There are seven - count ‘em - seven “Pabst” pieces on Ebay right now and I wonder about how loosely the name is being bandied about for anything that resembles the style that he worked in.

British architect Bruce Talbert’s influential “Gothic Forms“, published in 1867, influenced many a maker at the time, including some to be mentioned below.  In addition to influences from the “influencers” such as Talbert, the makers themselves converged during the major exhibitions and saw what each other was working on.  Then there are the trade journals such as American Cabinetmaker that they all had copies of …

This exposure to architects, designers and other makers resulted in cross-pollination and propagation of stylistic elements that makes it unrealistic for us to whittle the list of likely makers down to the famous few and reuse their names over-and-over.  This why I will be doing more of the “For The Record” posts on this blog.

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As a website owner, I use a lot of tools to assess traffic patterns on my sites, and while doing so recently, I decided that I could use one of them to roughly judge global and U.S. trends for the antiques industry. I wanted to know how the public’s interest in antiques currently stood against historic trends.

Google “owns” web searching globally with an 81% market share that may someday soon become 90% (Yahoo is a distant second at 10% and MSN at 3%).  I reasoned that if any data out there can best capture the public’s interest in a particular topic, it is web search traffic.

My not-so-scientific methodology is not meant to be a precise view of the industry, but it should be an interesting window into the general trends over time.  There are some obvious errors with my methodology such as not having normalized for search traffic increasing overall since 2004 as more people get online.  However, for all I know, Google may have already done that for me within their data.

The charts below shows a relative scale of Google web search activity on a scale of 1-100 from 2004-present.  A datapoint of 100 anywhere in the chart denotes the peak of search interest over the past 5 years.

Let’s analyze each one individually (images can be clicked to expand size).

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I’d like to start a new feature on Rare Victorian, which I hope will last beyond this one post, called “For The Record”.  The aim is to profile some less prolific, less visible, or “lost” cabinetmakers from the Victorian era.  I’ll especially try to target makers whose pieces seem to be anonymously floating (or wrongly attributed) out there in the marketplace under our very noses, but that may not always be part of the criteria.  I may profile a maker whom a pocket of RV readers are familiar with, but the goal will be to expose the broader readership of Rare Victorian to them as well.

The above table was made by Israel Fellows of Salem, Massachusetts.  Israel was born Aug 28, 1814 in Ipswich, Massachussetts and died Mar 07, 1881.  He married Catherine H. Goldsmith June 14, 1838 in Salem and they had five children together.  That’s about all I could glean from the world on Israel Fellows.

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