Eastern National Antiques Show, Carlisle, PA, May 5-6

The truck is all loaded up with boxes again for the Eastern National Antiques Show in Carlisle. This is a twice-a-year show with something like sixty years of continuity: one of the oldest and best glass shows in the country, though you can find a few other things there, too: some jewelry, for example, and other things. 

Heisey 4-light candelabrum

But most people bring their glass to sell, and many buyers come for the glass. Since glass is in my blood, I have always dealt a bit in glass, though my real love these days is books, of course (more on that, next week). 

All my newest acquisitions in glass, pretty much, were already boxed up and priced before I got around to working up this blog post: all I had left was the crystal candelabra shown at the left.

This piece was probably made some time before World War II, possibly even in the first quarter of the twentieth century: it's a bit hard to date precisely, and similar pieces (to hold two or three candles) were certainly made into the 1950s. 

But before the war, and again after the war, the dangling prisms that were intended to catch the candlelight and reflect it around on candelabra like this were produced by the millions in Bohemia, then imported and re-sold by American manufacturers like A H Heisey & Co., who made this candelabrum. For a short time during the war, Heisey tried to make a pressed substitute, when the German/Czech/Bohemian sources were unavailable, but there's no substitute for cut and polished glass.

More recently, here in Morgantown, we were out of power for six or eight hours on Monday night: too bad I didn't have any candles to put in this, or I'd have had no problem reading all evening. 

It could've been an evening of unexpected elegance. But we had no candles, alas.