Learning Something New

In the past week, I've bought two things that I knew absolutely nothing about -- just because they looked interesting. As I've researched them, I've learned a few new things.

The first is this very cool canister set. It has 4 ceramic canisters decorated with fruit and the name (coffee, tea, flour, sugar) written in cursive, sitting on a wooden lazy susan and having one wooden lid. I've found out that these were manufactured by the Watt Pottery Company, but they're often called Watt Esmond Purinton canisters because Watt made pottery under the other two names, too. Here's something else I learned: Watt was in Crooksville, Ohio, which is in the same area as Paden City and Newell, West Virginia and Wellsville, Roseville & East Liverpool, Ohio -- I guess this is like the 'fertile crescent' of American pottery!

When we're out thrift shopping, we see Napco (National Pottery Company), Hall, Roseville, RRPCo, Homer Laughlin, Paden City and they were all inter-related by either buying and selling, by their founders having worked for one of the others or by producing china under an acquired company's name (as Homer Laughlin now produces Hall China). They're like a big pottery family!

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The other item I bought 'blind' was this large coin album. Other than collecting pennies and nickels in a blue cardboard book when I was a kid, and saving every wheat penny and buffalo nickel that I find, I never pay much attention to coins. I've seen how popular coins are, though, by helping customers with them at the antique mall. So when I saw this big album (about 9" x 14" with 2 coin boards inside) at a sale I bought it. It's a Wayte Raymond album, which meant absolutely nothing to me but is, apparently, a big deal and is really collectable. Yay!

Wayte Raymond was a famous American numismatist (coin collector) in the 1920s & 30s. He was well-known for grading the quality of coins and wrote several coin collecting guides. One site I found said that Wayte Raymond boards were the state of the art for coin collecting in their day and that all the coin boards we have now were copied off of them. That's pretty impressive! Isn't it fun to learn new things? I wonder if any of you have bought things lately that have taught you about a collectable that's new to you?