All the Best Rubbish Read online

  All the Best Rubbish

  The Classic Ode to Collecting

  Ivor Noël Hume

  Dedication

  For

  CAROL,

  Keeper of the Flame

  And of the Collection

  Contents

  Dedication

  Introduction: Enter the Internet and the Age of eBay

  ONE

  “What’s Past Is Prologue

  TWO

  To Have and to Hold

  THREE

  Cabinets, Closets, and Dubitable Curiosities

  FOUR

  In Search of Bald Sextons

  FIVE

  Something for Nothing

  SIX

  Billie and Charlie and Margaret North

  SEVEN

  Of Mud, and Pots, and Puppy Dogs, and Mistakes that Come Back in the Night

  EIGHT

  Adam and Eve to Caroline, with Intermediate Stops

  NINE

  History in a Green Bottle

  TEN

  “All the Best Rubbish Is Gone”

  ELEVEN

  A Word in Your Eye

  TWELVE

  Of Mermaids, Fakes, and Other Grave Matters

  THIRTEEN

  And Then What?

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Searchable Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Introduction

  Enter the Internet and the Age of eBay

  BY NOW she could be a grandmother. I am referring to the little girl on the island of St. Kitts who in 1970 gave this book its title. It was written when, for me, the appearance of youth still lingered and the future seemed rich with the promise of adventures and unimaginable discoveries. As an archaeologist there would be some of both. I would come close to drowning while diving on a shipwreck in Bermuda, discover a Virginia plantation massacred by the Indians in 1622, and find the place on North Carolina’s Roanoke Island where in 1585 the first English colonists set up their research laboratory. But this is not a book about archaeology; it is about collecting—about why we do it, what we find, and, most important, what we learn.

  The book ended in 1973, and although on rereading it I still philosophically agree with myself, much else has changed. We are deep into the age of the computer and can examine objects in new and scientific ways. Where once we looked at an early American crock and offered educated guesses at when and where it was made, now we can analyze its clay and by identifying significant trace elements pinpoint its origin. We are no longer content to derive esoteric pleasures from the beauty of a chair leg or the blue painting of a delftware vase. We want to know what was in the mind of the carver when he wasn’t carving, and about the chemical components of the ceramic decorator’s colors.

  1. English blunderbuss, dated 1784. 2. 17th-century-style slipware mug, dated 1983. 3. Late 17th-century style German stoneware jugs, probably modern. 4. English oak box, dated 1670. 5. English pearlware puzzle jug, ca. 1790–1800. 6. Dutch delftware fireplace tile, ca. 1650–1680. 7. Chinese earthenware tomb ewer. Thought to be a fake. 8. New York stoneware oyster jar, ca. 1800. 9. English stoneware harvest jug, dated 1843. 10. English stoneware tavern jug, ca. 1830. Photo by David Doody.

  There is nothing wrong with such approaches. It is simply that we ask more questions because we know that in the last half century doors to the answers have been opened by historians and scientists. In 1973 there was no Internet, no televised Antiques Roadshow, and no eBay. Antiques in the attic tended to stay there until the owner’s will was read, and even then they stood a good chance of being thrown away unrecognized. But not anymore. If we don’t know what it is or what it may be worth, we can haul it to the Roadshow. Or, alternatively, put it on eBay and see if anyone bites. Antique dealers who used to pass the time between customers by knitting or doing crossword puzzles now spend it scrolling down through eBay’s daily offerings. If one wants an answer to an abstruse historical fact, look for it on the Web. Historical researchers who once had to travel to far-flung libraries in search of documents can now access them with the click of a mouse, and aging collectors like myself can be spared the horrors of airline travel by letting the sellers come to us via the computer.

  As one gets older, the urge to dash over to scour the street markets of London or Paris slowly diminishes, although I confess that the last time I did it there was very little dashing. Six languid days aboard the Queen Mary 2 proved to be a much more civilized way to approach London’s Bermondsey and Portobello Road markets. Although in a later chapter I have extolled the virtues of those markets, it is my sad conclusion that most of, if not all, the best rubbish is gone. Nevertheless, my last Bermondsey treasure was to be an English blunderbuss thrice dated 1785.

  As a boy I had thrilled to stories of Dick Turpin and other eighteenth-century highwaymen waylaying mail coaches on the road to York and shouting, “Stand and deliver!” The coachman invariably had a blunderbuss on the seat beside him ready to respond with a blast of buckshot and pistol balls. Those childhood memories were reignited when I spotted the gun on a market stall otherwise devoted to crockery and silver cutlery. Having deduced that the vendor was no blunderbuss expert, I saw his four-hundred-pound price tag as a bargain not to be missed. Not only were the brass barrel and the lock dated, but so was the stock, stamped 1785 between a crown and the “G III R” of George III. Better still was the name on both the lock and breech reading “H W MORTIMER LONDON.” Mortimer was one of the best-known London gunmakers of his time, and in tiny letters around the muzzle of this gun was the famed Mortimer slogan “HAPPY HE WHO ESCAPES ME.” Everything from the ramrod to the screws holding the lock looked authentic. I was sure I had found a treasure worth thousands.

  The Mortimer family of gunsmiths went into business in 1753 and stayed there until 1923—though by 1850 blunderbusses had been dropped from their inventory. Henry Walklate Mortimer turned out to have been located at No. 89 Fleet Street from 1782 until 1800 and so was at that address when my weapon was made. But it was not his.

  The hoary adage about the dangers inherent in a little knowledge was never more applicable. I knew far too little about eighteenth-century gunmakers. Mortimer was then styled “Gunmaker to his Majesty” and had become so famous that rivals had discovered that their guns sold better with his name on them rather than their own. My Bermondsey Market blunderbuss was one of them. So how should I have known the difference? On Mortimer’s guns his name was carefully engraved; on mine it was merely stamped into the metal. All the more galling was the memory that mistaking Mr. Mortimer had not been my first essay into firearms foolishness—as turning to page 282 will attest.

  There are still dealers who, out of ignorance rather than design, misrepresent their wares and, when we find out that they are wrong, will take the object back. But many will not, and the same can be said of some auction houses who hide behind “as is” disclaimers—and smugly answer “caveat emptor” (buyer beware) when we demur. Getting it wrong on eBay is a real possibility, because many sellers are inexperienced dealers or not dealers at all. Some, however, lean toward deception, albeit unstated.

  My wife, Carol, our eBay scanner, found on it a very attractive English slipware mug of the kind known as “Metropolitan” and attributable to the second half of the seventeenth century. Many examples are dated, but this seller made no such reference in his description—and only showed a single photograph of one side. Had he provided another it would have revealed that the mug was, indeed, dated—and clearly. It read 1983. A descriptive oversight? We think not.

  An inexplicable characteristic of eBay’s commerce in
antiques is that in the space of a month similar objects can turn up from different corners of the world and then as quickly disappear, never to be seen again. In a six-week span in 2007, three small, German-looking stoneware jugs came on the market. The first turned up in New York, and because it looked interesting and cheap, I bought it. It was highly decorated with applied flowers and incised designs in both cobalt blue and manganese purple. On the front was the badge emblem of Bunzlau in Silesia, a stoneware potting region about which Western collectors know very little—myself included. However, if the style dated from the late seventeenth century (as I thought it did), the jug looked too new to be true. A sortie through the few relevant books failed to illustrate a parallel, but one author did say that the glazed surface of Bunzlau stoneware had a brownish tinge. This didn’t.

  Two weeks later an almost identical Bunzlau-decorated jug was offered for sale by a dealer in England who admitted that he knew nothing about it. The accompanying photographs showed that this jug very definitely possessed the brownish tinge. Again there were few bidders, and when the new treasure arrived it had the right color and looked older than the New York jug. It was, however, an extraordinary coincidence that two little jugs that were illustrated in none of the books should surface on two continents, one looking authentically older than the other. Could they both be right? Could one be old and one not? Or were they both tourist souvenirs from East Germany? I was still pondering these questions when a third jug turned up in California.

  This time the seller was convinced that she was offering a rare gem and so put an exorbitant reserve price on it—even though she had no idea where it came from or how old it really was. For her it was enough to be pretty and therefore pricey. When I suggested that I suspected that the jug was a modern reproduction, her response lacked cordiality. She had no intention of lowering her reserve price. So, rather than letting jug Number 3 escape me, I reluctantly paid her price. Carol was even more reluctant. When the jug arrived, it looked newer than the one from New York. With all three together, it was hard for me to believe that any of them were three hundred years old. What, I wondered, were the chances of a hitherto unrecorded antique jug turning up within weeks of two copies surfacing? There the enigma rested until the author of the book from which I had obtained my spattering of Bunzlau knowledge came to dinner. After examining the trio he concluded that the brown-tinted jug was original—but so, too, were the others. Novices must listen gratefully to the experts, but should we always believe them? In this instance, the answer may be: not necessarily. I even risk the arrogance of a novice and suggest that all three jugs were made in the Westerwald district of the Rhineland, no earlier than the 1870s, for sale to Silesian tourists.

  I should add that after that brief burst of Bunzlau juggery our eBay excursions have yielded no more.

  With the jug puzzle still in mind I risked asking a real-estate appraiser friend how he came to his valuations. How can one broker, who also appraises the contents of houses, put a price on everything in them? How does he know enough to put a value on a potato peeler, on an Art Deco dresser, or an ancestral portrait? My friend answered with a smile, saying it calls for educated guessing—the education born of experience. You study auction catalogs, he said; you read specialists’ books and, when in doubt, call a friend. As the contents of a home can be as mundane as a yard sale or as esoteric and diverse as the stock of an antiques mall, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that one appraiser’s assessment may differ from another’s. Fortunately, for the educated guessers, within the frameworks of law and insurance, possessing an appraiser’s license assures its holder a seat on the right hand of God. The opinions of dealers, auctioneers, curators, and collectors, on the other hand, have to be taken on trust, while keeping the caveat emptor warning constantly in mind.

  Like estate appraisers, auctioneers do their best to accurately describe their lots and put estimated values on them. But in country auctions, the hammer man (or lady) is often handling large numbers of totally disparate objects, some of them familiar and others very definitely not. Potential bidders looking for bargains hope that they are wrong—as they were at a Virginia tent-in-the-yard auction whose catalog listed: “Lot 173. 1 English Carved Wooden Box with Date of 1670, Copper Penny Inserted, and Iron Hardware.” On reading that description, bells of interest began to tinkle. There were no such English pennies in 1670. If the coin was a copper penny, it could not date before 1797, and if that was the case, why was it set into a box already more than a hundred years old? At the auction preview I found the answer. Copper-tinted by old varnish, the coin was a silver shilling of Queen Elizabeth I, probably minted between 1594 and 1596. But why make it part of the design for the elaborately carved lid? And there was another mystery—one that I did not recognize until I had it home. Carved into the lid’s floral design were two small demonic faces slyly staring out and asking, “Figure us out if you can.” The owner’s initials, D. J., were also part of the design, and on the plain back were seared the letters E. K., presumably identifying the maker. The inside had been lined with bright blue paper, most of which had been ripped out. The lid was cracked, causing someone to stick a George V penny postage stamp across the split, presumably to determine whether it would get worse. It didn’t. All the stamp told me was that the box had been in an English collection prior to 1935 and that the owner had been prepared to invest an unused penny stamp in his conservation research. There, alas, the trail went cold. What was the significance of the coin? And why the evil faces? The questions remain; but that is my point. Searching and guessing are the warp and weft of collecting.

  A ceramic puzzle jug provides another classic example of the “one-of-a-kind” enigma. It had been brought to New York’s prestigious annual antiques fair by an English dealer, but it failed to attract a buyer and was on its way home when I saw a photograph of it. Like the 1670 box, I convinced myself that I had to own it. So back it came. Puzzle jugs can be categorized as simple jokes for simple folks and have been around for hundreds of years. Fitted with three teat-like spouts above a fretwork collar, the game was to drink the contents without spilling. The secret lay in covering a small hole in the underside of the handle through which the liquid had to flow. What made this jug simpler yet was the fact that it had only one spout. Made in pearlware (see p. 154) and delicately polychrome-painted, it bore the name John Bloome. Decorated on one side with a deep purple to black rose (perhaps a cynical play on his name), it had on the other a carefully painted merchant ship whose stern bore the name Hopewell. There was nothing startling about that. In the late eighteenth-century many presentation bowls and jugs were decorated with profiles of named ships. What made this nautical rendering different from any other was the bow’s figurehead in the shape of a long-eared jackass.

  The fascination, therefore, is not with the jug but with John Bloome, whom someone considered not smart enough to handle a three-spouter. The most obvious choice for that someone had to be Mrs. Bloome. When she ordered it made, had she, perhaps, just realized that her husband had sunk their savings in the failed voyage of the Hopewell? Was Mrs. Bloome smiling when she gave it to him, and did he manage a laugh when he received it—or did he even notice the jackass? These are the kinds of questions that carry us beyond ceramics or wooden boxes and open doors into the mystery-rich closets of yesteryear.

  I think it highly unlikely that I shall ever find another jackass jug, but I have learned over time that one should never say never. An example: I thought I had bought a unique treasure when a London dealer sold me the mermaid-decorated powder horn you will find on page 262. Forty years later another, almost certainly by the same soldier in Jamaica, was sold in Philadelphia and illustrated in collecting’s principal monthly, the Maine Antique Digest. Unfortunately, the second mermaid disappeared before I could land her. The first, however, had set us on a nautical creature course that still endures. I wrote a book about them, and Carol went into business calling her company Mermaid Arts. Neither prospered, but toget
her they launched us into collecting seventeenth-century delftware tiles painted with sea monsters, fish, classical sea deities, and mermaids in all manner of poses, from copulative to spinning. Most of them were bought on eBay, and collectively (we have about a 150) they embrace the spectrum of the contemporary Dutch thought as it related to whatever lurked in the depths of the sea. For those of us unable to afford the canvas-painted art of the great (or even marginally great) Dutch artists of the seventeenth century, these little pictures on clay are the real thing. Studying them, we are in touch with the artists and can speculate about the scope of an imagination that let them paint a sea unicorn or a sea dragon. We can also wonder what the man (or was it a woman?) who painted a sea giraffe had been drinking.

  The passion that developed from a Jamaican powder horn and led to walls hung with framed maritime tiles inevitably broadened as friends brought us mermaids of all sorts, blown in glass, carved in wood, molded in pewter, plastic, and even soap. In a weak moment I invested in a life-sized lady in fiberglass from the Philippines. Suspended from a bathroom corridor ceiling, her pendent attributes evoke only silence from embarrassed visitors who pass beneath her. The mermaid from Manila is of no antiquity, but another may be—or so I thought. Offered on eBay by a seller in Shanghai, a white earthenware bottle glazed in green and orange (so-called sancai colors) is shaped like a fish with a human head, and has a bird’s wings and feet. Human arms and hands grasp the head of an angry dragon while a thin and impractical handle stretches from the crown of its head to the tip of its tail. When this remarkable hybrid creature arrived, I found it coated with a vigorously adhering encrustation that looked like the result of long burial. That, coupled with the weak handle, suggested that this was an item of tomb furniture filled with wine or oil for use in the deceased’s after life. The sancai glazing resembled that of the T’ang period (A.D. 618–906), which was famed for its elaborate tomb wares. Packed in the same box with the mer-person, and without explanation from the seller, was a small, hollow-cast female figurine, molded in the same white earthenware and of the kind commonly found in tombs. My attempts to reach the seller went unanswered, but a knowledgeable oriental collector told me that while the little figure was genuine T’ang, the mer-person almost certainly was not. But why would one be genuine and the other fake? I later found that the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge (U.K.) possesses a less elaborate tomb mer-person there attributed to the eighth century. Not positive proof, to be sure, but it left open the possibility that both objects were dug from the same T’ang-era tomb.