Thursday, February 16, 2012

Tempest In An Egg Cup


A few months back, I found these wonderful milk glass egg cups from around the middle of the twentieth century decorated with vivid red roosters and hens on a milk white background. I could easily see these in any kitchen in Eisenhower's America, from farmhouses where the eggs were laid fresh that morning to modern city apartments where morning was when you went to bed to split level ranch houses in the booming middle class suburbs. They spoke to me.

When it came time to list them for sale, I researched them online and came across one or two other listings which seemed to confirm what I suspected - they were made by Hazel Atlas, a prolific manufacturer of jars, kitchenware and dinnerware. After I listed them at my Ruby Lane shop, I received further confirmation of my ID when I came across a picture of an identical egg cup in the Florences' Hazel Atlas Glass Identification and Value Guide. So case closed, right?

The other day, I received an e-mail from a confused shopper, directing me to Carnival Heaven, where he had seen this pic:



If those Indiana Glass egg cups aren't identical to my "Hazel Atlas" egg cups, I'll eat them both! So what is going on here? Are the Florences and a few other online resellers wrong? If they are not, both manufacturers made egg cups but farmed out the decoration to a third party, which seems entirely possible. I bring up this little story not to cast the accuracy of ID guides into doubt but to illustrate the pitfalls of identification. During the era in which these cups were made, manufacturers were going out of business and being bought and sold at an alarming clip. Molds were lost or broken or sold so sometimes a dealer just has to make an educated guess and adapt if new information comes along.