Apologies for the lack of posts recently. There are a number of reasons why I haven’t been able to devote more time to this site. The most important one is that we’re currently in the midst of building our own online vintage shop, which will actually feature quite a bit of California Pottery.

One of the things that I’ve come to realize is that running a collectibles fansite takes an enormous amount of time. And unlike an author who writes a collectible book, there isn’t so much monetary compensation for the hours of work put in to building and maintaining a site like this. Sure, most people (including myself) do it mostly for the love of collecting. But this is the problem - there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do the research and write up the articles.

This is especially true with some of the lesser known potteries of California. I’ve found that the literature can be researched in bigger libraries. For instance, the above issues of Ceramic Industry were really enlightening. We recently made a trip to the LA Public Library and requested several volumes (side note: all of them had extensive water damage which made it nearly impossible to look through). The thing about these industry publications are that there’s no such thing as a table of contents. For instance, if I wanted to try and find out about Moreno Ceramics, I couldn’t just look up all the places that business was mentioned in an index. I’d have to just search through the entire archive of journals 1940-1970, page by page, hoping to come across the name. (I just want to say I give Jack Chipman a lot of credit for the amount of research he had to do to write his books.)

Don’t get me wrong - researching unknown companies is a blast. But I’m not a retired collector yet - I can’t do this all day long. So, what we’ve decided to do is to try and “combine business with pleasure”. We’ll be selling California Pottery through our online store and I’ll be posting here when we find items that may be of interest. Hopefully, I’ll be able to keep the interesting posts about California stuff coming at the same time since it’ll be related, and we’ll continue to get galleries of unknown companies into the main reference. I hope that if you collect a particular type of California pottery, you’ll continue to come here for information, and perhaps you’ll also find something you’re looking for in our store when we launch it.