Collections editor
Beatrix Joost
Beatrix Joost has been writing about private collectors for sixteen years. She edits The Pewter's Collections section.
Beats
Published in The Pewter
A Pair of Rosewood Opera Glasses, Re-Collimated
A pair of Lemaire of Paris opera glasses, c. 1880, came into a small optical workshop in Vienna with mother-of-pearl losses, misaligned prisms, and a velvet case that had not been opened in fifty years.
A Collection of American Trade Cards, 1880 to 1905
In a third-floor apartment in Chicago, the retired graphic designer Henry Carmichael has assembled 6,318 American trade cards from the chromolithography boom of 1880 to 1905.
The Cookbook with Six Marginalia
An 1861 first edition of Mrs Beeton's Book of Household Management, found in a Charleston estate, traced through six women's annotations across a hundred and twenty years to a single Charleston kitchen.
An Online-Only Decorative Arts Sale, Observed
Three days of bidding on a regional auction house's online sale, where the lot numbers run to twelve hundred and the room is a webcam.
A Decoy Carver on the Eastern Shore
Walter Brimm restores Susquehanna Flats and Chesapeake working decoys from a shed behind his house in Havre de Grace, Maryland. On a morning in June he refinishes a 1936 Madison Mitchell pintail.
A County Antique Fair in Northern Vermont
A Saturday at the Lamoille County Antique Show, where seventy dealers fill a 4-H barn and the trade is unmistakably local.
Forty Years of Fountain Pens, One Collector in Portland
Lillian Yoshimoto of Portland, Oregon has assembled 814 fountain pens manufactured between 1888 and 1965. She uses about fifteen of them in regular rotation.
The Portrait Miniature in a Norfolk Attic
A watercolour-on-ivory portrait, three inches by two and a half, found in a biscuit tin in a Cromer attic, identified from a barely legible inscription as a 1798 likeness of a Norwich merchant's wife.
A Private Collection of Stereographs, 8,400 Cards
In a converted dairy barn in Mendocino County, California, Marcus Olwen has spent forty-one years assembling one of the largest privately held stereograph collections in the American West.
The Brass Case Mark on a Daguerreotype
A sixth-plate Civil War daguerreotype of a Union infantryman, identified from a small mark stamped into the brass mat, traced to a corporal of the 14th Connecticut Volunteers killed at Antietam.
A Saturday at the Brimfield Antique Show
Eight hours on the J & J field at Brimfield, where the gates open at six and the serious buyers have already walked the rows by eight.
A Single-Collector Cookbook Archive, 1880 to 1950
Eunice Tarr of Providence, Rhode Island has assembled 3,612 American cookbooks published between 1880 and 1950. She has read about half of them and has cooked from about two hundred.
The Auction-House Catalogue as a Research Tool
A run of Christie's spring decorative-arts catalogues from 1962 to 2024 sits on a shelf in Amsterdam. The pages, more than the prices, are what one collector consults.
A Victorian Mourning Brooch, Re-Set
A jet-and-hair brooch from 1873, with a damaged bezel and a missing pin, came back through the work of a goldsmith in Manchester and a hair-worker in Norfolk who is one of the last in the trade.
Wedgwood Date Codes, 1860 to 1929: A Working Guide
A blue jasperware vase came into Beatrix Joost's attention last May, marked on the underside with the impressed letters WED beside three smaller capitals, M, B, and F. The three letters, read in sequence, place the vase to August 1881 with no ambiguity.
Sixty Years of Buttons, A Collector in Rockland, Maine
Margery Lindholm has kept her button trays in the same parlor cabinet since 1965. There are now seventeen trays, and she knows the provenance of about six hundred of the pieces by memory.