History in Your Hands is very happy to announce a new feature! From time to time we will be interviewing authors, business owners, and collectors from various backgrounds.
Our very first guest in this series has a most unusual name--Mark Pickvet. How fortunate for Mark Pickvet to have a name that one can google and be the only one there is!!
Mr. Pickvet is well versed (and well educated) on glass, his most recent publication from earlier this year being the second edition of The Encyclopedia of Glass.
What is nice about this book is that it doesn't have prices and values in it. Why would that be good? Values are in constant flux and value guides need to be replaced yearly or at least quite often.
However, the information in this book provides all the unchanging facts and background for identification on the history, style, crafting, designers, and makers of glass. Over 4,000 listings are covered and cross-referenced in the book, which is currently available from bookstores and on-line.
If you are looking for a price guide on glass, never fear, Mark Pickvet has also written four editions of the Official Price Guide To Glassware.
While those books cover an entire field of collecting, Mark Pickvet also hones in on subjects with more focused detail including Paperweights, and Playing Cards; though his first book was on Shot Glasses, now in it's 4th edition.
Did you catch the title in there that wasn't about glass? Mark Pickvet's book about Playing Cards is what brought him to my attention several years ago. Because of his book, I added playing cards to my inventory which became a good and consistent selling item for me.
Mr. Pickvet hails from middle Michigan...Pinconning, MI, population (in 2010) listed at 1,307. If you were trying to find it on a map, you would be looking in the crook of the "thumb".
Although we might be tempted to refer to the author as an "expert", he might have something else to say about it...
"I always hate to be called an expert, researcher is probably better. When inspecting a piece I try not to let on that I know anything about it (sometimes I don't w/o research) or who I am. If they find out that I am an author and think I am an expert, then a collector will clam up & tell me little or nothing about the piece thinking erroneously that I know everything there is to know. So much glass is unmarked that I need the story....how long have you had it? Where did it come from? For instance, if it was passed down from your grandparents who brought it to America from Europe (a specific country is better). "
You wouldn't guess from that comment that the truth is...
"... the original Encyclopedia of Glass was basically the glossary to my PhD
dissertation on glass history..." (University of Michigan)
With all his books, he doesn't consider himself first and foremost as an author, he is quite at ease in his "day job"...
"...writing is really a hobby of mine, my main job is that of a safety engineer & I travel all over the state of Michigan conducting safety inspections; not to brag, but you would be hard pressed to find somewhere in the state where I have not been..."
" I started collecting shot glasses on a 6th grade (around 10 years of age) class trip to Boblo Island, a now defunct amusement park that once existed on the Detroit River between Michigan and Canada (it was actually on the Canadian side). I bought a souvenir shot glass for 69 cents at the time (I had a dollar of spending money). I started picking more and more of them up as souvenirs, flea markets, antique stores, and so on. They were always inexpensive like playing cards and basically, it is easy to collect them in quantity without shelling out that much money. As a graduate student, I could never find a price guide on shot glasses, so I wrote my own back in the mid-1980's as a Master's Thesis that paralleled the glass industry with that of the liquor industry. Pricing was always based on what one could buy them for. I ran a club called The Shot Glass Club of America through much of the later 1980's and into the '90's to share information with other collectors."
The author was also kind enough to share a little about those "finds" when you are out on the hunt for something and find it at a great price! (You know--when you feel like your heart is racing and you shouldn't have had that second cup of coffee--so excited!)
" I have found some pre-Prohibition whiskey sample glasses [valued] in the $50 to $75 [range] at rummage sales for 10 to 25 cents. Sometimes one can find a nice $50 piece of Fostoria Coin Glass for a few dollars too, but high end stuff like rare carnival glass, fancy art styles, and even clean Depression Glass, will not be found cheaply at garage & yard sales."
How does a price/value guide help the dealer and the collector?
" One thing people have to realize is that price guides often list the full retail value of an object; or in other words, what a dealer expects to get for it.....dealers/buyers generally pay about half of the price in price guides and then hope to sell the object at twice what they paid for it. Once the online auction houses came on line like eBay, the market radically changed.....along with search engines like Google. It's much easier to Google something or check eBay for pricing trends than pricing guides. Collector Books for instance, a huge publishing house for collector guides stopped publishing books a couple of years back (Antique Publications, my first publishing house, went out of business years ago). At first online auction houses raised prices considerably by throwing a lot of short supply ads out there to incredible demand. One example is that my wife collects Mary Gregory Glass; stuff that was fairly difficult to find in the 1990's & prior, but now, check eBay, and there may be 75 to 150 pieces listed any given day. In the early days of eBay, you might only find a handful of pieces and bidding would be ferocious, now there is an over abundance of supply; thus, combined with the recession, prices are down."
What are the trends that you have seen for the market in general and glass in particular since 2008?
"The recession over the past several years has really hammered the antique/collectible market unless you are into precious metals like gold & silver. There are simply more sellers than buyers and prices have been dropping.....Depression, Art, Carnival, and popular makers, especially those in America like Fenton & Fostoria to name a couple, are down significantly."
What can we be looking forward to from you in the future?
" I always have projects in the works. Originally, I was going to do another book on playing card values with Collector Books, but since they closed the door on publishing new titles, I am seeking publication of it elsewhere. I have a few more books coming out soon on the history of Michigan, and am dabbling in fiction as well. It took me 30 years to finish my book on the History of Michigan and I have a publisher who is going to print it in 3 to 4 volumes over the next couple of years since it is quite large."
A HUGE Thank You to author Mark Pickvet for spending a little time with History in Your Hands and being our "guinea pig" first author to join us. The History of Michigan sounds like it must have been a daunting task! We look forward to the publication! Let us know when you have a set publication date!
[full disclaimer: The author Mark Pickvet and the admin of the facebook page History in Your Hands have no agreement or arrangement through any publishing or promotional company. The admin of HIYH made an earnest and sincere request for a Q & A and Mark Pickvet was kind enough to comply. ]
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