supplying over 90 percent of the jewelry in the movies. according to Michele. “Antiques Roadshow” appraiser Rosalie Sayyah, a costume jewelry expert who goes by the name “Rhinestone Rosie,” agrees that Joseff, who employed between 35 and 70 during his company’s peak years, made an impact on Hollywood and fashion that cannot be underestimated.

Rhett Butler's one-of-a-kind cigar case from "Gone With the Wind" will never be rented to a movie studio again. Same goes for his belt buckle and Scarlett O'Hara's jewelry.

“Hands down, Eugene Joseff revolutionized the way jewelry was used in movies,” Sayyah says. “He was also a marketing genius and a perfectionist. He manufactured his own jewelry because the manufacturers told him, ‘You can’t make this look as good as you want it to be,’ so he did his own thing.”

Not only did he set high standards for himself, Joseff was also thrifty and resourceful, Sayyah says. “He would make a piece for one movie and then it might be disassembled and reassembled in another way for another movie,” she explains. “He was very organized, so he could either re-create something using parts he already had, or he would say, ‘Yes, I can have that for you,’ and he would build the piece from the ground up.”

Where It’s Still Made

Jewelry parts are still stored in cigar boxes, as they were in Joseff's time. The writing on the boxes has yet to be decoded, but Tina and Michele know the numbers have to do with the dealer Joseff bought his parts from and the price he paid. Click image for a larger view.

“When he first started out, he cast leaves, acorns, bugs, and cabinet knobs in metal.”

The workshop where Joseff kept all of his parts and forged his famous pieces is still there, in the room behind the studio. Tina and Michele take me there next. We greet Lucy Koch, who’s been with the company for 50 years and still puts the jewelry together by hand.

This room has a wall stacked floor to ceiling with old cigar boxes—the same ones used by Joseff all those years ago. They’re filled with large metal findings shaped like flowers, skulls, and animals like snakes or elephants. Small findings are kept in a card catalog, while a rainbow of Swarovski crystals are stored in clear glass jars and chains hang from the ceilings and walls.

Joseff and actress Katherine Wilson look over his supply of chains. Joseff always kept plenty of chains on hand to meet emergency studio orders. The cigar boxes behind Wilson are the same ones used today.

I’m shocked at the cluttered, messy state of the two work tables. As I study the jumble on a table, I find it hard to believe this is where those exotic pieces worn by Hollywood’s biggest stars were born. It’s like a woodshop, but instead of sawdust, the table is covered with glittery rhinestones, and a Bunsen burner is still aflame.

A work station where jewelry has been made for Hollywood's biggest stars. Click image for a larger view.

After we leave the studio, Tina takes me and Silver outside and then to the manufacturing plant, where Joseff’s trademark metal jewelry findings are cast. As World War II began brewing in 1939, Joseff also turned his metalworking talents toward developing techniques for manufacturing airplane parts for McDonnell Douglas, and founded Precision Investment Castings, the successful jet-parts company the Joseffs are still running today. At the same time, the Joseff of Hollywood retail and Hollywood rental businesses were flourishing.

Surprisingly, the process for making airplane parts isn’t all that different from making jewelry. All the jewelry findings are cast in pot metal while the plane parts are cast in stainless steel. Tina says it doesn’t make much difference to the workers whether they’re casting jewelry or jet pieces. “It basically goes down the same assembly line,” Tina explains.

Rows of Swarovski rhinestones (Joseff uses no other) adorn the walls of the tiny Joseff workshop.

“It’s so ironic that these two things are being made the same way and are so different,” Silver says later, in the studio. “It just is kind of bizarre.”

Michele agrees, “One is so beautiful and the other is so utilitarian.”

One reason Joseff was so successful in Hollywood was that he developed a special plating technique known as the “antique” or “Renaissance look” that gave his jewelry a veneer of authenticity, Tina says. Even better, his pieces didn’t reflect the bright lights used during the filming.

“Today, people are still trying to figure out his plating technique that creates that Renaissance feel, which gives a piece a look like it has an age about it,” Tina says. “It isn’t just bright and shiny—it has depth. No one else has actually figured out that process yet. I’ve seen some people try to replicate it, and so far they’ve been unsuccessful. The pieces that they make are sort of muddy looking, almost like they’ve got dirt on them. His movie pieces were quite vibrant. That antique look was his signature in Hollywood.”

The Joseff manufacturing plant is in the small building behind the studio. This is where the pieces are cast, before they become the beautiful baubles we see onscreen.

After casting, the jewelry bits are brought to the plating area. Tina points it out: This is where the Joseff magic happens. Each piece is plated with Joseff’s “secret sauce,” a recipe and technique that will forever remain a Joseff family secret. This plating sauce used to simmer in much larger pots, Tina explains. But because it involves cyanide, the company switched to these surprisingly small Pyrex dishes, the sort you’d make soup in.

After casting, pieces are brought to the plating area. Each piece of metal is plated with Joseff's "secret sauce," which gives Joseff pieces their signature antique look.

In addition to this “antique look,” Joseff made his period jewelry even more authentic by employing ancient setting techniques, says “Antiques Roadshow” appraiser Rosalie Sayyah.

“He used a lot of what we call a bezel set,” she says. “In other words, it was not simply prongs holding the stones in. It was a smooth crown that encased the stones. He used a bezel setting because that’s how a lot of the older period pieces he was emulating were set.”

Going Retail

Joseff is pictured delivering his wares to Buffums department store in a newspaper ad from 1948.

Thanks to his cunning and innovative approach to movie jewelry, Joseff became something of a celebrity in his own right. He went as far as to legally change his name to just Joseff.

“Before Cher, before Madonna, there was Joseff,” Tina says. “He worked side-by-side with famous Hollywood costume designers including Walter Plunkett, Rene Hubert, Milo Anderson, Orry-Kelly, and Charles LeMaire, creating the pieces along with their costumes.”

Carole Lombard wears Joseff on the January 1940's "Photoplay," and Joan Crawford flaunts a Joseff brooch on the February 1948 issue of "Motion Picture." February 1948's "Movie Show," with Tyrone Power and Ann Blyth on the cover, features an article penned by Joseff entitled, ”Let’s Be Glamorous!"

In the mid-’30s, many actresses asked Joseff for copies of the pieces they wore in their films. “Actresses wore Joseff on the set, and then they wore it when they went out,” says costume jewelry expert Judith Miller. “People felt that anybody who was wealthy could buy precious jewelry. There was a bit of a Hollywood cachet to wearing costume.”

Regular women, in turn, would see photos of their favorite stars in magazines like “Coronet,” “Movie Stars Parade,” or “Movie Secrets” and covet them. And it struck Joseff, “Why shouldn’t we make every woman in the world feel like a movie star?” And so he expanded his business to retail around 1937, offering pieces for as much as $2.50, a steep price for the time. The line was sold at Nordstrom’s, Neiman Marcus, Bullock’s, Macy’s, Saks, all over.

“The women in the movies of the ’30s and ’40s were very brassy and bold,” Sayyah says. “It changed after that. But with those Golden Era women, there was something different going on. Even if you weren’t that type of woman, it made you feel proud and a little sassy yourself when you would wear something you saw in a movie. These women are solving crimes, they’re newspaper reporters, they’re running around. They usually end up in the lead. They were ahead of the liberated woman craze in the ’60s and ’70s. These were women that rose above the commonplace, so we also associate the jewelry with that.”

Love and Tragedy

While he was great at designing the jewelry, as well as socializing and networking, Joseff found the demands of managing a retail business overwhelming. So in the late 1930s, he made a call to Sawyer’s Business College for a secretary to help him manage the retail side. The school sent a sharp business-minded young woman by the name of Joan Castle, or “J.C.,” who was also working on a Ph.D. in psychology from UCLA.

Newlyweds Joan Castle Joseff and Eugene Joseff at Lake Mead, Nevada, for their 1942 honeymoon. Joan wears the 10 bells necklace from the retail line.

“She fell in love with him immediately, and I’m sure he was attracted to her also,” Tina says. “As they worked close for hours and hours a day, their personalities clicked. What one lacked, the other had, and so they just fell in love. She married the boss in 1942, and they had a son, Jeff, in 1947. They worked hand-in-hand, creating the pieces. They just had a marvelous relationship. They both were vivacious personalities, and very self-confident. Both of them had this great aura about them that they were destined to do greater things.”

Unfortunately, as Joseff of Hollywood was reaching its peak in the late 1940s, tragedy struck. When he was 42 years old, flying his own plane out of Newhall, California, in 1948, Joseff crashed his aircraft, and everyone on the plane was killed. Joan, his surviving wife and partner, took over his businesses, which she stayed involved with until her death at age 97 in 2010. All three still operate out of the Burbank studio I’m visiting.

Joan is pictured in the Joseff library in 1937, wearing a Joseff sun brooch. The necklace shown in the book was replicated for Norma Shearer in 1938's "Marie Antoinette."

“Our family is so proud and happy that Joan continued the businesses after he passed away under such tragic circumstances,” Tina says. “To be a businesswoman running three businesses in the ’40s was just unheard of. She wasn’t a quitter. She just kept it going, and if it hadn’t been for her, it wouldn’t be here today.”

Why Joseff Lost Its Crown

Joan was a savvy businesswoman, so she recognized that tides were turning in the 1950s: As Americans became prosperous and had more access to precious metals and gemstones, regular women wanting glamour began to turn their noses up at over-the-top costume jewelry in favor of more discrete fine jewelry. In 1956, Prince Rainer III of Monaco adorned his bride, Hollywood star Grace Kelly, with a real diamond tiara and necklace by Cartier, and that seems to have snowballed into the current trend of celebrities wearing only fine jewelry on the red carpet.

“In Hollywood’s Golden Age, stars would wear our necklaces and earrings to the Academy Awards, but these days they get lent the real stuff worth millions,” Michele says.

Joan Castle Joseff looks on, horrified, as Shirley Jones, who starred in many Rodgers & Hammerstein musicals, pretends to touch a Christmas tree made of Joseff jewelry during a company holiday party.

As tastes changed in the 1950s, Joan adapted the retail line to focus on cute, figural brooches, which were tremendously popular. At the same time, Joseff of Hollywood was making its mark on the young medium of television, on shows like “I Love Lucy” and “Queen for a Day,” while Joan became active in the Republican Party. Meanwhile, the airplane-parts side of business, Precision Investment Castings, got a contract making military plane parts for the Korean War, employing as many as 240 people at its peak.

Movie studios themselves are partially to blame for the end of Joseff’s reign. For decades, while they rented and returned Joseff pieces, the studios had also been building their own permanent costume jewelry collections. By the late ‘60s, they didn’t have to rely on Joseff as much. But the ‘70s delivered the most devastating blow to Joseff’s reign, thanks to the newfound taste for realism and naturalism in film. Suddenly, the grandiose escapism of the Golden Era was gone.

However, Joan kept the companies afloat. She found a new niche for Joseff of Hollywood in ‘80s primetime soap operas like “Dallas” and “Dynasty” that reveled in ostentatious displays of wealth. As Joseff jewelry faded into obscurity, Precision Investment Castings—for airplanes and now NASA space crafts as well—thrived.

Lucille Ball wears a Joseff of Hollywood necklace and bracelet set. The company provided much of the jewelry seen in "I Love Lucy" and was even a plot point in an episode.

These days, Tina runs the jet-part sales side, which dominates the family business by a ratio of 95 to 5 percent. But Joseff of Hollywood costume jewelry still sells in specialty boutiques, for prices ranging from $100 to $2,000. And it pops up occasionally on the Nickelodeon kids’ TV show, “Supah Ninjas,” as well as movies like the first “Pirates of the Caribbean,” 2011’s “Atlas Shrugged: Part 1,” and the Harvey Keitel mob-movie spoof, “The Last Godfather.”

Joseff of Hollywood also remains a favorite of costume jewelry fanatics, who mobbed Tina and Michele’s booth at the last Costume Jewelry Collectors International Convention and snapped up every piece of Joseff they could get their hands on.

How Little Has Changed

Joan shown at her desk at the Joseff of Hollywood studio in 1953.

Back in the studio, Tina and Michele show me several of Koch’s latest pieces. It’s impossible to tell the difference between what’s new and what’s vintage because many pieces are made from those same vintage findings we’d seen earlier in the workshop.

From the looks of the file cabinet stuffed to the gills with archives, it’s obvious that Joan also had an obsessive side, which most collectors can appreciate. There’s a file of just photos from the fabulous Christmas parties they used to throw. Not only do they have the memory, but they also have the proof.

One studio wall is lined with trays of Joseff jewelry. The pieces are organized by type and by color. This is funny because the movie stills the Joseffs have to identify pieces are in black-and-white.

“We also have a whole building that’s nothing but storage, and it’s box after box after box of papers, newspaper articles, and magazine articles,” Tina Joseff says. “She saved things like airline tickets and matchbooks from hotels, so I know where she’s been and I know how long she stayed. She kept just all sorts of odd, little things that you wouldn’t even know people collect, but she did. She just saved everything. She really left behind quite an archive.”

“In the ’30s and ’40s, it made you feel a little sassy when you wore something you saw in a movie.”

Tina Joseff’s daughter, Michele, is currently working on photographing and archiving the whole collection to post it on the company web site, in hopes of making the studio rental process smoother, and breathing new life into the once-bustling movie rental business.

That said, the Joseffs are particular about who they rent their jewelry to. Not just any Joe can walk in off the street and walk away with a historic piece of jewelry.

“There are people that we work with all the time that we trust and that I know take very good care,” Tina says. “If it’s somebody new that I’ve never met, I’m a little more leery about renting to them. When I see how they treat the jewelry after they bring it back—if it’s all in the trays, it’s laid out nice, and they’ve got the covers on it—I know they respect the jewelry for what it is.”

This turquoise vault of Hollywood treasures has been meticulously preserved through half a century.

But some pieces, naturally, can never be rented, because they’re irreplaceable historical film artifacts. They’ve traveled the world appearing in museum shows in Barcelona, Paris, Milan, and London, as well as the L.A. County Museum of Art, and the Academy of Motion Pictures, but they’ll never see the bright studio lights again.

“There’s only one of the Clark Gable cigar case from ‘Gone With the Wind,’” Tina explains as we wrap up the tour. “That piece will never leave our studio except maybe as a museum exhibit. Its rental days are over.”

Which makes this visit to the hidden Joseff of Hollywood studio all the more magical. Rarely would someone like me get the chance to see—much less touch or try on—these valuable Hollywood treasures, without a personal invitation from Tina Joseff herself.

Don’t even think of asking me for the address—I’ll never tell!

Joan poses wearing her company's crown jewels on her voluminous skirt.

(All movie stills and archival photos courtesy Joseff of Hollywood. Contemporary photos of the Joseff studio and workshop by Joanna Mangan. Special thanks to Cameron Silver of Decades Inc.  for crowning around with me.)

For home-front America, World War II was a time of shared sacrifice, when people gave up simple pleasures to support those fighting overseas in the greatest struggle the civilized world had ever known. After the war, though, society breathed a collective sigh of relief and went out looking for a bit of fun.

One of the easiest things to do was to update one’s décor, as Donald-Brian Johnson discovered when he and co-author, Leslie Piña, began researching “Postwar Pop: Memorabilia of the Mid-20th Century,” which focuses on art pottery, paper goods, and holiday ephemera, and was published in 2011 by Schiffer. “During the war and immediately after it, foreign imports had been cut off, so all of these domestic art pottery firms sprang up,” Johnson says. “They were very successful until the early 1950s, when imports from Japan took over. By the time the ’60s rolled around, most of the U.S. firms were out of business.”

Hedi Schoop's "Blue Dancers" were sold as a pair.

Coincidentally, some of the most influential figures in what Johnson calls postwar pop pottery were named Betty. Between 1941 and 1955, Betty Harrington designed nearly 1,000 different objects for Ceramic Arts Studio of Madison, Wisconsin. Beginning in 1943, Betty Cleminson and her husband, George, sold their homey and heartwarming work as The California Cleminsons. And Betty Lou Nichols, considered by Johnson to be the queen of head vases, began her career in 1945 in the backyard of her parents’ La Habra, California, home.

“Joan Crawford loved Sascha Brastoff’s work and bought it regularly.”

One of the first artists of the era to break into the ceramics figurine world was Hedi Schoop, who moved to Los Angeles from Switzerland with her husband, composer Frederick Hollander, and opened her business in 1940. “Schoop had been an actress,” says Johnson, “and was kind of dabbling in making dolls out of wax. One day somebody said to her, ‘Those dolls are really spectacular. If you could find a more permanent form for them, there’d probably be a market.’ Schoop became one of the best-known ceramic designers of the ’40s and ’50s.”

Schoop’s slip-cast figurines were often clad in long, draping garments, their heads tilted to the left or the right to give them a coy expression. Many of her characters were taken from European sources—there’s a Tyrolean girl in yellow, a Dutch brother and sister in blue clogs—while others are clearly Western riffs on Asian sources—a pair of Siamese dancers wear blue pagoda-like hats on their heads, while the “Oriental” musicians on the front of an oval vase suggest the graphic approach used by artist Mary Blair for Disneyland’s “It’s a Small World” attraction.

"Marie the Maid" and "Antoine the Chef" wall pockets by The California Cleminsons.

The Cleminson’s work was folksier and more humorous than Schoop’s (see their “Morning After” mug, at top). “Betty Cleminson’s pieces were whimsical, but also useful,” says Johnson. “A lot of them had cute sayings on them that Betty wrote. She made string holders, pie birds, wall pockets, and other things you’d use around the house. Her razor-blade bank was a popular one, as was the girl with freckles that looked like a head vase. When I first saw it, I thought it was a mug, except it didn’t have a handle. Turns out you were supposed to put a dish scrubber in it.”

With ceramic figurines, the biggest sellers were usually the pairs. “People put them on end tables on either side of a couch, or on night tables at either side of a bed,” says Johnson. “There was just more of a market for pairs.”

Ceramic Arts Studio made the most of this trend by making its pairs as both regular figurines and salt-and-pepper shakers. That way, they could appeal to multiple audiences. “The unlikeliest figurines were sometimes made into salt-and-pepper shakers,” says Johnson. “One Betty Harrington design paired a ‘Fire Man’ and ‘Fire Woman’, each around 11 inches tall, that were artistic representations of what fire would look like if it assumed a human form. They had human faces, but their clothing and such were all rendered as flames. They’re wonderful figurines, but it’s difficult to imagine using them as salt-and-pepper shakers.”

Roselane figurines, like this one called "Fantasy Horse," are known for their elongated limbs.

And then there was Betty Lou Nichols. “Her work is important because it was so distinctive,” Johnson says. “You simply cannot see a Betty Lou Nichols piece and not know it’s hers. They have bright, red lips and those big eyelashes, which were hand-applied.”

With Nichols pieces, though, it’s hard to find one in pristine condition. “Her pieces had so many little add-ons, ruffles and things like that,” says Johnson. “Today, most of her head vases are missing part of an eyelash, or a piece of ruffle has been chipped. They just had so many places where they could be damaged. Betty Lou Nichols’s daughter still has quite a restoration business going.”

Howard Pierce's figures were sometimes incorporated into planters.

Competition from within the U.S. and abroad eventually sunk all the Bettys, as well as Schoop. Indeed, the arc of Schoop’s company was typical of many. “In the 1940s and ’50s, not only was Schoop imitated and undermined by imports, many of her former employees opened their own studios, too,” says Johnson. “More often than not, they used designs that were extremely similar to hers. They would add their own original touches but the overall styling was a lot like hers, so she had to spend a lot of her time trying to tamp down the competition that was infringing on her designs.”

Sascha Brastoff was a consumate promoter, whose work was collected by Hollywood stars.

Schoop’s most prominent competitor was former employee Katherine Schuefftan, known professionally as Kay McHugh. “After leaving Schoop, McHugh and her husband opened a studio; she signed her pieces ‘Kaye.’ Hedi Schoop actually sued McHugh in the early ’40s for copying her work, and the judge sided with Schoop. McHugh had to cease making such direct imitations, although she didn’t have to pay damages; her products soon resurfaced under a different name, ‘Kaye of Hollywood.’ Another prominent former Schoop employee, Yona Lippin, also released figurines that were definitely Hedi-influenced.”

But the real competition came from overseas. “When that happened,” Johnson says, “people could buy similar pieces at their local five-and-dime store for a fraction of the cost. Domestic firms run by designers like Schoop simply could not compete.”

Marc Bellaire was a protege of Sascha Brastoff, and an eventual competitor.

Even industry giant Ceramic Arts Studio, which produced 500,000 figurines a year at the height of its production, was a target of plagiarists. “Some of the imitators would simply make a mold of a Ceramic Arts Studio figurine. The copies they produced had similarities, but they were imprecise. When Ceramic Arts Studio closed in 1955, co-founder Reuben Sand sold many of the copyrights and molds to one of the main firms that had been copying him without permission. Sand told me he might as well get some money out of it as long as he was going out of business.”

Other areas of the postwar art pottery world had their own mini-rivalries. “Sascha Brastoff was a Los Angeles designer who was really good at promoting himself,” says Johnson. “Designer Marc Bellaire worked with him. When Bellaire went out on his own, his work clearly showed some Brastoff style similarities, although it was a little more ‘out there’ in terms of shape and design. Bellaire’s designs seem somewhat more contemporary than Brastoff’s,” Johnson adds, “in the sense that his depictions are not quite as literal. Bellaire’s people don’t have all their features; their bodies have kind of an alien look to them.”

Betty Harrington designed almost 1,000 pieces for Ceramic Arts Studio, including "Salome." Photo: John Petzold

Brastoff had a knack for attracting influential people. “He designed costumes in Hollywood, some for Carmen Miranda. He was in the service during World War II, back in the days when they did all-soldier shows. He would take part in those shows; along the way, Hollywood stars collected his pieces. Winthrop Rockefeller, the great philanthropist and investor, liked Brastoff’s work so much, he helped him open a studio in Los Angeles to show off his work.”

Howard Pierce’s abstraction was more minimalist. “He’d give you the idea of a horse or a gazelle, their most prominent elements, and from there you’d identify what the figurine was. He also did a number of cameo vases, kind of like Wedgwood, but they weren’t very popular for him. They were almost too traditional. The best examples of his work are the simplest pieces, like a horse whose mane appears blown back, like he’s standing in the wind. Pierce could say a lot with minimal lines and just a few types of glazes.”

"Mary Lou" is a classic Betty Lou Nichols head vase, with thick eyelashes and lots of breakable edges.

For those with very traditional tastes, there was Roselane. “People felt comfortable with Roselane,” says Johnson. “The pieces weren’t quite as scary as some of Bellaire’s, which didn’t fit with every décor. Roselane’s work was soothing, lots of horses and deer. Except for those ‘sparkler’ pieces with the rhinestone eyes, which were just kind of horrible.”

Today when we look at postwar pottery, be it Roselane or Schoop, we see something people collect. Back in their day, though, these pieces were everyday design accents, like the stuff you might find as you head to the checkout at IKEA. “Today people collect these pieces based on a particular style, or maybe even an artist,” says Johnson. “When most of these things were created, there might have been a few people on the cutting edge who were stocking up on Marc Bellaire or Sascha Brastoff because they really liked the artists. For example, Joan Crawford loved Sascha Brastoff’s work and bought it regularly. However, it was usually more of a stylistic choice for the buyer. Most people in the 1950s were simply buying these things as décor items to brighten up their homes.”

"Tyrolean Girl" by Hedi Schoop featured two baskets for flowers.

That changed in the 1980s when collectors of both art pottery and kitsch started paying attention to head vases from the 1940s and ’50s. “I’ve done a lot of research on head vases,” says Johnson, “but I haven’t run across any reference to who might have come up with the concept first. Florists loved them because they’d have all these little blossoms that weren’t big enough for large arrangements. But they could take a small arrangement of flowers and sell them in an inexpensive head vase.”

To contemporary head vase collectors, the quality of Betty Harrington’s work for Ceramic Arts Studio and pieces made by Betty Lou Nichols make those objects especially desirable. “There was such attention to detail,” says Johnson, “and the glazes are also really good. In a lot of figural ceramics from the ’50s, the skin of the figure is all cracked because the glazes haven’t held up. Pieces made by Ceramic Arts Studio and Betty Lou Nichols haven’t been prone to crazing, so the pieces you see today look like they did when they were originally released.”

By the 1950s, head vases such as this one designed by Kathi Urbach, were being imported from Japan by companies like Ucagco.

Other collectors only acquire certain types of head vases, like ones that have bouffant hair, or a female figure with one hand held up by the side of her face. “There are all these subtle delineations of the head vase,” says Johnson. “I’ve been to some head vase collectors’ homes, and it can be a little daunting because every place you go there are shelves filled with eyes looking at you.

“One collector even had them in her bathroom around the tub,” Johnson continues. “Her husband built shelves there for her collection, but when their granddaughter came over, she always had to turn the vases toward wall. The little girl didn’t like having all those heads looking at her.”

(All visuals from “Postwar Pop: Memorabilia of the Mid-20th Century,” by Donald-Brian Johnson and Leslie Piña, copyright 2011, Schiffer Publishing, Ltd., used with permission. All photos are by Piña and Johnson, except as indicated.)