FOHBC Show, Reno - NV, 2012

Sunday was predictably slow but a good time to chat with sellers whose names I knew from eBay deals but had never met in person.

I'm not sure what time the show was supposed to close, but many attendees started packing up soon after lunch and I missed the opportunity to photograph most of the displays before they were disassembled. The one that interested me was still intact, however. Entitled "Swirls, Whirls, Twists & Twirls" (left), it featured various pieces of glass with steaks of color in them. The exhibit was put together by Dwayne Anthony, who explained that early glass often contained impurities and foreign objects that made their way into the finished piece and thereby discolored them.

For example, the insulator at left above contains a nail, whereas the one at right contains a bottle cap. These pieces of metal are presumed to have found their way into the cullet, which often comprised pieces of recycled bottles and window pane, and then became incorporated into finished object.

Can't say I've ever seen a nail in a shot glass - if anyone has a glass with something interesting molded into its base, I'd love to see it!

Here's another fun display, except this one was not part of the show! The casino floors were eerily quiet for most of the time I was there. At one end of the casino floor was a wall of glass down which water flowed. When the brightly-light slot machines were photographed through this pane, it distorted the image in an artistically satisfying way (right)!

I was so engrossed in the photo shoot that I had failed to notice a couple entering the casino from the left. Having seen my camera, the woman pulled her jacket up over her head so that I would not been able to catch her face on film - ooops. Must be a story there somewhere!

I wanted to spend a couple of hours in the Reno public library before it closed to research a couple of a dealers who had produced shot glasses, so I bade my farewells. Then I remembered that Paul Van Vactor had brought three shot glasses he'd recently added to his own Kentucky collection along to the show for me to lust at and photograph for the database. The best of the three was a "Dant Whiskey" - the only other time I've seen this glass was twenty years ago during a visit to the whiskey museum in Bardstown, KY.

Now that's a rare and valuable find!

The show ended on Sunday, but my I planned on staying an additional day so that I might have time to see what some of our West-coast colleagues have in their display cases. You can read about Bob Mraz' collection (the largest pre-pro collection I've seen to date) in a separate report, but I also dropped in briefly on Steve Abbott. You can see some of the pieces in his fine collection in the next and final page of this show report.

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