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Antique Precision Measuring Instruments: A Collector's Guide to Spherometers, Watchmaker's Measuring Microscopes and Coverslip Micrometers
By Thomas Guenther◆Guides◆~24 min read A working bench in a late 19th century Swiss watchmaker's atelier, a Berlin optical workshop, or a Vienna laboratory looked very different from a clock shop, a desk or a kitchen. The objects on it were small, precise, and built to measure things the human eye could not see. A spherometer no larger than a hand. A microscope mounted above a calibrated sliding stage. A brass instrument with an enamel dial that did one specific job: measure the thickness of a piece of glass. These... Read more...
How to Identify Antique Straight Pull Corkscrews: A Buyer's Guide to Worms, Handles, Makers and Marks
By Thomas Guenther◆Guides◆~15 min read Antique straight pull corkscrews are the most chronologically deep niche in the corkscrew category. The simplest mechanical form (rotate the worm into the cork, pull the handle straight up) was made continuously from the early 18th century through into the early 20th century, and the family quietly absorbed every important development in corkscrew design along the way. The good news for buyers is that no other corkscrew type rewards careful looking quite so well. The worm alone, properly read, will date a piece to a... Read more...
How to Identify Antique Folding and Pocket Corkscrews: A Buyer's Guide to Types, Makers and Marks
By Thomas Guenther◆Guides◆~14 min read Antique folding and pocket corkscrews are one of the most rewarding niches in collectible barware. The category covers roughly 250 years of design history, from late 18th century all-metal travelling tools to early 20th century French registered multi-tools, and includes some of the most actively collected objects in the field, particularly the German Belle Époque novelty figural pieces. The market is also dense with confusion: replated finishes sold as original, replacement worms presented as period, vague Victorian attributions on pieces that need maker-level cataloguing to... Read more...
How Antique Mechanical Corkscrews Work: A Collector's Guide to Types, Mechanisms and Makers
By Thomas Guenther◆Guides◆~13 min read The mechanical corkscrew is one of the most rewarding niches in antique collecting. Each piece is a working tool, an engineering puzzle and a documentary record of late 19th-century industrial design, often all at once. The market is also dense with confusion: vague Victorian attributions, replacement parts presented as original, polished surfaces sold as "restored" rather than diminished. This guide explains how mechanical corkscrews actually work, walks through the four main mechanism families, and breaks down the named makers most commonly encountered in serious collections,... Read more...
How to Identify Antique Figural Corkscrews: A Buyer's Guide to Makers, Materials and Marks
By Thomas Guenther◆Guides◆~14 min read If you are about to buy a figural corkscrew or a novelty bottle opener, the difference between a genuine period example and a modern reproduction is not always obvious in a photograph. The market is large, attribution is inconsistent and many sellers describe pieces in vague terms. This guide walks through the four signals that, together, allow you to identify a real period figural corkscrew with confidence: material, surface, marks and mechanism. It then breaks down the makers most commonly encountered in serious collections, including... Read more...
A Collector's Guide to African Headrests: Forms, Cultures, and What to Look For
By Thomas Guenther◆Guides◆~15 min read The African headrest is one of the richest and least-understood object categories in ethnographic collecting. Across pastoral and prestige cultures from East to West Africa, communities with no historical contact with each other independently developed wooden head-supporting objects that solved the same set of practical problems and carried the same set of social meanings. The forms are unmistakably different. The function is unmistakably shared. For a collector, a single field of headrests becomes a map of African cultural geography in miniature. This guide covers the... Read more...
West African Cast Brass and Bronze Bracelets: A Collector's Guide
By Thomas Guenther◆Guides◆~18 min read A West African cast brass bracelet is rarely just jewellery. The same object that wraps a wrist may have served as currency in an Atlantic trading post in the 1880s, as a unit of bridewealth across the Niger Delta, as a mark of seniority in an Akan household, and finally as an entry in a 20th-century field collector's notebook. Reading one of these pieces means reading several centuries of West African economic, social and metallurgical history at once. This guide sets out how to do... Read more...
Egon Guenther: Gallerist, Collector & the Amadlozi Legacy
By Esteemed Antiques Guides~12 min read Egon Guenther was not the most famous figure in mid-twentieth-century South African art, but he may have been the most quietly consequential. From a small gallery in Bree Street, Johannesburg, opened in 1957, he placed historical African brass and bronze beside contemporary South African modernism for nearly six decades, and in doing so altered the visual vocabulary of artists like Cecil Skotnes, Sydney Kumalo and Edoardo Villa. The Amadlozi Group, the founding moment of which he curated in his own gallery in October 1963,... Read more...
African Tribal Art: A Collector’s Guide to Metalwork, Headrests & Provenance
Most working collections of African tribal art today are not built around masks and figurative sculpture, even though those are the categories most associated with the field. The bulk of what circulates in the market and in serious specialist collections is cast brass and bronze adornment, currency objects, ceremonial stools, pastoralist headrests, and bead work tied to centuries of Atlantic and trans-Saharan trade. Identifying these objects well is a different skill than reading a Dan or Fang mask, and it is the skill this guide covers. This piece works through... Read more...
Antique Scientific Instruments and Watchmaking Tools: A Collector's Guide
Antique scientific instruments and antique watchmaking tools sit at the intersection of craft, engineering and the history of science. A signed R. & J. Beck Ltd. compound microscope from late Victorian London, a Swiss "Jauge Patent" spherometer for measuring lens curvature, a brass watchmaker's measuring microscope from a Continental European workshop, and a fine coverslip thickness gauge from a late 19th century laboratory are not "vintage tools" in the decorative sense. They are precision objects, built by named workshops or under recognised patent marks, and very often still functionally useful... Read more...
How to Identify Antique Corkscrews: A Collector’s Guide
Identifying an antique corkscrew is less about recognition and more about sequence. Most pieces can be narrowed to a country, a period and often a maker by reading four things in order: the type, the worm, the marks, and the materials. Once that sequence is disciplined, the field opens up, and the apparent variety of forms resolves into a manageable number of recognised patterns. This guide is written around the corkscrews actually in our collection of rare antique and collectible corkscrews, which spans English direct-pull pieces from the 1730s, the... Read more...
How to Identify Authentic Akan Gold Weights: A Collector’s Guide
  Akan gold weights are small cast brass and bronze objects, made by the Akan peoples of present-day Ghana and Côte d'Ivoire to measure gold dust, the principal medium of exchange in the Akan economy from the 15th century until British colonial currency reform in the late 19th century. They are one of the best-documented and most tightly typed object categories in West African art, and a serious collector can read each piece against a clear framework: casting method, surface, mass in grams, typology, subject and provenance. This guide explains... Read more...
How to Identify Antique Venetian Millefiori Trade Bead Necklaces
Most antique trade bead necklaces on the market today fall into a small number of well-defined object categories, and identifying them well is less about instinct and more about sequence. For Venetian millefiori beads in particular, almost any piece can be narrowed to a type, an approximate period and a regional context by reading four things in order: the construction, the cane work, the glass, and the wear. This guide focuses on the categories that actually matter for the kind of pieces you are most likely to handle: antique Venetian... Read more...
African Trade Bead Necklaces: How to Read Venetian Glass and Akan Brass as One Object
Guide · African Tribal Art An antique African trade bead necklace is rarely a single-material object. The strand carries Venetian glass beads made in Murano two centuries ago. The focal pendant, where one is present, is most often a hand-cast Akan brass piece from Ghana — a goldweight, a bell, or a small figurative casting. Where additional beads sit alongside the glass, they may be early 20th-century phenolic resin in a butterscotch tone. Each material has its own production history, its own collector market and its own identification cues. Read... Read more...
How to Identify an Antique African Headrest: A Region-by-Region Buyer's Guide
Learn how to authenticate antique African headrests with regional identification, patina analysis, provenance tips, and buyer guidance.  Read more...
How to read an Antique: A collector's Field Guide
A working field guide for collectors. The same five questions read every antique: mark, construction, period, condition, provenance. The vocabulary changes between categories; the discipline does not. Read more...
The HH Mark: Currency Bracelets from the Hans Himmelheber Collection
The HH Mark: Currency Bracelets from the Hans Himmelheber Collection
Discover the significance of “HH” marked African currency bracelets from the Hans Himmelheber Collection, and why these historic pieces are valued for their provenance and connection to early ethnographic collecting. Read more...
When Currency Became Jewellery: African Manilla Bracelets
When Currency Became Jewellery: African Manilla Bracelets
Introduction Some of the most fascinating works of art began life as practical objects. That is certainly true of African manilla bracelets — forms once used in trade and exchange,... Read more...
Tribal Manilla Currency Bracelets: History, Meaning & Collecting
Tribal Manilla Currency Bracelets: History, Meaning & Collecting
Among the most powerful objects in African material culture are the so-called manilla currency bracelets, bold metal forms that once functioned as money, adornment and symbols of status across West Africa.... Read more...
Where It All Began – The Story Behind an Extraordinary Collection
Where It All Began – The Story Behind an Extraordinary Collection
When we look at the world’s great art collections, each one has a beginning — a spark of curiosity, a passion that grows into a lifetime of discovery. At Esteemed Treasure... Read more...