DR. TWITCHETT AND MME. AUGUSTULA THOMAS’S HUSBAND (MR. THOMAS) WEARING THE INSIGNIA OF FULL MEMBERS OF THE AMERICAN ACADEMY FOR THE POPULARIZATION OF ANTIQUITIES
Now, to take up my own specialties (if I may call them so), I have the temerity to assume that my long experience in securing and handling these has possibly given me a little knowledge that may be of use to the amateur collector. I do not claim too much, perhaps, when I state that hooked rugs and early American iron and glass were familiar items in my possession long before the present craze for collecting them came to rage so wildly and widely. I have had exquisite hooked rugs, and rare fragments of such rugs, for instance, as far back as 1886.
American glass has always been a passion (if I may use the word) with me. In fact, among my friends and relatives, my search for really good glass has made me almost something of a by-word, jocularly speaking. The reader will easily connote that what I consider good glass is not a thing to be found every day in the week and that I am somewhat particular in my taste. Well, I confess it, and to substantiate the confession perhaps I should essay some description of what I mean by “really good glass.”
Glass, to be perfect in my eyes, should be absolutely in the condition in which it left the retailer who sold it to the private purchaser. I am aware that broken, cracked, or partially decomposed pieces have some value to the beginner, and I myself do often handle them, as a dealer, it is true. But it is sound glass that has kept me so diligently on the search day after day, year after year. Sandwich and Stiegel I leave to the beginner who likes to pay $17 for a ruby finger-bowl that was a drug on the market at two-for-a-quarter five years ago; who gladly signs a check for $125 in exchange for a dozen Benjamin Franklin cup-plates regularly turned out at the Sandwich factory for thirty cents a dozen, up to the time when the strike closed production in General Benjamin Harrison’s administration; but for myself—well, even a quaint old Colonial Sandwich lamp chimney, manufactured during Grover Cleveland’s first term, or as far back as the supremacy of Chester A. Arthur, does not excite me. A friend of mine proudly exhibits a lamp chimney said to have been persistently mistaken for a spy-glass by Lafayette himself on a Christmas Eve, on the occasion when he was so well entertained by the citizens of Yonkers, during his second visit to this country. I have never made the slightest effort to obtain this bit.
No. The perfect glass of my dreams—for I admit I am always dreaming of it—the perfect glass of my dreams is a bit of plain glass, very simple. It may be either pressed glass or moulded glass—I care not; and it may be browned in the making, or clear; I am indifferent about that. I do not even insist upon its antiquity, though the older it is the better, of course; but what I do value is the state of preservation in which I find it. That is to say, as I have already pointed out, a specimen of glass, to be really worth while, should be precisely in the condition in which it left the retailer’s shelf to pass to the original purchaser’s possession, and, above all, THE ORIGINAL CONTENTS SHOULD BE INTACT.
I admit that this is asking a great deal. It is more than one requires, for instance, of seventeenth-century Venetian glass, or of old Bohemian or of Bristol. Shall I be accused of jingoism when I say that I, personally, have found perfection only in American glass? (A Hungarian collector, now resident in this country, once asserted to me that he had found a sample of Scotch glass in the state I hold to be really worth while; but he was absolutely unwilling to show it, though I made every effort to induce him; and I ended by doubting him.) I do not claim that I have found worth-while glass frequently. Alas, no! For though I have looked and looked and hoped and hoped for it during many years, I have actually discovered but two perfect examples—only two! The first (a superb thing from Kentucky) I found absolutely by chance in the queerest, quaintest little place imaginable, up a passageway behind a hotel, early in the morning after the election of President Taft; and the second (not so pure, but nevertheless wonderful) I discovered only last September, among some shrubberies close to a summer mansion on the rugged coast of Massachusetts. What these discoveries meant to me, only one who seeks with a like patient enthusiasm could comprehend. I shall not describe my sensations; it is enough to say that there are pleasures one must keep to one’s self. I did not even speak of my discoveries at the time; but it may not be out of place for me to say now that they made me very happy. Indeed, after the second, I wandered for hours as in a dream, and even on the following day, when I chanced to meet a friend, he passed me, and then looked round over his shoulder at me for some time, all without recognizing me.
THE GLASS PERFECT
From a drawing by Jared P. Kilgallen, Esq., J.D. & R.P., of the item he considers most worth while in his collection. Note: This glass is no longer in original condition.
Now, a word upon the manner and means of collecting. As will readily be supposed, I do not follow the ordinary channels or patronize the customary marts of trade in antiques. I have nothing to say against the Antiquity Shops as such; and I freely admit that many of them contain genuine prizes for the persistent seeker; but after all they are for the amateur of careless purse. It is true that in a shop one CAN pick up a very small bit of rare value for nothing sometimes; and I have done it successfully; but the chances are against it, and, as it is always risky, usually I have thought better not even to try. No, the shops are not my field of endeavor. I say it in all modesty, but I have done better among the garnered old treasures of one quiet, private house than in a hundred Antiquity Shops.