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Home Bartending Collections
One of the great things about your own at home bar is having a place to display some of your prized collections. Sports memorialibilia, trophies and awards immediately come to mind for many.
Once you start mastering a few drinks, most home bar owners will also start to accumulate an assortment of bartending equipment, gadgets and tools. For many, this can turn into a fun hobby and you’ll want to expand your collection to include vintage barware as well.
Vintage Bar Ware Guide
“You can travel back in time. Seven hard shakes over your right shoulder with a vintage cocktail shaker and you’re back with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, back to the splendor of Hollywood movie sets and luxurious hotel lounges with gleaming chrome, back to the world of F. Scott Fitzgerald and The Great Gatsby, and watching William Powell instruct a bartender on the proper way to shake a martini in The Thin Man movie of 1933.
The aesthetic value of cocktail cultural artifacts is receiving a wide recognition, not only as beautiful objects to use and enjoy in one’s home, but as documents and artifacts of history. We hope this book will give a look back at the spirit of a more graceful time in our nation’s history, a time of elegance and glamour.”
~ Vintage Bar Ware: Identification & Value Guide
Although highly collectibe and lots of fun, antique corkscrews and classic beer trays aren’t the focus of this book. The Vintage Bar Ware Indentifcation and Value Guide is all about spirits.
Vintage cocktail shakers, serving trays, glassware and sets (like the Manhattan cocktail set) along with garnish picks, swizzle sticks, recipe books, ice buckets, paper collectibles and other bar ware items are all identified with their approximate values at the time of publication in the guide. Serves as an extensive reference for models and manufacturing information with visual markings and historical data that can be used for identifying and determining current values relative to each other. Several resources should always be consulted before purchasing anything of significant value and current antique pricing guides can be cross referenced along with recent sales for accurate determinations.
If you’re serious about collecting vintage barware and antique bartending tools, you should always be willing to purchase damaged multi-component items or sets with missing pieces at reduced prices. These partials can then be assembled later with others to form complete articles and full sets worth higher valuations which will appreciate over time as investments.
Author Stephen Visakay, acclaimed as one of America’s top 100 collectors by Art & Antiques Magazine, spent over 20 years compiling his personal collection of vintage bar ware which numbers over 1,600 items. The impressive display has been featured in numerous national magazines and also became a traveling exhibition which went on tour to museums across the country.
Along with over 300 color pictures and 2000 values, you’ll find how to tips for caring for and finding vintage bar ware as well as a section of classic cocktail recipes. A great way to pair drinks from the same general time period with your collection when entertaining guests at themed parties.
Get the vintage barware guide for your home bar here
