By Maribeth Keane and Brad Quinn — In 2010, we spoke with Seattle-based artist Benjamin Moore (1952-2021) about the origins of the American Studio Art Glass Movement and how it benefited from the combination of traditional European techniques and an American attitude of collaboration and experimentation. : Marvin Lipofsky introduced me to glass while I was getting a bachelor’s degree in ceramics at the California College of Arts in Oakland, California. One day I saw a poster there for the Pilchuck Glass School,...

Agates, Corkscrews, and Onionskins: Fun with Antique Marbles

By Maribeth Keane and Jessica Lewis, Collectors Weekly Staff (Copyright 2009) — Like most kids growing up in the late ’60s, early ’70s, I played with marbles. Of course I grew out of it, but I carried those good memories with me. Skip forward some years, and I was working in my previous profession as an archaeologist. Most of the sites that we investigated were pre-Columbian, mostly here in Florida. When we started to work on one site in downtown Jacksonville where I live, I began finding a lot of marbles. This was a part of town that’s sort of a slum now but was an...

Antique Marbles of Stone, Pottery and Glass

By Dr. Henry D. Watson — There is amusement for children of nearly all ages in such elemental manifestations as quick motions, bright colors, symmetry of form, smoothness and clashing of sounds. All these are supplied by marbles and it is quite natural, therefore, that they should have become almost universally adopted as one of the playthings of childhood. We must not lose sight of the undeniable fact that the latter runs right on through youth, adolescence and into full maturity. Consequently we might...

Marbles Among the Earliest Games

By Dr. Henry W. Watson — If we attempt to trace marbles back to the time in history when first they were devised and employed by people for amusement and games we shall be astonished at their great antiquity. Two thousand years ago they were recorded in the literature of the Greeks and Romans and they have been found in excavations dating back at least fifty centuries. Like other devices made and used by man at this early period, these marbles were made of stone and bore the crudeness of workmanship found in other...

Loetz Glass Collector Eddy Scheepers on the Pride of Bohemia

By Maribeth Keane — Loetz was a Bohemian company. It was a factory; and the region’s biggest and best glass manufacturer. There were other contemporaries like Kralik, Rindskopf, and Pallme-Konig that produced glass in the same style, made almost in the same way, but not always with the same quality. The glass is covered with vapors of metals, like silver, for instance. Most Loetz glass was not free-blown like most people think; ninety-five percent was blown in molds. Some people think some of the glasses...

Reyne Haines Spills on Tiffany, Chihuly, and Loetz

By Dave Margulius — I started becoming interested in art glass when I moved from Texas to New York, and wanted to decorate my apartment with New York-type things, things I had never seen in Houston. I grew up in Texas, which is a relatively new state. While there’s a lot of money in Texas, we didn’t have a Tiffany’s, we didn’t have a Marshall Field’s, or companies that sold Baccarat or Lalique or Tiffany or Steuben or any of the bigger makers. Nobody in my family really collected anything, and I wouldn’t say...