5. THE SIGNS OF USE AND WEAR
Many fantastic pieces of old glass were made as curiosities or ornaments, but most old glass was made for use. Glass is easily scratched; as the wine glasses and decanters were set down upon the hard, polished mahogany of dinner-tables, after the cloth was drawn, and were moved, the feet of the wine glasses and the bases of the decanters become scratched thereby. Lustre-ornaments, glass candlesticks, or glass vases which stood upon marble or hard wood mantelpieces, being moved when maidservants were dusting, became scratched at the base. The collector will therefore carefully examine those parts of a piece of glass which, if it is old, may be expected to show the signs of use and wear caused by contact and movement upon hard surfaces; it is well to do this by the aid of a pocket-lens—which ought to be a glass collector’s constant companion.
In a genuine old piece the scratches are numerous, do not all run the same way, and are dust-coloured, more or less. Most counterfeits show no scratches at all, but the more elaborate forgeries show artificial scratches; these usually run all one way, however, or seem all to have been made together at the same time, and sometimes these artificial scratchings appear in parts of the glass which would not be exposed to marking of the kind when in use, as, for instance, inside the bowls.
Yet it is not wise to condemn and refuse as a fraud a piece of glass which shows the other four or five general evidences of genuineness simply because only slight scratching is evident; for the glass may have been standing in a cupboard unused for many years, its nose put out of joint by some change of fashion in table-ware soon after it had been bought, and have passed into a collector’s cabinet before coming into your hands for examination. Nor is it safe to suppose that the more the scratches the older the piece; it may have had more than the common amount of usage. If the glass has a “folded foot” or a “ring-base” to stand on, the scratches will be at the very edge of the foot, or on the ring, just where it touched the table or mantelpiece, and there only.