‘Tis the season of giving and eBay has rewarded the patient glassluster with hoardes of sparkling glasses to bid on, and bid on the glasslusters have – with wild abandon. The stats speak for themselves. In the past 28 days, 277 pre-pro glass auctions have come and gone on eBay, 122 auctions closed with no bidders, and the average price of glasses that sold was $49.92.
Maybe it’s cabin/covid fever that’s driving the price increase, but pretty much anything seems to be selling at the moment. By way of example, the B. S. Flersheim glass shown below was first listed for sale by lithiumgrin back in June, 2018. It failed to attract a bidder even after relisting twice with an opening bid of $23.00.
Fast forward to November 27, 2020 and lithiumgrin drags the glass out of the sales stash, blows off the dust, spits on it and polishes it with his shirt cuff and relists it with an opening bid $20.00. Third time lucky, because the auction closes on December 7, 2020, with a final bid price of $131.59!
There are far more glasses to talk about than can be comfortably handled in a single SOTW, so I’ll save them for subsequent posts, but Santa also left a couple of lumps of coal that I’ll touch on here.
Here’s a nice Casper Co. glass – it’s one of the rare Roanoke, VA. variants that fetches >$250 in mint condition. It was listed for sale by josbe-9495 with a $20 opening bid and a $40 bin.
It’s a little faded – okay, a lot faded – but worth $20 as a placeholder , right? Someone clearly though so and snapped it up for the $40 bin price.
Except.
Wait.
Did you look at the other listing pics?
Yikes……
If you’re at all familiar with this site, you’ll know how I feel about “desert glass”. By that, I mean that a glass that has been rendered a ghastly shade of putrid purple by exposing it to UV light, either through prolonged tanning under the sun or, as in this case, through artificial irradiation. I may have had a teensy rant about intentionally purpling glass in this way not so long ago.
This one was listed for sale by aquameds with a $35 bin. The listing did come with a disclaimer, much to the seller’s credit: “This shot glass is considered to be “IRRADIATED” as it got it’s PURPLE COLOR by MECHANICALLY ACCELERATING the “PURPLING PROCESS” through intense ULTRA VIOLET RAYS that would have taken a long time in the same ULTRA VIOLET RAYS of the SUN as opposed to the accelerated machine process. The glass was made with MANGANESE in the GLASS MIXTURE and that’s where the COLOR comes from……………..”
Kellerstrass glasses are easy to come by in nice condition for less than the one shown above, so I was more than a little surprised when the auction closed a few hours later for the asking price of $35. Maybe someone is starting a purple glass collection? We’ll probably never know.