On Tuesday, May 22, 2012, Freeman’s will be auctioning off antiques and decorative art items from the estate of famed Hollywood actress Ava Gardner (1922-1990) as part of their English & Continental Furniture & Decorative Arts auction.  According to the auction catalog, the iconic actress had her glamorous residences in Hollywood, Paris, and London decorated by the most renowned interior decorators of the era, including Maison Jansen and her well-appointed residences contained a variety of tasteful decorative objects, from 19th century French silver to contemporary Gucci bronzes, which the actress adored. All of the items, lots 470 through 489, have the provenance of having descended in the family.

One standout item for me is Lot 480A, a 19th century Chinese cloisonne enameled vase with a dragon mounted as a lamp.

It’s not only beautiful, but is accompanied by a photograph of the actress twirling near the lamp itself.

The auction estimate for such a rare item with charming photographic proof of the beautiful actress’ ownership is $800 – $1,200.

For the past few years, whenever I mention that I’m going hunting for antiques and vintage collectibles in the local thrift stores, people usually grumble about how it’s a waste of time, and that nothing good can be found there anymore. While it’s true that donations of older items have likely decreased with the ease of selling items online, and that most thrift stores have become far more savvy about the worth of the older donated items and price them higher than in previous years, I still find bargains a-plenty at thrift stores. But I’ve never found anything like this recent story.

A roughly 7 1/2 inch tall piece of pottery turned up in the Goodwill Industries of Western New York warehouse and was deemed interesting enough to be placed on Goodwill’s online auction site. Within a few hours of being placed online, not only had the bidding risen to $75, but there was a flurry of e-mail about the piece.

People had recognized the vessel’s unusual design of fluted openings and knobby protrusions, and, along with the penciled note of provenance inside the piece, knew that this was very likely a prehistoric pottery piece belonging to the Caddo Indian Nation.

The penciled note inside the pot read, “Found in a burial mound near Spiro Oklahoma in 1970,” indicating this piece had been found at the Spiro Mounds, located just outside of eastern Oklahoma City. The area was a permanent prehistoric Native American settlement from A.D. 800 to A.D. 1450, but people had camped in the area for 8,000 years prior as well. While a number of excavations of the area date to the 1930s, and the Oklahoma Historical Society opened the Spiro Mounds Archaeological Center in 1978, looting was a problem before 1990, when the site was then protected by the Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act, making it illegal to traffic in such cultural property.

Once Goodwill had all the facts, they stopped the auction, and now, the artifact is to return home to the Caddo Nation — proof that the organization does indeed have good will—and proof that you never know what may show up at a thrift store.

[Photo via Buffalo News.]

On Saturday I spotted this retro cookie jar at a yard sale — actually, the sign alerting passersby to the sale read, “Oh, No, A Fire… Yard Sale!” which certainly was alarming enough to garner our attention. The hipsters running the sale seemed to find the whole concept of a yard sale too ironic to bothered pricing anything, which distracted me from asking about the fire. But anyway, this cookie jar with its goofy kitschy smile plastered across a way-too-happy sunshine yellow glaze shining in the sun was instantly recognizable as something from the 1970s.

And something I must have.

But not enough to pay the $5 he first quoted me.

We negotiated and settled on $3.

I call it the “smiley face cookie jar,” but its official name is the Happy Face cookie jar. And while I say it looks like a game piece off the Sorry! game board (another reason for this board game junkie to love it), the cookie jar shape is properly called a round or ball-shaped cookie jar on a pedestal. But its shape is rather a problem.

I know that cookie jar lids are easily broken, making vintage cookie jars complete with lids rare and pricey in general, but on this specific design, it seems nothing short of a miracle if the lids do survive. The lids nest imperfectly, requiring some adjustment to get it to sit “just so” — something people with hands full of cookies (especially sneaky kids) likely aren’t thinking about. Plus, that finial ball top design is just begging for a sleeve or something to knock it out of that “just so” place — and onto a hard floor. Thankfully, this cookie jar lid has defied the odds to survive.

There are several glaze color variations for this vintage McCoy cookie jar: yellow, with black, as mine is; solid yellow (which makes the features and writing rather hard to read); white with black, and white with red. It measures just under 11 inches tall.

The Happy Face cookie jar was first made by McCoy in 1971, when the pottery company was part of The Mount Clemens Pottery Company and the design lasted at least a few more years, including after McCoy was sold again, this time to The Lancaster Colony Corporation in 1974. Earliest versions of this vintage pottery cookie jar will have the classic McCoy name in a stylized or decorated circle, with U.S.A. beneath it, embossed on the bottom. Later pieces will have a plainer version of the McCoy name along with the Lancaster Colony’s “LLC” mark embossed on the bottom. Based on the makers marks, you can see that my cookie jar find is an earlier production piece:

The markings are important to note, for even though this Happy Face McCoy cookie jar doesn’t seem to have been copied and faked, many McCoy pottery cookie jars have been. Faked, that is. (Use of the word “reproduction” would be incorrect; McCoy ceased production in 1990 and use of the designs and McCoy name are misleading at best.) One way to tell that your McCoy pottery piece is authentic is to find a the correct embossed maker’s mark from the correct time period — and a crisp mark at that. Since copies or “reproductions” are not made from the original molds, but rather from clay pressed and molded around the original piece, the maker’s marks are less clear.

This method of making molds to copy pieces also results in smaller pieces because the clay molded around the original vintage pieces shrinks in size — and then the piece made in that smaller mold shrinks again when the piece is fired in the kiln. So copies will be smaller. Knowing what size the cookie jar or other potter piece is supposed to be will save you from buying knock-offs at authentic vintage prices.

It’s hard to believe, but you can own pieces of space exploration history — including items which have gone to the moon. Among the 270+ lots in Heritage Auction’s Space Exploration Signature Auction (May 12, 2012, in Dallas, Texas), there are items which have gone into space, into lunar orbits, and even to the surface of the moon.

Since I’ve made a comedic reference with the “To the moon, Alice!” post title, I think it’s appropriate to mention comedian Bill Dana. His character, José Jiménez, the reluctant astronaut, was adopted by the original Mercury astronauts — resulting in a a presentation medallion gifted to Dana by Alan Shepard in 1969.

The Apollo 14 Lunar Module Flown Gold Medallion Presented to and From the Collection of Comedian Bill Dana is a 38mm 14K gold medallion with diamonds set into a large “10″ on the front. It has a personalized engraved inscription on the back, and, when Alan Shepard offered to carry the medal along on Apollo 14, Dana, living in Hawaii at the time, had the front engraved with an adaptation of the Hawaii state motto. Yup, it went into space too. The medallion comes with two letters of provenance from Shepard. The auction estimate for this piece of space history is $15,000 – $25,000.

But not all of space exploration was amusing or even exhilarating; there was risk and loss too. Among the other items, a photo signed by all seven crew members of the ill-fated Space Shuttle Columbia. While it’s difficult to put a price on a memory seared into our collective cultural consciousness, the auction estimate for this historic autographed photograph is $5,000 – $8,000.

Absentee bidding for the Space Exploration Signature Auction ends May 11, 2012 at 10:00 PM (CT).

Yes, Virginia, there was voice mail back in the Second World War; these photos I snapped at River City Antique Mall prove it.

The voice of your soldiers and other loved ones in the military could be recorded and then mailed back home, thanks to wartime audio recordings, projects typically done in conjunction with the USO. While this envelope announces that Gem Blades (American Safety Razor Corp.) brings you the recorded voice of your soldier, there’s also the handwritten USO identification numbers on the front. The back of the envelope promotes the home front activity of buying U.S. war bonds and stamps.

While I didn’t disturb the seller’s packaging, this is what the records themselves look like:

According to the back of the Gem Razor records, there was a bus of some sort from which “Gem Blade reporters” made “thousands of free Voices Of Victory records throughout the nation.”

Along with the Gem Razor recordings, there were also records, in both 45 and 78 RPM, made for free in kiosks at USO clubs, National Catholic Community Service USO clubs, Pepsi Centers, and radio stations around the country during the war, resulting in many different looking records, labels, and mailers. Also, wives, mothers and other family members went to the USO clubs to record their own audio letters for their beloved service men.

These kiosk recordings are thought to have been made on an early version of Mutoscope’s Voice-O-Graph — which certainly makes sense in terms of Mutoscope’s marketing of the audio booths after the war. Jose Fritz includes the Gem Voices Of Victory recordings in his Voice-O-Graph labelography. But one can’t rule out Wilcox-Gay’s Recordio and other devices for these recordings either. According to the January, 1946 issue of Audio Record (published by Audio Devices Inc., a manufacturer of blank discs), “the USO Central Purchasing Department has sent out 301,059 discs for records in the last two year, and that this figure is exclusive of those purchased locally or through other channels.”

These one-of-a-kind records are considered “home made records” due to the lower quality of the recordings in part based upon the poor quality of the materials the records themselves are made of. The Gem Blade records are mere cardboard covered in a then film of lacquer, making them quite fragile things. It is strongly recommended that the records be played only to record the voices off of them, preferably preserving them in a less fragile medium, such as converting them to MP3 or other digital files. Fellow Collectors Quest columnist Collin is still offering his free service to transfer these recordings into digital files; if interested, contact him at collin@collectorsquest.com.