Tuesday, August 14, 2012

SYMPOSIUM UPDATE

With just five weeks to go before the Symposium, registrations are being received regularly. At this point, we are about 50% of the way to our record attendance number. Registration for the Symposium can be made on the club web site (www.cardersteubenclub.org) by clicking on the “Registration” button on the left hand side of the home page and following the instructions. Payment can be made from your PayPal account, you may use a credit card, or you may print a completed registration sheet and mail a check.

More importantly, it’s time to make your hotel reservations if you haven’t already done so. Our discounted room rates and reserved rooms disappear after August 29 at the Radisson (607-962-5000) and after September 6 at the Comfort Inn (607-962-1515). Fall is a busy time in Corning with the leaf peepers and the tours and hotel rooms will become increasingly more difficult to find and expensive.

Michael Krumme of Los Angeles followed Jo An Godawa’s suggestion about doing eBay searches and reports.

Hello,

Regarding GG#1539: I decided to take Jo Ann Godawa’s challenge, and run the suggested search of closed auctions for “Steuben” on eBay. Now, I’m no eBay dummy — I’m pretty good at creating and using saved searches to locate items, as well as to do price research, and to try to gauge how often a particular item or type of item may come up for sale. However, the results of this simple search surprised me in several ways.

First, while I didn’t look at the dates of all of the auctions, or sort them chronologically, I was surprised to hear that it would pick up auctions going back as far as 2009. I thought eBay deleted auctions after a certain time period. Perhaps that only happens for auctions where the photos are stored on eBay servers, and auctions with other photo hosting could stay up longer?

Secondly, it was interesting to see what items sold, and which items were offered again and again with no takers — sometimes at always the same opening bid, other times at an opening bid that had been reduced (sometimes reduced several times.)

Thirdly, I must say, I was surprised at the prices that certain “modern” Steuben items garnered — and these were not always pieces designed by Waugh and other Steuben superstars, either.

Fourth, I saw a number of items that were dubiously attributed to Steuben. I was particularly pained to see that someone had purchased a “stick” vase that was not Steuben in light blue jade, but rather, a Cambridge Glass Company stick vase in their Azurite color. I should know — the first time I purchased a black “Cambridge stick vase” for my collection of black glass, I later learned that what I had was actually Steuben! The Steuben vases have a wafer near the bottom; the Cambridge ones have no wafer at all, just plain, like a test tube.

Fifth, and most alarming: I saw many items which had sold VERY recently, that did NOT come up in my daily saved search for Steuben. I had noticed that almost on a daily basis, many of the same Carder Steuben items were coming up in my search, being offered again and again and again. I wonder if this is a case of the seller of these items having a high eBay placement ranking based on his or her sales, hence these items made it into the search results? The lesson for me is that my Steuben search is one that I will need to expand every day. You can do this by clicking on the “view all items” link at the bottom of the daily email containing your “Steuben” search results.

THANK YOU, Jo Ann, for your suggestion. This exercise opened my eyes in many ways.

Michael

www.cardersteubenclub.org

Any opinions expressed by participants to the Gazette e-mail newsletters are the opinions of the authors and are not endorsed by or the opinions of the Carder Steuben Club.

2012 Carder Steuben Club annual Symposium will be held at The Corning Museum of Glass in Corning, NY from September 20-22, 2012.