CAVEAT EMPTOR – Hood & Co.
Is it genuine? Is it all original? Has it been restored? If in doubt, as always BUYER BEWARE.
Please remember that the rarer a piece the more likely it is to have a scratch or some repair, be it ever so minor.
Why this is so unacceptable or not even tolerated by some I find difficult to understand. As the number of collectors increases and material becomes scarcer, especially mint items, more and more repaired pieces will be offered for sale. After all, how is a beginner to get started? Surely a professionally restored item is better than none at all. A mint specimen (if available) would probably be beyond his/her means anyway.
On the club show scene judges are not permitted to handle exhibits. In general, they are required to do their job outside the barrier, so if a repair is not visible (or known to exist) the exhibit is unlikely to be penalized. And that is how it should be.
But on the other hand, if a repaired (or damaged) item is offered for sale, all faults should be declared.
As I move around the shows, quite often I have seen apparently original paper labels pasted on containers that did not originally carry them. In some cases the host bottles were not even of the correct shape or from the true source.
On one occasion, I came across a previously unrecorded pair of potlids. The first was apparently made for a men’s club, the description thereon of the places the grease could be used is not suitable to be printed through these pages, while the second item from the same source was for wombat grease. Those in the know claimed that on both these lids the original glaze was removed, the new design added and the whole top of the lid resealed. And the effect caused them to look genuine.
Although I was unaware of the above at that time, I was able to detect the “work” with the aid of a black light.
To add either of these lids to one’s collection is O.K. if that is your wish, but to pass them on as a genuine old lid to an unsuspecting purchaser is a different matter.
George Dean