More April 2006 Hotlines

Four years ago we wrote that pottery marked “West Germany” is “still low-priced” (“On the Road,” Kovels, March 2002). Now West German pottery is attracting more collectors and prices are starting to rise. The big New York Triple Pier show had several dealers with shelves of pottery marked “West Germany,” indicating it was made between 1949 and 1990.

George Washington sat here. A carved mahogany Chippendale chair from Washington’s Revolutionary War headquarters in Cambridge, Massachusetts, just sold for $51,920 at a Sloans & Kenyon auction in Chevy Chase, Maryland. And Washington would be happy to learn that his portrait by Charles Willson Peale auctioned at Christie’s New York for a record $21.3 million, the highest price ever paid for an American portrait.

Hot collectibles, according to Metropolitan Home, a magazine that emphasizes 20th-century decorating: Pigeon Forge pottery, contemporary fabrics from yardage to scarves, 1970s ceramic-face Howard Miller clocks, Thayer Coggin furniture designed by Milo Baughman, 1960s Greenwich Flint-Craft glass designed by Tom Connally for the Indiana Glass Company, and silver by Henning Koppel, a Danish designer who worked for Georg Jensen.

The Prince of Wales and Camilla Parker Bowles were married on April 9, 2005. They postponed their wedding by one day so Prince Charles could attend Pope John Paul II’s funeral. Royal Crown Derby’s factory samples of royal wedding souvenirs with the original April 8 date are being auctioned only at charity events. So far, almost $9,000 has been raised.

The original art for the February 17, 1952, Sunday Peanuts comic strip brought $39,390 at a Hake’s auction.