John Hotchner is a writer, editor, researcher, and lecturer on stamps. He has served on numerous boards, including the American Philatelic Society, the United States Stamp Society, and the American Association of Philatelic Exhibitors, and is currently a member of the Postmaster General’s Citizens’ Stamp Advisory Committee and the Smithsonian National Postal Museum’s Council of Philatelists. Hotchner collects stamps from 20 countries, but when we spoke with him recently, we talked about his chief passion, U.S. errors, freaks, and oddities, or EFOs.

My father was a stamp collector, and I just took to it. He was perfectly happy to mentor me, so I began collecting at the age of five and got serious about it around the age of 11. I started collecting the world, but when it became obvious that that was not something that I could ever complete, I reduced my scope to about 20 different countries, including the United States. Early on I got interested in errors, freaks, and oddities, known as EFOs, including interesting cancellations and color varieties. Eventually that led to learning about the origins of errors and mistakes in the production process.

Missing horizontal perforations (Scott 538c).

I would ask my father about stamps with flaws, and some of it he couldn’t explain. I started looking for information in the philatelic literature, publications such as Linn’s Stamp News and The American Philatelist, about how these mistakes happened and what existed in the error, freak, and oddity line. When I own something, I want to know not just what it is but how it came to be.

There are particular definitions for each category. Errors are defined as a major mistake that’s repeatable. The standard reference in the philatelic hobby, the Scott Catalogue, lists errors such as missing perforations that affect a whole side of a stamp, either vertically or horizontally.

Freaks are defined as minor variations, where the perforations are only partially missing, for example. They are not listed in Scott, and though freaks often display the same effect as errors, they’re slightly different in each instance.

Oddities are examples that don’t fit in the other two categories. Test stamps, for instance, were printed to test dispensing machines. They were never meant for public distribution. There are a couple of other examples, such as stamps on which no design has been printed or where the perforations were made for one format, say for coils (rolls of stamps), but then the stamps were actually used in booklets, so it looks like a misperforation but it really isn’t. It’s not a freak; it’s an oddity.

Collectors Weekly: How long have error, freak, and oddity stamps been collectible?

Hotchner: Error collecting has been around from the time the British issued the first stamp in 1840. From the beginning there were mistakes such as creases in the paper, very light printing, and excessively heavy printing. Nearly all collectors will pick up an error if the price is right and add it to their album, even if they don’t focus on it as a specialty area.

A bent perforator pin caused this misaligned perforation.

My particular interest is in what’s called stamp separation—how perforations are added to sheets of stamps to make them easy to use. In fact, I’ve collected stamps as a means of showing how perforations developed over time. Stamps were first introduced without any perforations, and they were torn apart or cut with scissors. By about 1854, the English added perforations or small holes, between the stamps to make separation easy.

Stamp printers experimented with the size of the perforations for a long time before they came up with the right number of holes to facilitate tearing the stamps apart from one another. Even now, 150 years after the system was first introduced, stamp printers are still trying to come up with a machine that can perforate accurately and quickly.

There are about 20 different major categories of perforation varieties, including missing holes, perforations of the wrong gauge (that is to say, the number of holes per 2 centimeters), misplaced perforations, and “crazy” perforations caused by a fold in a corner of a stamp sheet.

Problems occur when a part of the production process—watermarking, the type of paper used, printing, and so on—impact the placement of perforations. For example, it used to be that paper had to be wetted down in order to accept an engraved impression. If the paper dried unevenly, which it often did, when it went through the perforation machine, the lines of holes would fall inside the design instead of between the stamps.

There is no perfect system to this day, and the more complex the equipment is, the more things can go wrong. Starting and stopping the machines, for example, can cause problems.

Collectors Weekly: Have errors, freaks, and oddities gone through the mail?

Hotchner: Yes. A prize find is a stamp that has made it through the production and inspection processes as an error, freak, or oddity, and then is sold as postage. Sometimes postal clerks don’t recognize a problem with stamps they sell. Once I actually stood in line behind a postal customer who was returning stamps and said, “I can’t pull these apart. I want new ones.” Little did they know that they had imperforate stamps (stamps that went through the production process without perforations), and they could’ve made a bundle of money by selling them well above their face value. Instead, they returned the stamps to the post office as defective.

The yellow background is inverted on this U.S. 4¢ Dag Hammarskjold stamp from 1962 (Scott 1204). It was reprinted after the invert error was discovered.

These kinds of mistakes are inevitable with the speed of modern production. There is hardly a modern coil that does not exist as an imperforate error, and that’s because they are the most heavily produced stamps. They get very little human intervention during the production process and so if something goes wrong, the errors go through.

There are many ways an imperforate can occur. The perforator, which is a set of pins, may not come down and put holes in the sheet at the start of a print run, at the end of a print run, or when the roll of paper tears and has to be repaired. These mistakes happen repeatedly because there isn’t a way to eliminate the basic cause.

The great majority of imperforates are caught and destroyed. The private printing firms that produce stamps for the Postal Service have a high degree of internal security, and they have installed electronic cameras into the production system to catch errors. The firms also inspect the final product and destroy errors, freaks, and oddities so that the minimum possible problem material is distributed to the public.

But the numbers are so huge—the United States produces 40 billion stamps with 125 or so different designs a year—there’s no way in the world a manufacturer can look at every one of those stamps. A small percentage of the stamps are going to be flawed. But if there are between five and 10 errors a year, that’s a lot.

Collectors Weekly: How does a stamp fail to get its color?

Hotchner: The press can run out of ink. On a multi-color stamp, it could run out of a particular color. During the startup and wind-down of a press, things tend not to work as smoothly as they do during the print run, and color can simply not be applied. Or fold-overs can occur, where the paper folds during the process and you get color at the back of the stamp but not on the front, for instance. There are many ways for that sort of thing to happen.

This is an example of diagonal misperforations on the 1941 8¢ airmail stamp (Scott C26).

Most American stamps through the 1960s were printed by line engraving, a process in which the paper is pressed into a plate that’s been incised with the design. That means if no color has been applied to the paper, the paper will still show the design raised off the surface of the paper. You can tell what the stamp should have been by looking at the design. You can also tell what color the stamp should have been if it is attached to a sheet that has some of the intended color on it.

Colorless stamps are rare. Many test stamps, which are collected as oddities, have no color, but if you get them in a booklet pane or as a roll of coils, then you can tell that they were intended for testing purposes.

Test stamps are unissued and they’re also uncontrolled, which is to say they have no value—some of them say ‘for testing purposes only’. Others are just a block of color. Others may have a design to simulate a stamp, but they’ll also have a 00 on them. When the post office uses them for testing, occasionally they’ll be thrown in the dumpster instead of being destroyed. This is how collectors, who are not too proud to dumpster dive, often get a hold of the test stamps.

Collectors Weekly: Between errors, freaks, and oddities, which area is most popular?

Hotchner: For those who focus on EFOs as a primary collecting area, we’re happy to get anything; the general collector is focused more on errors.

What’s interesting is that the value of these things is determined by how visual they are. The more obvious the mistake, the more sought after it is. Stamps that are listed in catalogs tend to be collected, but as a collector, you want to fill empty spaces in your album, and that can make a particular stamp more desirable to you than to another collector with a different focus.

Rarity is also subjective. Often the stamps people want the most have a story behind them. Probably everybody in the world knows about the 1918 Inverted Jenny, a 24-cent, U.S. airmail stamp in which the plane was printed upside down. There were a hundred of those created, and we know where about 97 of them are. It’s not a rare stamp. Examples come up at auction two or three times a year.

But if you’re going to be a serious collector of errors, freaks, and oddities and you have a couple hundred thousand dollars, that’s the kind of thing you want. A lot of regular U.S. stamp collectors want that stamp as well. That’s why it’s so expensive. There are other stamps that exist in many fewer copies that are affordable, but they don’t command the same interest level.

This example of Scott 1608 has blind vertical perforations, which are perforations that have been punched, but not punched out.

Many stamp collectors are just interested in certain stamps with errors. For example, some people collect the 1869 issue of the United States, which is the first set of square stamps the U.S. issued without pictures of people, with the exception of a Pony Express rider and the signing of the Declaration of Independence. There’s another one that has a seal of the United States in two colors.

For people who collect the 1869 issue, they’re interested in cancellations, they’re interested in the basic stamps, and they’re interested in reprints. But they’re also interested in error, freak, and oddity material. Several of the 1869s were bicolor stamps, which meant that they had to be put through the press twice, creating the possibility of inverts or upside-down images. And, indeed, there are inverts associated with this stamp issue. A serious 1869 collector is going to want those inverts. They may not care about any of the other EFO material that exists in American philately, but for that set, they want the inverts.

Probably the next best-known error stamp is what’s called the CIA invert. As the story goes, an agency staffer went to a post office in McLean, Virginia and bought a sheet of 1979 issue $1 stamps to be used on agency mailings. This one sheet had an image of a candleholder inverted, and it’s become known as the CIA invert. There are a hundred of them known, and they are valued at $21,000 per stamp. That’s a pretty good return on a $1 investment.

There are also inverts of several other modern U.S. stamps. The Richard Nixon issue—that’s a 32-center, I think—exists with Nixon inverted, but those were stolen from a private printer working for the Postal Service. They were never released to the public as errors. The printer’s production waste wasn’t completely destroyed, and someone who worked in the printer’s office sold the flawed stamps.

Collectors Weekly: Is it difficult to find flawed stamps?

Hotchner: They’re fairly hard to find at this point. Color varieties don’t cost much more than the basic stamp, but stamps with an actual error—where the wrong color was used or where a design element is placed upside down on the sheet—are very expensive.

It’s very unusual to find errors or freaks from the modern era. The speed and reliability of modern press equipment is very high. But for the really old ones, I’d like to think there are a lot out there that haven’t been discovered in old collections. They look like regular stamps unless somebody looks carefully to see that the perforations are the wrong size or that the wrong value has been impressed on it.

Collectors Weekly: How does a stamp with a design error get into circulation in the first place?

The black ink which comprises the engraved portion of this issue is missing from the stamp at left (Scott 1488b). The normal U.S. 1973 8¢ Copernicus stamp is shown at right (Scott 1488).

Hotchner: It happens very rarely. Usually a design is approved, produced on a stamp, and sold at the post office before somebody discovers that a mistake was made. You see, every stamp has an issue date, so the goal is to catch mistakes before the issue date. If the issuing authority, the U.S. Postal Office, finds a mistake before that date, it will instantly tell its 40,000 retail outlets not to sell the stamps. But some post offices will get a shipment of stamps and start selling the stamps before they should, before the issue date, and that’s one way a design error can get into circulation.

The best-known recent U.S. design error is the Legends of the West sheet issued in 1993. The Bill Pickett stamp was printed with the image of Pickett’s brother, Ben. After a few of the sheets had been sold, the Pickett family contacted the Postal Service and the mix-up was reported in the press. It became a national story, and the Postal Service told its outlets to destroy what they had in stock and it reprinted the whole issue. To offset the cost of the reprint, they sold 150,000 of the error sheets in a lottery. Today, sheets with the faulty pane list for $250 apiece compared to ones with the normal pane, which is the corrected reprint, which go for $15.

Collectors Weekly: What other sorts of errors are collectible?

Hotchner: Probably the one that you see most often is a cancellation before the first day of issue. If the post office isn’t careful about waiting to sell a new issue, the stamp may end up with a cancellation prior to the first day, and that’s a big deal to collectors. But there are many other kinds of cancellation errors which include dating mistakes made by postal clerks. I have a stamp cancelled November 33rd. They can put things in upside down or spell things wrong or leave things out entirely. There are lots of different types of cancellation errors.

There are also errors concerning the different kinds of paper used for different printing methods. Sometimes paper with a watermark produced for a booklet will get used for regular stamp production. In the old days, when they printed stamps on sheet-fed machines, that happened fairly frequently. It was simply a matter of somebody picking the wrong paper off the shelf. Now it’s much harder to use the wrong papers because they’re in large rolls called webs that travel through a press very quickly.

Collectors Weekly: Is it possible to figure out how each EFO happened?

Hotchner: If you know a little bit about the press process or the finishing process, and by that I mostly mean perforating and cutting, you can figure most of it out. But with the older stamps it’s almost impossible because the equipment no longer exists. It took us a long time, for example, to figure out what happened with the 24-cent Inverted Jenny. We had to study the sheet markings (plate printers placed these on the edges of the sheets to help them determine what edge of the sheet to put into the press) before we could figure out what caused the inversion.

Even with today’s modern equipment, we’re sometimes stumped because the producers won’t talk to us. They don’t care if a color is slightly off or if the perforations aren’t exactly where they’re supposed to be. All they care about is whether the stamps can be used for postage, and it costs them extra to help us determine the cause of production mistakes.

Collectors Weekly: Are errors, freaks, and oddities collected worldwide?

Hotchner: Stamp collecting is an international hobby, and every kind of a stamp is collected someplace. Every country that produces stamps has errors, freaks, and oddities, and most often they are considerably more expensive than normal stamps.

These are examples of color misregistration on a sheet of 25¢ stamps from 1988.

I collect errors, freaks, and oddities from all over the world, and the types of flaws you see are pretty standard. The emphasis may change from one area to another—lots of color varieties in one country, perforation varieties somewhere else—but the stamp production processes are, at least in the First World, consistent around the globe.

My single most favorite error from any country is from right here in the United States. In 1922, the U.S. issued stamps with pictures of George Washington and Benjamin Franklin on them. Those stamps were all issued with 11-gauge perforations, which means 11 holes per 2 centimeters. Somewhere in the process, a perforating pin section broke, and the press people replaced that broken section of 11-gauge perforations with a 10-gauge replacement. These are very scarce, probably less than a hundred of any given value.

I found two of them in old albums, and the Scott Catalogue gave the stamps major numbers several years ago. Stamps that I bought 25 years ago that were worth hundreds of dollars are worth thousands now because they are Scott-listed errors. That was a nice surprise.

Collectors Weekly: Is this area of stamp collecting growing?

Hotchner: Prices for EFOs have remained stable, even in a bad economy, so I think it’s fair to say that EFO collecting is one of those areas of the hobby that is growing. Prices are steady and in some cases rising. I’m not worried about my collection becoming less valuable.

There are a lot of collectors who get excited about all errors, freaks, and oddities and there are many who collect only EFO material associated with a particular issue. The $1 candleholder is part of the Americana Definitive Issue, a set of small stamps that you can buy at the post office. There are Americana collectors who want any EFO material associated with that whole issue. There are people who collect American flags on stamps that want EFO material associated with American flag stamps, and there are people who only want inverts, missing colors or fold-overs.

So yes, it’s a hobby unto itself. The collector gets to define what their interest is, what they want to collect, what level of investment they’re willing to put into it, how to display their stamps, and how they trade or buy.

Collectors Weekly: What advice do you have for a new collector of errors, freaks, and oddities?

Hotchner: Learn as much as you can about philately and this particular area of stamp collecting before you put money into it. Like any other hobby, where there is value there are people who are going to try to capitalize on that. Only an expert can tell whether some EFO material is genuine. So before you buy anything, make sure you have the expertise to recognize what’s valuable.

Collectors Weekly: What books do you recommend?

A paper crease that occurred before printing was opened up before perforating (Scott 498).

Hotchner: There isn’t a standard handbook that lists all EFOs. I recommend Stephen Datz’s Errors on U.S. Postage Stamps, which lists and illustrates all the known missing color stamps, imperforates, and inverts. It has a section on printers’ waste and another on other existing varieties. That’s probably the single best reference out there at this point.

It’s also important to be part of the community and know people you can ask questions of. Stamp collectors like to help each other. The EFO Collectors’ Club at efocc.org exists to help collectors find things for their collections and to facilitate trading and bartering for the stamps we want for our collections. We have 300 members, a quarterly journal, and the most knowledgeable people in the hobby are members.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, John, for speaking with us today about errors, freaks, and oddities.

(All images in this article courtesy John Hotchner’s article at the Errors, Freaks, and Oddities Collectors’ Club)

This battered and beloved copy of a Fillmore West/Winterland postcard from 1970-1971 has been signed by David Singer in the lower-right.

My Singer collection started in 1970 when I was on the Fillmore West mailing list. Being young and dumb, I did not save all of the postcards that were mailed to me, free of charge. But I kept enough of them to give me a pretty good head start on a poster and postcard collection as an adult.

One card in particular is perhaps my most cherished material possession. It’s a smaller version of a poster known to collectors as BG-263, which advertised a pair of 1970-1971 New Year’s Eve shows at Graham’s fabled Fillmore West and Winterland venues. I was all of 14, but my broad-minded parents thought it would be fine for me to attend one of these concerts, and my dad even offered to pick me up after the show. It was only years later, as a parent, that I appreciated what it must have been like for him to steel himself for the wee-hours drive from Marin into San Francisco and back on the drunkest night of the year. Thanks again, pops.

I chose the show at Fillmore West because I was really into Cold Blood at the time, and Elvin Bishop and Boz Scaggs were always good (the opening act, Voices of East Harlem, was a gospel-like outfit whose glorious refrains still ring in my head). The Winterland show was headlined by the Grateful Dead, with the New Riders of the Purple Sage and Stoneground rounding out the bill.

Even though I was a budding Deadhead at the time, I had just seen the Dead and the Riders (Jerry Garcia was still their pedal-steel guitar player) earlier in the year at a dumpy little dive in San Rafael called the Euphoria. The late Janis Joplin (she had died in October of that year) had joined the band on stage for a couple of numbers, including “Turn on Your Love Light.” I had never seen Cold Blood before, so off I went.

The postcard, like most of Singer’s art of the time, was based on a photo collage, whose elements included a hand, a dove, and the San Francisco Ferry Building. My copy suffered mightily from my affection for it, as its numerous thumbtack holes prove. I moved it from wall to wall in my room, and it even lived for about a year in a tree fort I had built in some oaks behind our house—thanks to a rainy winter, the thumbtack holes have rust stains around their edges, and the card’s once-vibrant colors are not as bright as the day it came off the press.

How it survived my college years, I have no idea.

But back to the binge. A few months ago, I began an informal, no-deadline search for a Singer image I had always coveted, BG-242, which advertised four July 1970 performances by the Quicksilver Messenger Service, Mott the Hoople, and Silver Metre. Framed in blue, the central black-and-white photo collage featured a solar eclipse in the background with a crown formed by a droplet of milk at the bottom. Within the crown, a man with outstretched arms appears to be surfing or skateboarding, but without a board beneath his feet. I had always thought of this as the Silver Surfer poster, probably because of the repeated ‘silver’s on the bill, but I’m probably the only one who calls it that. When I found a copy of the postcard that was reasonably priced and in decent shape, I snapped it up.

Then, last month, I went to The Rock Poster Society’s Festival of Posters in Golden Gate Park. The society’s newsletter (I’m a member) had promised that David Singer would be there to sign posters. I’d heard he charged a modest fee (as it turns out, his is less than most), so I decided to bring my battered copy of BG-263 for him to autograph.

Many people who bring posters and postcards to events for ’60s poster artists like Wes Wilson, Victor Moscoso, and Stanley Mouse to sign are doing so to enhance the value of the piece in their collections. That’s not a bad thing, but it’s also why the artists don’t feel bashful about charging people for their John Hancocks. But when I showed Singer my fragile keepsake, and told him its tale of love and woe, he just smiled warmly and said, “I’m not going to charge you for this.” He saw immediately that this little piece wasn’t going to be showing up on eBay anytime soon.

While we chatted, Roger McNamee, who, along with U2’s Bono, is one of the founders of Elevation Partners, wandered by. “David’s the best,” he exclaimed, “the best!” McNamee has kept Singer busy producing some of the most intricately beautiful posters of Singer’s career for a band McNamee fronts called Moonalice. People attending Moonalice shows get a free poster, just like back in the day. I’ve got a couple of those, too.

Last week, I added one more Singer to my growing collection. It’s a version of BG-287, the poster Singer created for Fillmore West’s closing week in the summer of 1971. It’s not one of the rare posters from the run of 500 that was produced after the show. Rather, it’s the thin-stock version that was folded into sixths and packaged with the three-LP-set of recorded highlights from that extraordinary week. I don’t mind that it’s folded, that’s part of the piece. And if it’s a bit frayed around the edges, it’ll fit right in with the rest of my collection.

As for my Singer wish list, that’s topped by the first poster Singer created for Graham, BG-178, which advertised two shows from June of 1969. It’s classic Singer, and classic Bill Graham—in one improbable pairing, Woody Herman and his Orchestra play warm-up for The Who, who were performing “Tommy” at the time. Three bucks got you in the door.

Vintage banjo collector Lowell Levinger is perhaps best known to 1960s music fans as “Banana,” the bushy-haired guitarist and keyboards player for The Youngbloods. Today, Levinger is the proprietor of Players Vintage Instruments, where he buys and sells vintage guitars, mandolins, banjos, and other musical instruments. He also performs bluegrass and folk music for families under the name Grandpa Banana. Recently we spoke with Levinger about vintage banjos and the evolution of the instrument, from its African roots to its role as a bluegrass staple.

I bought my first really good bluegrass banjo in 1963 from a banjo player who lived in New York. His name was Winnie Winston, and he was a mentor of mine. It was a great banjo, a Gibson RB-1 Mastertone, and I played it for a few years. Then, in 1966, it was stolen out of my Lower East Side apartment. I looked in vain for it in pawnshops and all the old instrument shops. Finally, I gave up.

From left to right, headstocks (pegheads) for a 1928 Epiphone Concert Recording five-string, a 1929 Paramount Style C, and an eight-string B&D Silver Bell mandolin banjo from 1927.

Then, about four, five months ago, it showed up on online. I got in touch with the guy who was selling it, and of course he had no idea what the history of it was. He had just bought it from somebody a year ago. I told him my story, but put yourself in his place: it’s a hard story to accept, and I didn’t have any proof. I filed a police report back then, but the New York City Police Department had more important stuff to do.

I wasn’t absolutely positive from the pictures and descriptions that it was mine, but it sure looked like it. We went back and forth, and he offered to sell it to me for what he had in it, which was quite a bit of money. I bought it for 600 bucks back in 1963. I had so many banjos anyway that I didn’t really need another, especially if I wasn’t totally sure it was mine. So I said, “I don’t think I’ll do it,” and he said, “Well, I think I’ll just hang on to it rather than sell it.”

Then about a month ago, I was looking through a drawer and I found this little piece of paper. I’d written down the instruments I owned in 1964. And here was this banjo and here was the serial number. I checked back through my correspondence with the guy and, sure enough, it actually was my banjo. So I paid his price, and I now have my very first bluegrass banjo back, and it plays and sounds great. To me, it’s like an old part of me has been returned.

Collectors Weekly: How did you get into music?

Levinger: My mother was a pianist, so we had a piano in the house. As soon as I could touch the keys I started messing around, and I began taking piano lessons probably at about the age of five, or something. I didn’t pick up a guitar until I was probably 14 or 15 years old and I discovered, wow, that sounds great! But I never really took lessons or anything. I just learned to play. And then when I was in my senior year of high school, I heard Earl Scruggs for the first time, and it changed my life. I had to get a banjo and learn to play the banjo, and that’s just what I did.

My first guitar was a really cheap, horrible Stella with an action that was impossible to play. After that, I got a Gibson. It must’ve been one of those mahogany B-25s or B-15s. I hated it, but at least you could play it. I had a Gibson J-50 after that, which I also didn’t like very much. I never really got a good guitar until I went to college in Boston, where I met Rick Turner.

At that point, we were both beginning to realize that new guitars were not what you wanted. And so we started cruising the antiques stores and old-instrument shops of Boston. They mostly had violins but a few guitars and banjos, too. We also traveled to the little towns on the North Shore and the Cape and found some banjos and Martin guitars.

This was circa 1962. We knew that the Martins were really good and we knew that Vega banjos were really good and Gibson banjos were really good. We also learned about Lyon and Healy and Weymann. And all of them were better than buying a new Gibson, or something like that. Old instruments are better, because of the sound you can get out of them, especially if you’re willing to put a little work into it to get them set up really nicely. The sound is more focused, warmer, and has more character. It’s not jangly. They feel better and are more enjoyable to play.

Lowell Levinger's 1933 Gibson RB-1 "Mastertone" banjo was stolen in 1966 and recovered in 2009.

I currently own maybe 15 or 20 banjos. I play them all every once in a while. For bluegrass I play my Gibson Mastertone. Well, for everything these days, I play my Gibson Mastertone. For gigs, I’m only playing the one that I just got back.

I’m also a big fan of Paramount banjos. Paramount made really nice banjos back in the late 1920s. William L. Lange was involved in a few early banjo companies and then went off on his own and formed Paramount banjos. He made banjos under a lot of other names, too. Orpheum was one of them, and Lange Style was another. And boy, did he put out a lot of banjos. He was in New York. He must’ve made thousands of banjos a year. He published these very nice catalogs that are pretty readily available.

In the early years of the Depression, 1930, ’31, Lange had Martin build some guitars for him. Everybody was having hard times, but I’m surprised Martin stooped to this. They had a very radical design. You can see a few of those on the Museum page of my website. They made some tenor guitars and some six-strings, and they have these crazy resonators with the holes in the top around the edges. They made about 30 or 35 of these very strange guitars. The Martin-Paramount connection, however brief, is fascinating.

But Lange’s banjos were some of the very best for the type of music that was popular at the time. They were the precursors to the B&D Dixieland banjos, which were probably the most popular for that style of playing. Lange’s workmanship, his intricacy of design, and the complexity of the inlay—he had a really great eye. But they also sound good.

William L. Lange. I’d love to know what the L stands for. I have a feeling it might be Leo because there are these guitars called Leo Masters that really have the William L. Lange look to them. There are a couple of them on my website. And I’ve never been able to get much history on them, but I have this suspicion that they might have been made by Regal for Lange. But I have nothing to back that up, no documentation.

Paramount banjos are generally not rare. They made gazillions of them, especially the tenors. They also made a lot of plectrums, which are four-string banjos that have a longer scale length than a tenor—they have 22 frets instead of 19 and they’re tuned a little bit differently. You can find Paramount tenor banjos on eBay every day, especially the lower-end models, the style As, and below that. You get up to the style Es and Fs, which were the more expensive ones, then they become more rare. And Paramount only made a very, very limited number of five-strings, so those are exceedingly rare.

Collectors Weekly: When did the banjo gain recognition as a country, folk, and bluegrass instrument?

Levinger: Earl Scruggs made the banjo a bluegrass instrument. When he and Lester Flatt joined Bill Monroe’s band in 1946, that was a key moment in bluegrass. In fact, a lot of people say that’s when bluegrass music was born. Earl Scruggs brought with him this style of picking that he had adapted through listening to Snuffy Jenkins and a few other people who were playing the three-finger style of the time. But he took that style and smoothed it out and made it more melodic, more complex, more interesting. He was a virtuoso by the time he and Flatt joined Bill Monroe’s band.

In the mid-1950s, Pete Seeger and the Weavers launched the banjo into prominence as a folk instrument. Seeger played a custom long-neck Vega with three extra frets, so he could tune it down lower. It suited his singing, gave him an interesting tone, and let him play in additional keys with the same fingering. Pete Seeger published a book, How to Play the 5-String Banjo, that was used by every kid who wanted to learn how to play the instrument from 1959 to 1979.

A 1924 Paramount Style F five-string banjo.

The five-string banjo is actually having a bit of a heyday right now. The Dixieland banjo’s heyday was in the late 1920s, 1925 to 1929. And then, prior to that, in the late 1800s, the five-string banjo had an earlier heyday, when people played this funny Vaudevillian banjo music. It was like banjo ragtime music—they played it in blackface, using five-string banjos (some of them used four-string banjos) and it was associated with comedy and slapstick.

If you look at the old Paramount catalogs from that period, you’ll see pictures of all these banjo players who were endorsing their products. It’s fascinating to try and think about what they were like and what they were playing and whatnot.

Four-string banjos are different. They are tuned in fifths like a mandolin, mandola, and mandocello. It’s very difficult to play bluegrass on a four-string banjo tuned in fifths. But you can play all kinds of other chord voicings and melody lines on a four-string more easily than you can a five-string banjo tuned to an open G chord. It’s just two completely different worlds. Six-string banjos are just tuned like a guitar. They are really for guitar players who want to have plunky tones but don’t want to learn to how to play a banjo.

Today the banjo is associated with Vaudeville and Dixieland and bluegrass, but it originally evolved in Africa. Slaves who were captured and forced onto ships brought the instrument with them. They made them out of gourds.

The banjo is very much like a drum. The rim is made of heated and bent wood—sometimes the wood is laminated—then wet animal skin is stretched over the rim and tapped on. When it dries it tightens and, bingo, you’ve got a drum. If you put a neck on it and some strings, you’ve got a banjo. So African Americans did that when they got over here. And then white guys caught on.

Collectors Weekly: How did the banjo evolve in the 20th century?

Levinger: As banjo-making became almost an industry in the late 1800s, all kinds of different woods were used—more expensive and fancier woods in the higher-end models, plainer woods in the lower-end models. Rosewood was generally used on top-of-the-line banjos, and it went down from there to walnut, mahogany, maple.

Today maple is considered a really high-quality wood, and it is. But the reason to use different woods is so you can have different price points and basically charge different amounts of money for the same banjo. There was also all kinds of inlay and wood carving, as well as metal engraving and even gold-plating. This gave players on different budgets a whole range of models to choose from.

A 1933 Gibson Granada Mastertone banjo with its original flathead tone ring.

Wood is actually not as important in a banjo as a guitar. A maple rim and a maple neck will sound a little bit different than a mahogany rim and a mahogany neck, let’s say, on a Gibson Mastertone banjo. That’s about all Gibson used for rim wood, mahogany or maple. They didn’t get into rosewood, and they only used walnut for a little bit. Mostly it was mahogany and maple—the mahogany tends to have a slightly warmer sound than the maple.

The banjo sound, if not the banjo itself, is not unique to American culture. The Celts and the Irish have similar instruments that sound like the banjo and are constructed exactly the same. You’ll hear Eastern European and Slavic music that sounds banjo-ish. Interestingly, in the southern latitudes you don’t hear many banjo-like sounds. Their sounds are woodier.

The same thing is true with Eastern music—you get banjo-y sounds from kotos and instruments like that. They aren’t really banjos, but they do have a similar, plunky sound. So banjo tones are used worldwide, but not so much in the southern hemispheres.

In America, banjo music evolved as a reflection of the culture. Throughout different periods, it reflected what Americans were doing to amuse themselves. In the late 1800s, with no TV or radio, people were going to music halls and watching Vaudeville shows which featured guys playing banjos. In the late 1920s and early ’30s, in the Southeast and even in the Midwest, there were radio stations starting to come on, powerful ones, with signals that reached quite a ways, and they broadcast a lot of live country-music shows.

A lot of the bands that performed on these radio shows included a banjo player. The bands would travel around, maybe in a 350-mile radius from their home radio station, and play at fairs, churches, high schools, bazaars, little theaters, and Lions clubs, usually having to make it back to the radio station for some dumb 7:45 a.m. show every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday. That’s how the banjo was heard in those days.

During the 1960s, you could hear banjos in concerts at colleges and town halls. Same thing in Europe. There was a lot of rock ’n’ roll, too, but in the early ’60s, there was also a lot of folk and bluegrass music, which included banjos. People also heard banjos a little bit on TV, especially when “The Beverly Hillbillies” came along, with Earl Scruggs playing the theme song.

Today there’s a banjo community that extends all over the whole world. It’s pretty neat. People who are interested in banjos should know about Banjo Hangout. That is the main banjo community online, and from there you can find pretty much anything relating to banjos.

Collectors Weekly: How did World War II affect the production of banjos in the United States?

Levinger: I think it affected production in most countries. Any country that was involved in the war was using all its metal to make bullets, not banjos. That would be a great slogan—banjos, not bullets. Anyhow, during the war, musical-instrument manufacturers made just a trickle of instruments; a lot of parts on guitars that had been made out of metal were made out of wood during the war. Back then, many of the instrument factories were converted to wartime use. Gibson made toys for a while but when the war ended, they went back to making banjos and guitars.

Collectors Weekly: Who were the top banjo manufacturers?

A 1937 Gibson Charles McNeil five-string banjo.

Levinger: Gibson, Paramount, Epiphone, and Vega for sure. Bacon & Day would also be in there. B&D was their real name, but people called them Bacon & Day. The B&D Silver Bell was probably the most popular Dixieland banjo. Gibsons were the preferred bluegrass banjos because Earl Scruggs played a Gibson, so every bluegrass banjo player wanted that sound. It’s not easy to make that sound—you can do it on a Gibson but it’s almost impossible on a Bacon & Day. It’s a different method of construction using a completely different kind of tone ring. It’s fantastic for Dixieland but not good for bluegrass.

In the early days, banjos were sold by traveling salesmen, in stores, and through catalogs such as Sears and Montgomery Ward. Music teachers had classes and started orchestras in their hometowns, and the banjo companies would make the leaders of the orchestras dealers. They sold banjos to their students and their orchestra members, and that was a big, big part of the business.

Today, Gibson is still around, and I think Deering has taken over the Vega line. There are companies making copies of old banjos, too. Recording King makes copies of the old models of the Gibsons, so does Gold Star. I believe these are all made in China.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most sought after vintage or antique banjos?

Levinger: The most popular banjo from a collector’s or bluegrass player’s standpoint is an original mid-1930s Gibson Mastertone flathead five-string banjo. They only made about 90 of them, one of which Earl Scruggs played. Consequently, all the other concurrent, seminal, influential banjo players also wanted to play original five-string Gibson flathead Mastertone banjos. Most of those players managed to get themselves one in the late ’40s and early ’50s.

These banjos are the best sounding banjos for bluegrass in the world. I know a banjo player named Jim Mills who just wrote a book about Mastertone banjos. Of the known ones, he has pictures and the history of each one. When they trade hands, it’s in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. That’s nothing compared to a Stradivarius, but it’s still a lot of dough.

Collectors Weekly: What should a collector look for when purchasing a vintage or antique banjo?

This circa-1912 Dayton six-string guitar banjo features a Venetian scene on its skin head.

Levinger: It has to be something that they will enjoy, assuming they’re a player. If they just want to hang it on the wall, it has to be beautiful, ornate, and really finely made, with no flaws in it. If they’re a player, it has to be comfortable for them to play and sound good. Each note must ring true, clear, and be in tune, without any buzzing, ‘fretting out’, or being sharp or flat. If they’re an ensemble player, like in a bluegrass band, it has to be able to really project and have a good dynamic range. If played softly, it has to have a good, sweet, full tone.

Condition is also a factor. Banjos that have been left in attics that go from humid to hot to freezing cold typically have cracks, or their finishes have come off, or their necks have warped. Banjos that have been stored in basements where the bottom of the case was resting in a puddle for seven months out of the year are likely to have water damage—when water seeps under the finish it expands the wood grain which cracks the wood, separates glue joints, and rusts metal. But banjos that have been kept in the bedroom right there with their owner, and maybe taken out for a few concerts, those are probably just fine.

Collectors Weekly: One last question: What’s with all the banjo jokes?

Levinger: There are a million of them. For instance, what’s the difference between a banjo and an onion? No one cries when you cut up a banjo. What’s the difference between a banjo and a Harley-Davidson motorcycle? You can tune a Harley. How about the difference between a banjo and a trampoline? You take off your shoes when you jump on a trampoline. Why are there no banjos in Star Trek? It’s the future. I have no idea where they all came from, but being a banjo player, you get exposed to them over the years.

Collectors Weekly: Thank you, Lowell, for taking the time to talk with us about vintage banjos.

(All images in this article courtesy Lowell Levinger, Players Vintage Instruments)

Ken Sanders has been buying and selling books almost his entire life. A fan of illustrated books and books about the American West, Sanders is an appraiser for Antiques Roadshow, a publisher (dreamgarden.com), and a seller of rare and used books from his store in Salt Lake City, Utah. He is also well known for the role he played in catching an infamous book thief, which is the subject of a book by Allison Hoover Bartlett called “The Man Who Loved Books Too Much: The True Story of a Thief, a Detective, and a World of Literary Obsession.” Sanders can be contacted via his website at kensanders.com.

I don’t remember a time when I didn’t read books. In grade school, I devoured library books. I also loved comic books, and was wheeling and dealing them as a child—buying them for a nickel, sell them for dime. By junior high, I was a pretty serious book collector.

The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey, 1975, is a landmark novel, but a healthy print run has kept first-edition copies like this one within reach of collectors.

When I was 14, my grandparents took my little brother and me to Southern California to see our other grandfather. We did the Knott’s Berry Farm and Disneyland thing, but I begged my grandfather to take me to Bertrand Smith’s Acres of Books in Long Beach, California.

My grandfather sat outside the store smoking Camel cigarettes in his 1950s battleship gray Ford while I went through this bookstore for hours on end. I was in heaven. Bertrand Smith let me into the rare book room, and I bought a Maxwell Parrish Arabian Nights. I bought an Alice in Wonderland just for the illustrations. At the time I had no idea the artist was a Welsh woman named Gwynedd Hudson. Turns out she only illustrated two books—Alice and Peter Pan. I fell in love with the artwork, and I bought a big folio edition of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Raven with engravings by Gustav Dore.

I also loved science fiction, horror, and mystery books. As a young kid, I was a monster nut; I ate up Frankenstein, Dracula, and Wolfman. But then, about 1960-ish or so, the Marvel Superheroes came out—Spider-Man, the Fantastic Four, and the X-Men. They weren’t like the other comic books. Peter Parker/Spider-Man was this superhero by night and a nerdy high school kid who was afraid of girls during the day. That was a revelation. Spider-Man wasn’t an invincible superhero like Superman, and that had a huge appeal for an adolescent male.

The artist Steve Ditko, who created Spider-Man and Dr. Strange, was my hero. He also created the old Atlas and Marvel horror comics in the ’50s. I really loved that stuff as a kid. Later my interests blossomed into books from the golden age of illustration by the great American and European illustrators, including Maxfield Parrish and Arthur Rackham.

Collectors Weekly: Are you attracted to the illustrations in a book first?

Sanders: I definitely think so, and I think that came out of my interest in comic books. I read a lot of literature, but it was the pictures that got me into the books I seriously collected. I discovered the Walt Kelly Pogo comic strips and books, and I came awfully close to buying all 40 of the Oz books.

I collected the Donald Duck and Uncle Scrooge comics, too. Intuitively, I knew the artwork was good, but I didn’t know until I was an adult that Carl Barks had produced the duck illustrations and that Walt Disney had taken credit for everything. Disney did the same thing to Floyd Gottfredson, who created Mickey Mouse, and Walt Kelly, who worked on the film Fantasia. All those artists toiled anonymously.

Disney just stamped his name on everything, and I can understand that from a marketing and branding point of view, but to deprive individual artists of public acknowledgment, I think, is shameful. And of course they were paid terribly, too.

Edmund Dulac is one of many illustrators who was attracted to the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. This copy is from 1933.

Where would Lewis Carroll’s brilliant Alice in Wonderland be, for example, without John Tenniel’s illustrations? If we look at editions of Alice in Wonderland today, I wouldn’t even hazard a guess at how many artists, including surrealist painter Salvador Dali and the great British illustrator Arthur Rackham, created their own interpretations of the book.

The golden age of illustration was from 1880 to 1930. At the beginning of this period, there were illustrators like Gustave Doré, Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, and the American Brandywine School, which included great artists like N.C. Wyeth and Jessie Willcox Smith. On the European side, you had Rackham, Harry Clarke, Kay Nielsen, Willy Pogany, W. Heath Robinson, and Charles Robinson. Each of these artists would knock themselves out on an edition of Poe or Alice in Wonderland or Nathaniel Hawthorne’s A Wonder-Book for Girls and Boys. There was a whole pantheon of classic children’s literature that was interpreted by these artists.

The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam was a real favorite of these illustrators. I wouldn’t classify that as children’s literature, but it was one of those books that everybody took a shot at interpreting. And it was fun to collect that period, though good luck finding limited signed editions now. The entry level ones start in the $1,000-plus range.

One of the most sought after books is Kay Nielsen’s East of the Sun West of the Moon, which was also illustrated by many artists who signed limited editions of a few hundred. Probably the all-time best illustrated book, though, is The Ship That Sailed to Mars by William Timlin. It’s the only book the man ever wrote and illustrated.

Limited, signed volumes of Timlin’s book and Rackham’s greatest work, Wagner’s Ring Cycle, run in the $5,000 to $10,000 range. The closest to an American equivalent is Maxfield Parrish’s masterpiece, The Knave of Hearts, which in its original dust jacket and box fetches $5,000 to $8,000.

Collectors Weekly: Are there illustrated books about the American West that are well known?

Gods' Man by Lynd Ward was the first of six Ward novels whose stories were told graphically. This copy is a reprint from 2004.

Sanders: There were giant, lavishly illustrated books about the American West in the 1830s and ’40s. You’ve got Thomas McKenney and James Hall’s Indian Tribes of North America and Karl Bodmer’s great Indian portraits. They’re important because there wasn’t any photography of the American Frontier in that period. These illustrations are the only visual record we have of American Indians before European contact.

Later on, of course, Edward Sheriff Curtis did his massive 36-volume photographic portraits of North American Indian life, which is probably one of the great rarities of the West. It would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars to obtain a complete set of those portfolios.

There are many other great illustrators of the West—Charles Russell, Frederic Remington, William Henry Holmes, and Thomas Moran, to name a few. And there were also great photographers from the era of exploration—William Henry Jackson out of Colorado, Charles Savage here in Utah, and many others.

Collectors Weekly: Why did you begin to collect books by Western authors?

Sanders: Probably because I live in Utah. It wasn’t a childhood interest, but as I grew older, I became aware of my surroundings. The West is full of writers, such as Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey, and lesser-known authors like Charles Kelly and Dale Morgan. I started reading and collecting their work in the 1970s and I fell in love with the desert southwest—the Colorado Plateau, the West Desert, the Great Basin.

And I really got into regional writers. Walter Van Tilburg Clark is a Nevada writer. His most famous novel was made into a film called The Ox-Bow Incident. I also collected William Eastlake’s lyrical Southwestern novels: Go in Beauty, The Bronc People, Portrait of an Artist with 26 Horses; Vardis Fisher’s hellfire and brimstone novels; and A.B. Guthrie’s The Big Sky. These writers poured themselves into their books. Sometimes they became well known, and sometimes they didn’t.

Collectors Weekly: Do you collect books by authors in specific regions of the West?

Sanders: My collecting is a Western thing for sure, but it’s expanded to regional writers, to the people who speak about the sense of place and where we belong in it.

Every region produces great writers. I like writers who have a sense of place, who describe the natural world and how humans fit into it, whether it’s Marjory Stoneman Douglas’ masterpiece The Everglades: River of Grass for the WPA Rivers of America series, or Henry Beston writing about Cape Cod. One of my absolute favorite writers of all time is the Kentucky poet and novelist Wendell Berry. The Unsettling of America was a real eye-opener for me, and I’ve just fallen in love with his books over the years.

But what’s a regional writer? Is John Steinbeck a regional writer? Well, arguably he is. Is Ernest Hemingway a regional writer? Arguably, he is, too. What about Ezra Pound? He was born in Idaho and never ever came back. The African American writer Wallace Thurman, was born in Salt Lake City and attended the University of Utah. He went on to found the legendary Harlem Renaissance journal called Fire with Langston Hughes. Is he a Western writer? Well, he was born and lived 19 years here in Utah before he went off to New York.

Collectors Weekly: Who are the most collectible authors from the exploration period of the American West?

Sanders: It begins with the first published account in 1806 of Lewis and Clark’s explorations by Patrick Gass, who was a member of the expedition. The most important books after that are the massive 13-volume Pacific Railroad surveys that were printed in the 1850s and 1860s.

The first edition cover of Edward Abbey's Desert Solitaire, 1968, was illustrated by Peter Parnall.

Then you enter that great age of exploration by Ferdinand Hayden, Clarence King, John Wesley Powell, and George Wheeler. You’ve got Hayden’s survey of the American West in the 1850s; King’s Fortieth Parallel Survey in 1867; Powell going down the Colorado River in 1869; and Wheeler’s survey West of the one-hundredth meridian in the 1870s. These men competed to map and make sense of these unexplored lands. The writing is very visual and the books come with spectacular plates, charts, maps, and atlases. All of these writers were recording fossils, plants, and scenery.

John Wesley Powell’s thrilling narrative about his first descent into the Grand Canyon is one of the masterpieces of the genre. John C. Frémont’s earlier report about his 1840s exploration of the Rocky Mountains was published in 1845, and included a gigantic map by Charles Preuss, the great cartographer who was a member of the expedition. That was the first map that filled in the blank spots on the maps of the West even though, ironically, it has lots of empty spaces on it. It was the very map that Brigham Young used to bring the Mormon people to Utah two years later. Everybody copied that map.

Another great local book is by Captain Howard Stansbury, who circumnavigated and mapped the Great Salt Lake in 1850. His map is so accurate that satellite photos fit on top of it like a glove. I’ve always found it amusing that Stansbury’s expedition found the end of a spyglass Kit Carson lost when he came through the territory some time before.

Captain James H. Simpson crossed the Great Basin in 1859, and Joseph Christmas Ives took a steamboat up the lower Colorado River into the Grand Canyon in 1857. You couldn’t launch a boat on the lower Colorado now—it doesn’t even exist, for crying out loud. We’ve practically sucked it dry.

Then there’s Frederick H. Chapin, who published an incredible book in 1892 about the prehistoric Anasazi cultures of Mesa Verde with stunning photos of the landscape. Julius Bien created atlases of the government surveys.

There were government-sponsored works in the latter half of the 19th century with great monographs and atlases. Whether it was Clarence Dutton’s Tertiary History of the Grand Cañon District or his companion Report on the Geology of the High Plateaus of Utah, or William Ludlow’s Black Hills and Yellowstone reports, they’re all masterpieces, and they are harder and harder to find.

Collectors Weekly: Was poetry part of this Western genre?

Sanders: Not so much, not in those days. When you read geologist Clarence Dutton’s passages from the  Tertiary History book, they’re very lyrical and poetical. But when the explorers first started getting into the Yellowstone country and the Grand Canyon and the Rocky Mountains, the original accounts coming out of what they called Colter’s Hell, a.k.a. Yellowstone, were so fantastical that for years nobody believed them. People just figured the stories had been written by a bunch of lying mountain men who’d been drinking too much whiskey.

Collectors Weekly: What are the origins of the Beat poetry movement on the West coast?

Sanders considers The Knave of Hearts to be Maxfield Parrish's masterpiece. This first edition is from 1925.

Sanders: For the Beat movement in the 1950s, we have to go back to World War II, which transformed this country into a huge economic engine. One of the byproducts of the war was the rise of the petrochemical, corporate agricultural, and chemical industries. Unfortunately, that was the beginning of the end, I think, for the natural world.

Diane Wakoski, Neal Cassady, and dozens of other alienated youths became part of the Beat generation in the 1950s. They were on the East and the West coasts, in Greenwich Village in New York and North Beach in San Francisco. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William Burroughs were the holy trinity of the beat movement.

The defining moment for the Beat generation was Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl at the Six Gallery in San Francisco in 1955. Two years later, Kerouac published On the Road. Those events gave birth to the anti-establishment movement that segued into the 1960s protests.

Poet Gary Snyder was there, too, though he doesn’t like to be called a Beat poet, and rightly so. He’s much more than that. He took off into the whole Zen Buddhist thing and the whole nature-poet thing, and he’s carved out his own independent career. And who can argue with his success? He’s a fine poet, hunkered down in the Sierra foothills out by Grass Valley in California, and he’s lived and practiced what he’s preached.

Collectors Weekly: What are some of the most sought-after Western titles of the 20th century?

Sanders: To stick with the Beats for a moment, a beautiful copy of On the Road by Jack Kerouac, in its dust jacket, is a $10,000 to $15,000 book now. An autographed copy of the little first edition of Howl, depending on who’s signed it, could sell from $5,000 to $25,000. Gary Snyder’s first book, Riprap, from 1959, sells in the $2,000 to $3,000 range.

The 1947 first-edition cover of The Big Sky, by A.B. Guthrie, Jr.

The rarest book by Wallace Stegner, one of the giants of Western literature, is a little monograph published by the University of Utah that sells for around $15,000. His rarest novels are his early ones, Fire and Ice, On a Darkling Plain, and Big Rock Candy Mountain. Nice copies of those are always in the thousands of dollars.

A lot of early books aren’t necessarily rare or valuable, such as Edward Abbey’s Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang; N. Scott’s Momaday’s House Made of Dawn; Frank Waters’ novels and his book on the Colorado River, The Man Who Killed the Deer; the William Eastlake’s trilogy; and Vardis Fisher’s books.

As for rarities, David Seals, a relatively unknown Sioux writer, had a hit movie made from his self-published first novel, Powwow Highway, in 1989, but I’ve never been able to get my hands on a first edition on that book. The University of Chicago Press published several thousand copies of Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It as a favor to a former professor. He wrote the book at age 70 after he retired, and it became a hit movie, but that first edition is tough to find.

Before The Big Sky, A.B. Guthrie wrote a murder mystery called Murders at Moon Dance that he was so embarrassed by he never allowed it to be reprinted. It’s never listed on any of his books, so a lot of people don’t even know he wrote it. That book in its original jacket is very hard to find. Another bad first novel of note is The Indians Won by best-selling author Martin Cruz Smith. In it, the Indians and the Mormons team up and take over the interior of the United States. That book is really hard to find in the true first edition.

Collectors Weekly: How do you determine the rarity of a book?

Sanders: It’s the old law of supply and demand. From 1920s to the 1940s, Idaho Press and Caxton Press published a lot of Vardis Fisher’s limited edition, signed Morocco-leather-bound books, and they produced tiny editions of as few as 10 copies, but they’re not books that anybody cares about. They might be really hard to find, but no one wants them. So on a rarity scale, it’s hard to get much rarer, but you’re not going to have the same success selling even Vardis Fisher’s books versus limited signed Steinbecks and Hemingways.

Collectors Weekly: How many copies are typically printed in a first edition?

Sanders: Any number can be printed; no one has been able to figure out the alchemy of that weird science. Typically, a few thousand copies would have been a pretty healthy 19th-century print run.

Publishers don’t care about first editions; only collectors do. What people lose sight of is every book ever published has a first edition, and mercifully, most books are never reprinted because nobody wants them. So the mere fact that a book is a first edition, well, so what? There’s got to be more to it than that. It has to be something that endures a year later or generation later or a century later.

Collectors Weekly: Are early Western books in good condition still available?

Sanders: Yes, though the condition of a 19th or 18th-century book is different from the condition for a modern postwar literary first edition, but even those will bring a premium. So many books, particularly those with color plates or maps are chopped up and fed to the interior decorators and then they’ve been lost forever. So that makes the remaining copies even more valuable. It’s hard to find 100- to 200-year-old books in fine condition.

Collectors Weekly: What criteria define a book’s condition?

Sanders: Well, it’s got to have all its parts. You assess the cover and the binding separately from the interior text and contents. Color plates, in particular, can really be attacked by insects, molds, and fungus, and such. Depending on its condition, a book can vary in price by 10 times or more.

Collectors Weekly: Should someone read a rare book that they purchased or should they use another copy for that?

Sanders: That’s up to the collector or the owner. They certainly need to be handled with care. Some people make a point of reading their rare books. If they can’t use them and enjoy them, they don’t see the point in having them. Others lock them up in safety deposit boxes. I guess my advice would be: Don’t read it in the tub.

Collectors Weekly: Do you buy and sell later editions, too?

Sanders: The whole back wall of our 4,000 square foot bookstore is crammed full of $3 to $6 used paperbacks. I don’t make enough money off that to pay the rent without having an antiquarian client base across the country and around the world, but I love having them there.

Collectors Weekly: Are there collectors who just want hardbacks?

Sanders: A lot of collectors are hardback snobs. They hate paperbacks. Other people have a certain price limit—they won’t buy a first edition if costs more than $50 or $100. If you want to be a serious F. Scott Fitzgerald collector, and you want a Gatsby dust jacket, well… Five years ago we thought the idea of that book selling for $100,000 was ridiculous. I think one just sold for a quarter of a million dollars. Personally, I can’t afford to buy a book like that and resell it. I don’t have those kinds of resources, and most collectors and most dealers don’t either.

Collectors Weekly: How did you track down book thief John Gilkey?

Sanders: When I joined the Antiquarian Booksellers Association of America in the early 1990s, I ended up on the Board of Governors and they made me chair of the security committee.

When Sanders tracked down a book thief in the 1990s, his role was prominently featured in The Man Who Loved Books Too Much, by Allison Hoover Bartlett.

I started sending out security warnings via e-mail alerts. When a gang of thieves started defrauding Bay Area booksellers, I started tracking the robberies. It just struck me from the reports I read that it had to be the same thief, or gang of thieves.

It turns out Gilkey was working with his father. To make a long story short, it took me three years to find Gilkey. Every time he stole a book I’d get a little bit more information, and more and more people fed me reports, and I would blast them out to the whole organization. And so people started becoming wary. Obviously if you’re a bookseller and somebody slicks you out of a $5,000 copy of Grapes of Wrath with a stolen credit card, and you have to eat the $5,000, you’re not going to let that happen to you again.

Eventually Gilkey ran out of players in the immediate Bay Area. Then he hit upon the technique of calling long distance and using the same stolen Amex card to order books overnight. He got the numbers from a Christmas job he had at Saks Fifth Avenue in San Francisco. He would harvest all of the high-end Amex card account numbers. When they laid him off in January, two or three times a week he started calling up bookstores and stealing books. And then all of a sudden he’s having books overnighted all over the country to different hotel drops. He’d walk in and say “Any packages for me?” Then he’d pretend to be the cardholder and walk out.

He was hardly the only case I worked on, but it took me three bloody years to figure out what he was doing. Thanks to a detective in San Jose, who set up a sting, we caught him. It was a year and a half after that before he went to prison.

Collectors Weekly: Is there still a lot of book theft going on?

Sanders: Constantly, especially with the Internet. One part-time, unpaid security chair for the ABAA can’t do more than put a dent in it. But I’m very proud of having sent at least one book thief to San Quentin. I never claimed to be Sherlock Holmes, but I can guarantee you John Charles Gilkey ain’t no Moriarty, either.

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

(All images in this article courtesy Ken Sanders of kensanders.com)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: Where were double eagles minted?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: What about the platinum-sandwich coins?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: How are shipwreck coins verified?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: How long have you been collecting?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: Why did it fail in the marketplace?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: What manufacturers were the most prominent?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: In the United States?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: Do people collect by state?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: Where were Kentucky’s biggest banks?

A 1902 series Newport, Kentucky $10 note.

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: How did merchants make change?

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

Collectors Weekly: How did a bank get chartered?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A 1902 series Louisville, Kentucky $100 note.

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: How do you store your notes?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

A music stand used in James Cameron's Titanic.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: How do you acquire items?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: Did you help prop Mad Men?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: So it’s a collaborative process?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Collectors Weekly: Do you cook the food yourself?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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