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Antique china dolls were generally made of glazed bisque which gave them a glossy appearance and because the antique bisques generally covered the scalp most of the dolls have painted eyes and moulded hair. China dolls were historically produced from the late 1930s until the early part of the 19th century and by far the…

Photograph Your Jewellery Before we explain how to take care of your jewellery please do one thing immediately! Even before you clean it! Photograph it all! This has proven to be the single most important thing that you can do to help the police recover your valuables. A picture speaks a thousand words and the…

Collecting things appears to be something resembling a human instinct. People are almost natural hoarders and collecting all manner of items has been a common pastime for many individuals of almost every culture for a very long time. The innate desire to amass and to enjoy objects as well as too make money from them…

The name Chippendale is probably one of the most recognized names in furniture design today and his contributions to design are still as highly praised today as they were three centuries ago and many people still seek out Chippendale style furnishings to add to their antique collections. Chippendale was born in 1718 in Yorkshire to…

Now that so many people have and use computers it is perhaps easy to forget that the somewhat humble sounding paperweight once served an important function and that very many very beautiful ones were created. It is also somewhat ironic that their obsolescence is what has primarily made them almost a perfect beginning collector’s item….

Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933) was born in New York and was the founder of the now famous “Tiffany & Company”. He was by profession a skilled jeweller and by nature a talented businessman Louis started his professional career as a painter and was very enamoured of the work of the American painter Georges Innes whose…

Carl Faberge, was without doubt the most famous court jeweller in history and although he is often referred to as the “Cellini of the North” he is considered by a great many to have been, the goldsmith, ‘par excellence’. It would be impossible to say how many royal commissions he received but he was the…

Introduction People of all ages and in every country in the world collect things. They collect stamps, labels, books, cars, antiques and pretty much everything else that you can imagine and some collections even collect dust. Many collections are worth thousands of pounds (and twice as many dollars), a few are worth millions and many…

For perhaps the majority of people collecting things is simply a hobby and it is almost certainly true that in the vast majority of cases that that is how it starts out anyway. Not many people say, ‘I’m going to collect comics and get rich’. That said, many people that started collecting as a hobby…

When Did People Start Collecting? Whilst it is difficult to say when people started to collect things simply as a hobby, it is possible to verify the practice of collecting coins and books for whatever reason, back over thousands of years. It seems likely however that it is only in the last one hundred and…