COLLECTORS CRAVE COOKIE JARS 

 

Written and Photographed by June Grayson 

 

 

 

 

They don't make cookies like they used to: home-made cookies with sugar sparkling on top, thick and cake-like in the center, and crispy brown on the edges. 

They don't make grandmothers like they used to: a soft and round kind of grandmother wearing a big apron, with time to bake the cookies and stir hot coffee into milk for cookie dunking. 

They don't make cookie jars like they used to, either: jars 

crafted of the finest hand-blown art glass or delicate porcelain hand-painted with a profusion of flowers or cut-glass lead crystal that rang like a bell when you tapped it with a spoon. 

Unless you shop the antique stores and sales, you won't find any cookie jars to compare with the Victorian cracker jars or biscuit barrels. And that's a pity. The Victorian china, silver, and glass manufacturers made their jars in every conceivable color, shape and material: silver, glass, pottery, stoneware, earthenware, tin, and porcelain. 

We don't know who made the first cookie jar or when. Almost every culture has had some sweet treat to call its own. Did the Israelites have food storage jars when they fled Egypt for the Sinai desert? How did the American Indians store their maple sugar treats? 

Roman soldiers in Great Britain during the time of Christ carried some kind of cracker in tin containers - a foreshadowing of the wonderful English biscuit tin era between 1868 and 1939 when over 40,000 different tins were produced in England alone. 

Please see the detailed book with gorgeous color photography called "British Biscuit Tins - 1868-1939 - An Aspect of Decorative Packaging" by M. J. Franklin. 

The English probably started it all. They had to have something to eat with the exotic new beverages - the coffees and teas - brought from the Orient by the clipper ships of the East India Company between 1600 and 1874. The cracker jars became popular in England during the Nineteenth century when serving tea had become a national tradition. A family displayed its prettiest biscuit jar with the silver tea service on the dining room sideboard and reserved it for company. The plainer jars were for every day use in the kitchen. Surprisingly, it was the American silver manufacturers who popularized biscuit jars in the United States and advertised them in their silver trade catalogs. Silver manufacturers made the silver-plated rims, lids, and handles. They imported decorative glass jars from France and England until American glass and pottery makers took over. You can find the advertisements in the old trade catalogs preserved in historical museums and reproduced in reference books about antiques. 

Manufacturers also produced humidors, pickle jars, and ginger jars just as opulently designed as the biscuit jars. Sometimes a creamer and sugar bowl were made to match the biscuit jar. 

Unfortunately, there are no reference books on Victorian cracker jars. You will find cracker jars listed under almost every manufacturer of glass, porcelain, and pottery in the yearly antique price guides. Books about English and American art glass describe and picture priceless museum-quality cracker jars. Specialty reference books - for example, Cohen's book on Wavecrest Glass, Gaston's books on R. S. Prussia, and Heacock's books on Fenton Glass - picture many examples of cracker jars. 

You might think it would be impossible to mistake anything else for a cookie jar, but I managed to do it several times. Manufacturers sometimes made the same body for both cracker jars and humidors. The final use was determined by the lid used on the jar. The humidor lid usually has a place where a sponge can be inserted to hold water to keep the tobacco fresh and moist. Some china makers produced sugar jars for restaurant or railroad train use that were oversize; the opening of the sugar jar is smaller than that for a cracker jar. The Sears Roebuck Catalog of 1908 advertised their squatty covered jars as suitable for use as either a covered vegetable dish or a cracker jar. And in the very beginning of my collecting I bought a straight-sided milk glass covered jar that I learned later was a storage jar for a Victorian gentleman's celluloid collars.  

Perhaps you will be lucky enough to find some examples of Carnival glass cracker jars. Be sure you don't pay top price for a pattern that has been reproduced. I thought I was lucky to find a Hobstar marigold cracker jar by Imperial priced at $85.00 

and pictured on page 102 of "Carnival Glass" by Bill Edwards. Later I discovered on page 98 of "Confusing Collectibles" by Hammond that Imperial has reproduced this pattern. Now I have another marigold Hobstar jar for which I paid $15.00. I can't tell the difference. I still think they are beautiful. Maybe some day I will meet a carnival glass expert who can tell me if both of them are old, which is what I would like to believe. More likely they are both the later reproductions and I paid too much for the first one. 

Depression glass companies produced thousands of cracker jars. Few have survived and some of the patterns have been reproduced, such as the clear Sandwich pattern glass jar. 

American pottery manufacturers have produced thousands of patterns of the figural pottery cookie jars since the 1930s and even up to the present time. The nicest thing about this area of cookie jar collecting is that documentation is so complete. 

"Cookie Jars" by Westfall has been out for several years with prices updated in 1989. A new Encyclopedia of Cookie Jars, by 

Joyce and Fred Roerig, listing 2,500 figural cookie jars with over a thousand jars pictured in full color, should be available in late 1990. Companies still produce cookie jars. Almost every gift, holiday, and museum catalog will offer at least one or two samples. I buy a few new jars every year, the ones I think my grandchildren will love when they grow up, such as Big Bird, a Dinosaur, and the Pillsbury Boy Chef.

Perhaps the most famous contemporary cookie jar collector was the late Andy Warhol. He called cookie jars "pieces of time." And so they are. Thousands of them and all adding up to an intriguing history of an entire age. No one believed Warhol when he said he was putting his money in cookie jars. At his estate sale in 1988, a pair of his jars sold for $23,100.  

It is not likely that any of my jars, or your jars, will appreciate as much as the Warhol jars. But our appetite for sweets of every kind - and the jars we keep them in - may well remain insatiable.  

 

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