Customer Reviews

Hull Pottery: Decades of Design (Schiffer Book for Collectors)

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I am an amateur collector, and I reviewed more than a dozen books on Hull Pottery at several book stores (then, of course, I purchased it from Amazon). This one was by far the best of the lot. Best photos. Best variety of items. Best organization. If there is a better book out there on Hull Pottery, I sure would love to know about it, because I haven't ever seen one. Highly recommended to anyone interested in Hull pottery.

This Hull reference is thorough, but certainly not definitive. Synder's photos are vastly superior to those in Brenda Robert's The Collector's Encyclopedia of Hull Pottery. Color quality is better and shows the subtle variations found in the same lines of Hull art pottery making accurate identification much easier for the novice. Prices are also included in the cutlines with the pictures eliminating the need to flip back and forth between the photos and a price list somewhere else in the book. All in all I would recommend this book to any serious Hull collector.

I should have read the editorial review more closely. It means it when it says this is a sweeping survey. Not even close to being a helpful book for buying Hull. I bought it hoping it would be of help when looking through ebay listings. So far, I am batting less than 50% at finding items in this book. Patterns are not complete listings, only 'surveys' as the editorial review says. Patterns are not even always grouped together in the same pages of the book, either. And there is no kind of listing by Hull ID number to be able to find items quickly. Even when they are, pictures show many items in one picture and the description is sometimes confusing as to which piece is what. Labeled pictures of collections are sometimes shown, but not priced, and some of the items show up no where else in the book. I am very dissapointed. On the positive side, the pictures are great, and as promised it shows a wide variety of the types of items Hull made. Prices are right next to each picture, so you don't have to do the annoying 'flip to the back' unless you are doing it to try to find your item in the idex because it isn't with the rest of the pattern on its page! Overall, a nice book to look at and read, but if you are planning on using this for identification and pricing, get something different.