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New Books for Collectors
—
October 2008
Encyclopedia
of Collectible Children’s Books
by Diane McClure Jones & Rosemary Jones
Reviewed by Robert Reed
(Antique & Collectible News Service)
 |
The newly released Encyclopedia of Children’s Books provides some 800 full-color illustrations and thousands of individual book listings for the collector.
Co-authors Diane McClure Jones and Rosemary Jones have written previous books on the subject of vintage children’s books. This is the most comprehensive offering to date.
The detailed listings from the latest volume provide information on the book’s publisher, date of publications, and description of the volume and current value.
“The first and probably the most important factor in driving up the price of any collectible book is desire,” note the two authors.
“As with all types of collecting, desire can be a fickle thing. What collectors want today may not be what collectors of the next generation want,” they candidly point out in the book’s introduction. “Children’s books, like children’s toys, go through fads. Although it’s hard to imagine a time when Harry Potter will not rule bookshelves, J. K. Rowling has brought her successful series to a close. It may be that another book series will rise to equal or greater prominence in the next decade.”
Besides the initial listings, other chapters explain pricing, first editions and publishers’ history in brief.
In the major listing of authors in alphabetical order, the section begins in Hans Aanud and the 1935 Sidsel Longskirt and Solve Suntrap, Two Children of Norway. It spans all the way to Mr. Rabbit and the Lovely Present illustrated in 1962 by Maurice Sendak and written by Charlotte Zolotow.
Encyclopedia of Collectible Children’s Books by Diane McClure Jones and Rosemary Jones, hardcover, 344 pages, is $29.95 plus shipping from Collector Books, 1-800-626-5420.
Rookwood Pottery
by Denise Rago & Jonathon Clancy
Reviewed by Robert Reed
(Antique & Collectible News Service)
 |
Rookwood pottery is beautiful, and it gets the remarkable coverage it deserves in the latest volume on the subject.
Coverage is simply highly comprehensive in Rockwood Pottery by Denise Rago and Jonathan Clancy. A significant portion of that coverage, of course, is the more than 1,000 high-quality color photographs that fill the book’s pages.
Appropriately this timely book begins in a quote from W.P. Jarvis writing in 1896.
“A single piece of Rookwood is an education in itself,” Jarvis wrote, “and to take a piece in the hand and feel the velvety softness, and look lovingly on the happy blending of painting and glaze, is suggestive of a sympathy — the music of a half-forgotten dream.”
The book includes current values with every dazzling color photograph. Additionally, the section on early wares includes standard glaze, Tiger Eye, Aerial Blue, Iris, Goldstone and others. Further, the section on the New Porcelain Body includes Nacreous, French Red, Butterfat and Lagoon Green.
Providing the coverage from the 1880s to the 1960s are authors Denise Rago and Jonathan Clancy. Rago is the daughter of noted pottery expert David Rago, and an auction director at the Rago Arts and Auction Center in Lambertville, NJ. Clancy is a veteran art pottery researcher, working with both private and museum collections.
Rookwood Pottery by Denise Rago and Jonathon Clancy, softcover, color illustrated, with price and index of decorators, 256 pages, is $24.99 plus shipping from Krause Publications, 1-800-258-0929
©2000-08 Discovery Publications, Inc.