Fire King

I caught the Fire King bug from my parents, who had one of the largest Jadeite (light green) Fire King collections I’ve ever seen, including rare pieces such as egg cups. That set has come down to my sister and is still center stage in family gatherings. When I started collecting Fire King myself, I decided to concentrate on other options in its line. I now have small sets of Fire King in basic plates, mugs, and bowls in three colors: pink, ivory, and turquoise. I also found a complete set of four nested serving bowls in ivory, which I use often, while my sister has a full set in Jadeite.

These lines were called Fire King because the glass is oven safe. Still, I try to avoid putting any of my Fire King pieces in the oven, though I find the mugs and plates especially convenient for microwave heating of cups of coffee and leftover foods.

Perhaps the best known of the Fire King lines is Jadeite, originally made in two different forms for homeware and for restaurant use. The Jadeite color is a deep pastel green color that went well with the kitchen décor of the 1940s and ‘50s. A restaurant version has thicker glass. In the 1990s, the original Fire King Jadeite was re-popularized when Martha Stewart came out with a similar jadeite line, today made by Mosser Glass in Ohio. Suddenly, prices on the original Anchor Hocking jadeite went through the roof: $25 for a mug or a cereal bowl when, just a year earlier, you could find plenty of it on the secondary market for $5 or less per item.

Prices also tend to be high on at least some other Fire King colors, and while prices have moderated somewhat, there is also much less of this glass around today. The least expensive Fire King on the secondary market tends to be the white and iridized peach items. Among my sets, the easiest to find, at least in isolated items, is ivory (sometimes called Clam Broth), with turquoise a bit harder to find, and pink hardest of all (Fire King was actually made in two versions of pink, one with the color flashed over white and the other with the pink actually in the glass itself, which I much prefer but which is very difficult to find). The items that appear most often on the secondary market are mugs and bowls; plates are much harder to find.

Online auctions

As COVID-19 continues to rock our regular world, adaptive changes are becoming more common – including in the world of antiques and collectibles. Online auctions can compensate for the loss of sales opportunities on the ground, whether that loss is due to closure (temporary or otherwise) of live venues or the loss of customers who are choosing to stay home rather than risk infection. Here, for example, is a list of some of the Facebook groups offering auctions and straight sales:

• Antiques and Collectibles for Sale (482,000 members)
• Antiques and Collectibles for Sale or Wanted (31,000 members)
• Fenton Art Glass (several sales groups with several thousands of members)
• Mid-Century Modern Furniture for Sale (25,000 members)
• Vintage Clothing and Accessories (24,000 members)
• Antique and Vintage Silver for Sale (4,700 members)
• Vintage Clothing and Accessories (24,100 members)
• The Vintage Marketplace (34,400 members)
• Cast Iron Cookware Buy-Sell-Trade (29,000 members)
• Buy and Sell Vintage Toys (15,600 members)
• Vintage Sterling Silver Gems (Buy, Sell, and Trades) (6,700 members)

Taking advantage of these opportunities can be both fun and frustrating. Here are some of the things to watch for.

1. 1. Reputation of the Seller. When dealing with mailed sales from any of these groups, you’ll want to be sure you can trust the seller to deliver your purchased item as described and as mailed to arrive in one piece. I’m a member of two of the Fenton Facebook groups, but of the hundreds of sellers in these groups, there are three that I know I can trust to pack items safely for mailing. Online interest groups often have heart-rending posts from buyers about items that arrived unsafely packaged and in smithereens. For eBay sellers, there is also a system for buyers to rate a seller, and the reputation is worth paying attention to before buying.

    

   2.  Accurate Item Description. Just as with dealers in antiques and collectibles on the ground, there is a range of seller expertise on any given item from professional to rank amateur. And just as with live sales, there are varying levels of seller interest in describing their items accurately. Applying maker names to items that aren’t is a common problem, so buyers need to be on their guard.

Three books in print

Currently, I have three books in print, one on Lladró Spanish porcelain and two on Fenton Art Glass.

Publishers were keenly interested in my first Lladró book proposal because Lladró was very popular among collectors in the 1990s and early 2000s. I went with Krause Publications, then one of the big names in publishing on antiques and collectibles (It later became F&W Publications before going bankrupt and being bought out by Penguin Random House in 2001).

I was limited in what I could write, by that publisher’s infatuation with the “price guide” format in its books and by the Lladró company’s initial resistance to having my book include any of its brands other than the core collection. Not until my current book, brought out by Schiffer Publishing in December 2019, The Lladró Guide; A Collector’s Reference to Retired Porcelain Figurines in Lladró Brands, could I write the book I wanted.

The first publisher, in 2012, for my two Fenton Art Glass books (one on animal, bird, and insect figurines and the other on fairy lights) was Old Line Publishing, which later went out of business. In 2020, I was contacted out of the blue by Lemur Press, which was interested in reissuing these books. That relationship has been both rewarding and challenging, as this start-up publisher could not print revised editions but only reproduce the originals under its own imprint. While I had trouble promoting the books in their original publication back in 2012, sales of the Lemur printings with the same content have been brisk as the collecting market in Fenton glass has heated up.

What’s involved in publishing

Getting a book published in antiques and collectibles poses many challenges, not the least of which is the contraction (fewer publishers) in the publishing field. Here’s what I learned about the steps in the process.

Finding a publisher. How broad is the interest in the field you want to write about? What kind of/how broad of a reputation does the writer have among other collectors? How strong is the publisher’s business? That is, is it a startup, or does it have a reputation based on many years in business?

Reviewing the contract. What percentage of the total cost of book sales is reserved to the author? (10% is about standard for this). Most publishers will be open to negotiating some aspects of the contract. For example, who retains the rights to the work? As a writer who wants to be published, I nevertheless have a nonnegotiable bottom line: I avoid contracts that do not leave with me, as the author, the basic rights to the work.

As a collector, I came late to Fenton Art Glass, just a decade or two before the company closed in 2011. In those years, I bought Fenton affordably on the retail and secondary markets. Now, here we are at 2021, and the market in Fenton glass is super hot – and not just online. I can barely keep my two Fenton glass booths restocked in a local Vermont antique mall.
What’s up with that? Well, Fenton glass is beautiful and very well made, but the company is no longer making it. Recently, also, the Asian market has discovered Fenton, and buyers from Asian countries are scarfing it up on the secondary market as fast as they can find it in online auctions. That all means Fenton prices are up dramatically.

Fenton glass animals are particularly pricey right now. Years ago, you could buy them for $35 apiece or less, but the price has doubled, even tripled since then. One of the reasons is that veteran Fenton collectors here in the States are running out of space, and the animal models are easy to fit into display areas. That means more buying competition for the figurines available. I have a lot of Fenton animal figurines, most of which I’m keeping. Some I’m moving to my antique mall booths, pricing them at half what the going price is just about anywhere online and still selling them for more than what I paid for them 20 or so years ago.

Buying considerations

Older undecorated Fenton glass, especially in colors such as Red Carnival, Mandarin Red, Topaz (AKA Vaseline), tends to be very pricey. Studio Glass by artists such as Dave Fetty or Kelsey Murphy and Robert Bomkamp is highly desired. Glass that Fenton made for other companies is also in high demand as it was usually made in very limited production runs.
Beginning in 1970, glass made by Fenton, was marked on the bottom, usually with a Fenton logo. Fenton started making its own glass as early as 1907, however, and anything made before 1970 is not marked.

One of the decisions Fenton collectors have to make is whether they want to buy glass made by companies such as Mosser that have bought up the Fenton moulds at auction. Clearly, many Fenton collectors do. But I have so much original Fenton glass (and still can’t help buying more when it catches my eye in an antique shop) that I’ve pretty much decided not to buy Mosser Glass from Fenton moulds – even though Mosser is a perfectly fine company that makes excellent glass.