Figural Cookie Jars Still Hold Delicious Delights

QUESTION: I’ve come across two old cookie jars when cleaning out my parents home and wondered if they are worth anything. Are they collectible?

ANSWER: Cookie jars don't have to be old to have substantial value since collectors determine a jar’s value  by design, rarity and condition more than its age. Though the British used covered jars of cut glass and silver made especially to hold shortbread biscuits during the 19th Century, thus the name “biscuit jar,” it was the American pottery jar that first caught the eye of collectors.

The first American cookie jars, either glass or pottery, gained popularity at the start of the Great Depression in 1929. Shaped like covered glass cylinders or pots with screw-on lids, these early cookie containers were more utilitarian than decorative although they were often painted with floral or leaf decorations.
                                   
The Brush Pottery Company of Zanesville, Ohio, produced the first ceramic cookie jar, in green and with "Cookies" painted on the front. The company marked their jars with “Brush USA.”
By the mid-1930s, stoneware became the predominant material for American cookie jars.

As the end of the 1930s decade dawned, most manufacturers followed the move to molded pottery, and designers became more innovative as they began to produce cookie jars in figural shapes resembling fruits, vegetables, animals, and other whimsical characters such as Goldilocks.

The golden age of American cookie jars got underway in 1940 and lasted until 1970, with several manufacturers rising to prominence, including the Red Wing, McCoy, Brush,. Hull, Regal China, Metlox, Shawnee, and Robinson-Ransbottom companies. Many of these companies located in the clay-rich Ohio River Valley. By the mid-1940s, cartoons and comics inspired many makers to reproduce the popular characters of the day–Superman, Winnie the Pooh, Dumbo, Mickey Mouse, and Woody Woodpecker, to name a few.

Collectors love McCoy cookie jars. The company, based in Roseville, Ohio, produced cookie jars from about 1939 until 1987. Their first jar–the “Mammy” cookie jar–is today one of the most valuable.

American Bisque of Williamstown, West Virginia is recognized as another top U. S. manufacturer, beginning in the mid-1930s. They’re particularly well known for the cartoon characters which they translated into cookie jars, and they marked them “U.S.A.” on the bottom.

Other well respected U.S. manufacturers are known for particular cookie jars or series, such as Metlox of California, maker of the highly sought after Little Red Riding Hood jar, and the Abingdon Pottery of Illinois, maker of the Mother Goose jar series.

Today, with the advent of Zip-Loc packaging and plastic, air-tight containers, the cookie jar, for the most part, has gone the way of the horse and buggy and the Ford Edzel. But the nostalgia lives in on the cookie jar collections of hundreds of admirers who long for those good old days and the delicious homemade cookies found inside these jars.

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The Real McCoy

QUESTION: I love to collect cookie jars. I don’t have too many unusual ones in my collection, so you can imagine my joy when I came across this Mission Apollo cookie jar, made by the McCoy Pottery Company.  It’s one of the most unique ones I’ve seen. What can you tell me about this cookie jar and about the company that made it?

ANSWER: Cookie jars are a very popular collectible and have been since the 1960s when figural cookie jars reached their peak. You found one of the more unusual ones because not only is it one of McCoy’s best, it also commemorates the Apollo mission to the Moon in 1969. But the McCoy company in all its forms has been around for a very long time.

In 1848 William Nelson McCoy started a modest pottery business in Putnam, Ohio, producing simple, sturdy, utilitarian stoneware items for both local consumers and folks located further downriver from the plant. This began a four-generations family potting venture that would continue for over 40 years. As decades passed, the factory site shifted from Putnam to Roseville, Ohio, and the product lines evolved from utilitarian stoneware to useful earthenware table and artware. At its height in the 1950s, the Nelson McCoy Pottery Company employed 500 people whose combined efforts produced 500,000 pieces every month. The design department created up 50 new designs every year. Then potters produced them in three or more glaze colors.

Early on, the company produced mostly stoneware,  decorated with a variety of glazes. Glaze decoration on stoneware ranged from solid colors to blended and matt glazes. Common matt glazes included a brown and green combination, a dark green, and a white glaze color.

In 1886, J.W. McCoy, the son of W.N. McCoy, opened the McCoy Pottery Company, which over the next 12 years would merge with another company and sold to yet another.

J. W. McCoy, assisted his son, William Nelson McCoy, to form the Nelson McCoy Sanitary Stoneware Company on a site north of Roseville, Ohio, on April 25, 1910. The company employed a combination of local and English immigrant potters. Among the company's early wares were butter crocks, churns, jars, jugs, meat tubs, mixing bowls and storage containers. Other practical early products included foot warmers  and poultry fountains. Workers labeled early churns, jars and jugs on the side with the company's stenciled “M,” double shield and clover mark. By the 1920s, the company began putting its mark on the bottom of its pieces.


In 1926, the firm expanded its range of wares, producing earthenware specialties and artware for the first time. Among the new wares, glinting with the bright glazes popular during the period, were cuspidors, umbrella stands and jardinieres with pedestals, for which McCoy became widely known.

The 1930's brought a lot of changes at the company, including a change in name to "The Nelson McCoy Pottery Company." They also shed their old image of the producer of crocks and jugs and ushered in the new techniques, designs and products. In 1934, Nelson McCoy hired an English designer named Sidney Cope, whose designs were very distinctive.


By the end of the 1930s, the demand for jardinieres and large vases was decreasing. The Nelson McCoy Pottery Company turned its attention to the production of artwares, along with novelties like figural cookie jars, an idea that came from Duncan Curtiss, from the firm’s New York sales department. Curtisss felt that cookie jars shaped in the forms of fruit, flowers and characterizations would be well received by the public. And he was right.

By 1967, McCoy Pottery had begun to have financial problems because it couldn’t compete on the international import market. The Mount Clemens Pottery Company bought the company, and in 1974 , they sold it to the Lancaster Colony Corporation. In 1990 the McCoy Pottery ceased operation after a number of declining years of sales and profit. Today the company is best remembered for it's many collectible cookie jar.


Though McCoy marked most of their cookie jars with an incised “McCoy” on the bottom, there  are some exceptions. Over the years they used a variety of styles for their logo and a jar can often be dated by knowing which styles where used during each era. But be careful, as the McCoy mark is one of the most copied marks out there. Just because a jar or seller says it’s a "real McCoy" doesn't mean it is. Caution is always advised when it comes to the higher priced cookie jars.

Because of the prolific production of the company, collectors of McCoy pottery will be able to find pieces in a variety of designs and colors for a long time. This Mission Apollo or “Astronauts” cookie jar, produced in 1970, is one of the harder ones to find.

For more information on collecting cookie jars, read “Cookie Jars—Good as Gold” in The Antiques Almanac.

Biscuit Tins Never Get Stale

QUESTION: I’ve inherited my mother’s collection of English biscuit tins. She had been collecting them since she made a trip to England at the end of the 1960s. Her collection includes over four dozen tins, some are fancier than others. I love these old tins and want to continue collecting them. When my mother began collecting, she had to buy them during several trips to England. But today, I figure I can purchase them online. Can you tell me more about their history? Also, do you think I can add to her collection?

ANSWER: Biscuit tins are a fascinating part of British cultural history. They’re even tied to the monarchy. And while today manufacturers don’t make them as fancy as some of the ones from the early part of the 20th century, they’re still very popular with collectors. The peak of biscuit tin production ran from the late 1890s to the 1930s. Though originally meant to hold biscuits—the British term for “cookies”—they eventually became collectible works of art in themselves.

The history of the biscuit tin began with the passing of the Licensed Grocer’s Act of 1861 which allowed groceries to be individually packaged and sold. This coincided with the removal of the duty on paper for printed labels, so printing directly on to tinplate became common.

The bakery of Huntley & Palmers pioneered the use of metal tins. In 1832, Joseph Huntley’s son, who founded Huntley, Boorne & Stevens in an ironmongers opposite the bakery, began handcrafting large square seven- to ten-pound tins with glass inset tops for retailers. Grocery store clerks would measure out the amount of biscuits from these tins and place them in a paper bag for the customer. However, they didn’t stay fresh for very long once the customer returned home.

So Joseph Huntley began creating smaller tins without the glass insets so that customers could purchase their biscuits in a container to keep them fresh which they could take home. The tins were of such excellent quality that people began to reuse them to hold other things. The tins needed decoration but the only way to do that at the time was to paint them by hand.

In the early 1860s, all that changed with the invention of direct tin printing. This was a complicated and time-consuming technique. Then along came London printer Benjamin George George (That isn’t a typo.), who invented the lithographic transfer method.

In 1868, Huntley & Palmers commissioned the first lithographically decorated tin using George’s method from the London firm of De La Rue. Buckingham Palace granted the bakery permission to supply biscuits to the Royal Family. In order to create an appropriate design befitting the Royal Family, they hired Victorian designer Owen Jones to create a pattern which they could use on the biscuit tins using George’s new method. The result was a richly decorated oblong tin with the Royal Coat of Arms on the lid, now known to collectors as the “Ben George tin.” 

But George’s direct lithographic process, which involved laying an inked stone directly on to a sheet of tin, made it difficult to line up the colors. The breakthrough in decorative tin plate production was the invention of the offset lithographic process in 1877, which consists of bringing a sheet of rubber into contact with the decorated stone, and then setting-off the impression so obtained upon the metal surface. With this method, printers could use any number of colors, position them correctly, and apply the design to an uneven surface if necessary. Thus the elaborately embossed, colorful designs that became a hallmark of late Victorian biscuit tins became technically possible.

It became possible to make tins in almost any shape imaginable. Biscuit lovers bought baskets, windmills, cars, locomotives, globes, tables, and even mailboxes as much for their decorative qualities as their contents. Between 1868 and the outbreak of World War II, Huntley & Palmers issued around 400 tin designs with a lots of variations.

The most exotic designs appeared in the early years of the 20th century, just prior to the First World War. In the 1920s and 1930s, costs had risen substantially and the design of biscuit tins tended to be more conservative, with the exception of those targeted at the Christmas market and intended to appeal to children.

One of the most unique and most popular of biscuit tin designs resembled a stack of books held together with a belt. This 1901 Huntley & Palmers tin, known as “Literature,” was so realistically done that the covers and spines of the books appear to have been deeply tooled and inked and the page edges convincingly marbled and swirled in a rainbow of colors.

Most popular, however, were the tins shaped like vehicles. It was no coincidence that car, train, airplane, and boat tins bore a striking resemblance to similar toys sold at British department and toy stores since toy companies often crafted them from the same molds they used for their products. An example is Carr & Co's double-decker bus tin, made especially for them by Chad Valley and virtually identical to Chad Valley's toy bus except for the internal clockwork mechanism and different advertising.

But Huntley and Palmers were by no means the only company that made unusual biscuit tins. Some of the other famous biscuit tin sellers were Carr & Company., William Crawford & Sons, MacFarlane, Land & Company., and Peek, Frean, and Company. 

During the Second World War, all production on biscuit tins stopped so that factories and materials could be used for the war effort. When the war ended in 1945, production resumed but the tins weren’t as popular as before the war.

Peek, Frean, and Company, McVitie’s, and Jacob’s all became household names but for collectors Huntley & Palmers stands out. Collectors are particularly attracted to the decorative novelty tins. Condition is of prime importance, perhaps even more so with biscuit tins since they rust easily. Many also become worn or dented, giving the novice collector an opportunity to acquire interesting examples relatively cheaply.

Today, biscuit tins range in price from $10 to $200 online. However, the prices of those in British antiques shops are climbing into the stratosphere. This is due mostly to the antiques tourist trade. The most expensive tin sold at auction for over $20,000.