*At the Corning Museum
of Glass in Corning, New York, Visitors can view a small rare blue glass
creamer. It has a hollow base with an American penny sealed inside. Although its
origin is unknown, the date on the penny is 1794 and experts agree it was most
likely produced in Philadelphia sometime after that date.
Northeast Auctions in
Manchester, N.H. sold the creamer at auction for $82,600. The family that
cosigned the piece had acquired it the 1860s. The date on the coin often was to
mark a birthday, or other special occasion.
The Corning Museum of Glass owns
other glass vessels with coins sealed inside, but by far the American made pieces are
extremely rare.
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*Collecting 1960s Zippo
cigarette lighters that belonged to American soldiers has been the focus for
Bradford Edwards, an art collector based in Vietnam. Each lighter is unique because they are engraved with sentiments
for peace, home, sex, marijuana, and even death wishes for their enemies.
Mr. Edwards consigned
282 lighters from his collection to Cowan’s Auctions in Cincinnati. The
collection was valued between $30,000 to
$50,000. When the
collection did not sell, the owner of the auction house Wes Cowan, approached
the Manhattan collector, John Monsky, and convinced him to spend $35.250 for
the lot, so that it would not be broken up. Mr. Monsky has said, “each one of them is like a little
emotion.” His favorite is the
lighter engraved with a peace sign and the words “WHY ME.”
He plans to have them
mounted for traveling exhibitions, with a database of engravings and the
owners’ biographies.
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*It was quite a surprise
for furniture historians to discover that the Centennial Museum at the
University of Texas at El Paso had two pairs of 1880s gilded chairs from a
Vanderbilt home, forgotten in storage since the 1960s.
The armchairs were
produced in Manhattan by the luxury cabinetmaking team, the German born half-brothers,
Gustave and Christian Herter. They
are studded with mother-of-pearl and leafy gilding on their sides and were last
known to be used by William H. Vanderbilt at his town house on Fifth Avenue.
The Museum placed them
at auction through Charlton Hall Auctioneers in South Carolina and the four
were sold for $363,000. Margot
Johnson, a New York dealer specializing in Herter pieces, acquired them for the
Metropolitan Museum of Art. The
Met commissioned restoration work on the gilding and velvety red upholstery
prior to adding them to an exhibition about Herter work done under Vanderbilt
patronage.
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*For years “Star Trek”
fans have debated whether a huge 1960s prop from the television series had
survived. The prop is a 24-foot model of the show’s Galileo shuttlecraft that
was used to film scenes of crews and visitors in transit.
Sadly, the actual metal
and wood box used in the shuttlecraft ended up being left outdoors in Ohio and
exposed to the elements for years. It was badly rusted and the wood eroded when
it was put up for sale by Kiki Auctions of Canton, Ohio. Adam Schneider, a consultant in New
York, paid $70,000 for it.
Mr. Schneider commissioned
Master Shipwrights in New Jersey to do a full restoration. Galileo’s metal frame and landing skids
are salvageable, but the shell and doors will all have to be replaced.
Schneider is researching every detail, of the Galileo as it appeared in the
show, right down to the exterior lettering.
Mr. Schneider collects
space ship models from “Star Trek” sets and displays them at his home, complete
with reactivated lights and sound effects. Once restored, he plans to donate
the shuttlecraft to a museum as a children’s exhibit.
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*Sometimes auctions can
get pretty heavy. The government decided to remove a 12-ton concrete
topographical map of the Gettysburg battlefield from a battlefield visitor’s
center. The map is covered with
light bulbs that light up to indicate civil war troop movements.
The 1960s piece was
chopped up and stashed in trailers slated to be dumped. Local preservationists discovered the
plan and set up a web site to save the electric map. Enough support was garnered to convince the General Services
Administration to instead offer the piece for sale in and on-line auction.
A developer, Scott
Roland from Hanover, PA. paid about $14,000 for it, winning the bidding against
an unknown rival. The pieces have
been hoisted by crane and reassembled at a 1950 brick building that is being
converted to serve as a conference and visitors center.
Mr. Roland’s team will
have the map reactivated in time for Hanover’s 250th anniversary and the 150th
anniversary of Civil War Battles in the area. The wiring had been cut and ruined. All of the mechanisms
will be rebuilt from scratch and should work even better than before.
