Recent Auction Results from Near & Far By Ken Hall The “Cloud” guitar custom-made by Minneapolis Luthier Kurt Nelson in the 1990s for the musician Prince sold for $132,868 in an online auction that began on Feb. 19 and…
by Kary Pardy If patterned antique glass has ever caught your eye, you’ve likely appreciated the flowing lines and swirling, ribbed decoration of a “Pitkin” flask. The term “Pitkin” is a more recent collector’s designation that references Connecticut’s Pitkin Glass…
Recent Auction Results from Near & Far By Ken Hall Four jailhouse logbook pages bearing 12 signatures of Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. and five signatures of his associate Ralph Abernathy, signed during their 1963 incarceration at the…
by Sarah Turnbaugh Millefiori beads made in Venice, Italy, reached lofty technical and aesthetic heights in the late 1800s to early 1900s. The colorful, stunning-looking beads seem almost magical – then we learn that they were handmade using laborious, time-consuming…
Recent Auction Results from Near & Far By Ken Hall An American Flyer S gauge smoke-in-tender Northern 332 steam locomotive, 1946 or 1947, with a bronze brake tank, sold for $5,400 at a Toy & Train auction held February 24th…
by Mike McLeod Just imagine a world—if you can—in which the process of weaving was never discovered. Without weaving, people from the beginning would have been wearing leather all year long or grass skirts or fig leaves, probably until cardboard…
by John Sexton Q: Mr. Sexton, I am writing hoping you can help me identify a pistol that has passed down through my wife’s family from her great x? Grandfather. The original owner of the pistol in my wife’s family…
At the heart of the items that we collect and admire are the stories behind their creation, craft, and use. While an object might bear the mark or label of a company or business, the hands that produced the object…
By Peter Sheridan When it comes to radio design, the years from 1930 to 1940 presented a pocket of opportunity wedged between the deprivations of the Great Depression and the upheavals that presaged the advent of World War 2.…
by Maxine Carter-Lome, publisher “It has happened more than once that a composition has come to me, ready-made as it were, between the demands of other work.” While you might not know her name, Amy Beach’s accomplishments in…
