WILMINGTON, Calif. – Though the name today is a powerhouse brand symbolic of luxury, Tiffany Studios comes from humble origins as a glassmaker. Founder Louis Comfort Tiffany’s glassworks in the Queens borough of New York City started in 1892, and after much experimentation with his plant chief Arthur J. Nash, hit upon mixing metal oxides with liquid glass to create incredibly iridescent colors.
Tiffany called this glass favrile, and received a U.S. patent for it in 1894. Soon after, the Queens plant was churning out all sorts of colored art glass for use in Tiffany’s stained glass windows and later, lamp shades.
Taylor & Harris have a fine example of LCT’s favrile output in its Sunday, January 21 Decorative Arts and Jewelry auction. Marked LC Tiffany Favrile 3826B and standing 10.8in in height, the vase features a grapevine design created by Tiffany artisans using wheel carving and glass etching. Dated 1905, the lot is a classic example of favrile iridescence. Taylor & Harris estimate the piece at $8,000-$12,000.
BERKELEY, Calif. – Since 1906, Montblanc has been creating fine luxury goods for the world’s elite. Known best for its writing instruments and timepieces, the company also offers luxury handbags and even fragrances, all united under the German brand.
Building expensive writing instruments in a digital world that prefers electronic communication to the written word presents an ever-increasing challenge for Montblanc. Where once a fine pen was considered a status symbol and an indispensable tool, today it must be much more to command the type of pricing typically seen with Montblanc merchandise.
The company’s Artisan Edition series of pens draw from notable personalities in the world of art for inspiration, with an obvious nod to the collector mindset and marketplace scarcity. This Picasso-licensed edition from 2012 is one of a series of just 91. It features a skeletonized 18K gold cap engraved with Picasso’s Portrait de Jeune Fille and the artist‘s sketches and remarks. The barrel resembles Picasso‘s preferred sketch pencils and the clip, set against the cap window, represents the face of Picasso‘s Jeune Fille.
In excellent condition and “never inked,” according to the lot notes, PBA Galleries brings this instrument to market with a $40,000-$60,000 estimate as part of its Fine Pens & Watches sale on Thursday, January 18.
CHICAGO – Beloved by generations for his poetic, easy-to-read books for children, Theodor Seuss Geisel (1904-1991) has sold hundreds of millions of books, beginning with 1937’s And To Think That I Saw It On Mulberry Street and ending with Oh, The Places You’ll Go in 1990, just a year before his death from cancer.
Geisel grew up in Springfield, Massachusetts, born to German-American parents who ran the family brewery. Geisel was accepted to the prestigious Ivy League school Dartmouth College, and attended classes there from 1921 to 1925. During his time on campus, he served as the editor-in-chief of the school’s humor magazine, Jack-O-Lantern (affectionately known as Jacko). His tenure was cut short due to his hosting a drinking party while Prohibition raged in America, forcing him to adopt a pen name to continue appearing in print. He used his essentially unknown middle name, and the legend of Dr. Seuss was born.
Potter & Potter received a consignment of three volumes of the Jack-O-Lantern, covering the school years of 1919 to 1922. In it they discovered a single-page illustrated poem signed ‘Ted Geisel,’ foretelling the famous style for which his Dr. Seuss books would use to teach children to read. Essentially unknown, Potter & Potter experts believe “The full-page illustrated poem titled ‘Jazz’ is apparently undocumented in Seuss literature and appears here for the first and evidently the only time.” The three-volume set of books with the Geisel content are estimated at $1,000-$2,000 as part of Potter & Potter’s online-only Printed Books & Manuscripts sale slated for Thursday, January 18.
DETROIT – Droughts come in all forms, but for sports fans, nothing can be more painful than a failure to win a championship for decades. It happened to the Boston Red Sox, it happened to the Chicago Cubs, and it is still happening to the Detroit Lions of the National Football League, which have never even been to a Super Bowl, much less won one.
This football, consigned to DuMouchelles, is signed by every member of the 1957 Lions team that won their fourth and final (to date) NFL championship, when they went 8-4 and walloped the Cleveland Browns in the championship game, 59-14. While autographed balls are always of interest, this one is even more meaningful because of how it came to be – and that its mere presence suggests an eerie curse on the Lions.
In the days before mobile phones or even cheap long distance service, the world relied on telegrams for timely communications between people and organizations. The undisputed leader in this realm was Western Union, which had reinvented itself from its early days as a nationwide telegraph network operator.
Victor F. Pegg, Sr. was a telegram deliveryman for Western Union in Detroit in 1957, and his route included every member of the Lions team as well as the Lions corporate office, which relied on telegrams to keep players up to date with team news. As such, Pegg was not only a Detroit Lions fan, but friends with the entire team, routinely delivering telegrams to their homes. After the Lions achieved their historic win, Pegg purchased an authentic NFL football and asked each player to sign it. They all did, and then the football went into hiding in the Pegg home, rarely being handled or brought out into the light, which might damage the precious ball-point pen signatures.
In fact, the football was so jealously guarded that only its third owner, Victor Pegg II, the son of Victor Pegg, Jr., would finally learn of its fate upon the death of his namesake father. In spectacular condition, the ball is estimated at $5,000-$15,000 as part of Day One of DuMouchelles’ January 2024 two-day sale.
Maybe now that the ball is known to the public and available for sale, perhaps the lingering winless streak cursing the Detroit Lions will be lifted.
STANSTED MOUNTFITCHET, U.K. – A recently rediscovered version of one of the best-known Guild of Handicraft designs will appear for sale at Sworders on Tuesday, January 16. The upright Broadwood piano designed by Charles Robert Ashbee (1863-1942), a piece sent for exhibition in Hungary in 1902, is estimated at £6,000-£8,000 ($7,590-$10,125).
Fashioned in mahogany inlaid with holly and applied with pierced strap hinges, it is one of at least five Broadwood pianos made with Ashbee casings by the Guild of Handicraft. Examples are pictured in all of the major texts on British Arts and Crafts furniture.
This particular piano, numbered 95406, model 8, has an impeccable provenance. The Broadwood Archives list the date of manufacture (it was finished on February 27, 1902), the price paid by one Mr. C. Watson Low (118 pounds, two shillings and sixpence) and its part in the British Applied Arts Exhibition at the National Museum of Decorative Art in Budapest in September-November 1902. It was sent to Hungary along with another Arts and Crafts piano designed by Hugh Mackay Baillie Scott.
Watson Low later gave his Ashbee piano and its stool to his niece, Miss C.M. Low, who used it to teach piano until her retirement in 2001. Her grandson is offering it for sale. He contacted Sworders after he found a near-identical piano sold by the auction house in 2014 for £10,400 (roughly $13,150).
