By Maribeth Keane and George Spencer — Tony Hyman has been collecting cigar boxes since he was 12. The National Cigar Museum has been open for 10 to 12 years in various formats on the Internet, but I completely redesigned the site about four years ago. In the early days, I’d send information to industry executives, and they’d post it, so they had control of the site. But when iWeb came out for the Mac, it made it so easy to build and maintain a site that I took it back from them, because they weren’t posting enough new...

The Disappearing Art of Porcelain Signs

By Dave Margulius — I liked to collect things even as a child. Things that didn’t cost anything, like different colors of stones. There was something about the advertising that I liked, so in the mid-1970s, I started to pick up porcelain signs. I got heavier and heavier into that, and by the 1980s, I had a fairly substantial collection. As a result of collecting telephone signs, I would run into other advertising specialists, and I started seeing the kind of stuff that other people were buying and looking...

Signs, Tins, and Other Advertising Antiques

By Maribeth Keane — How did I get started collecting advertising antiques? My dad was a lecturer and tutor in graphics and art from the 1960s onwards, and was into vintage automobiles and advertising, like vintage signs, pumps, and globes. So I spent the large portion of my childhood going to auto swap meets and antiques fairs, I think it all started from there. The first thing I collected was old bottles. In one of the books I read as a child, there was an aqua green bottle and I thought it was great and I...