Apologies in advance, but the next couple posts are probably going to feature blurry cameraphone photos of California Pottery. The reason is that I’ve got a large backload of these photos from the thrift stores. I’ve really started to cut back on what I buy, but I still like to take photos for the website when possible to document the types of ceramics I still see around.

Often, I’ll only buy a piece if I don’t yet own an example of the ceramics produced by that company. I used to collect Foreign coins in the 1980s, and I was very much a “one of each country” type of coin collector, as opposed to focusing on a single country. Of course, this type of collecting only works when there are a large number of different categories where you can collect one example for each. But this definitely isn’t a problem with Calif pottery companies! I would say there must’ve been over a thousand different companies.

The example above is from Frazier. I’ve seen this “Briar” style of theirs previously in auctions. These are dishes that feature hand-applied sticks and twigs around the edges. There were two dishes, this larger one and another smaller one. I actually might’ve picked them up, but they had too many chips. The backstamp is shown below.