Nicol Knappen - ©2003 - Wisconsin Pottery Association

The following article appeared in WPA Press, Vol. 18, Fall 2003

Featuring WPA Member — Nicol Knappen

Nicol Knappen is a charter member of the Wisconsin Pottery Association and our current vice president. Here’s Nicol in his own words on how he started collecting pottery.

How I Became Afflicted
Nicol Knappen

In 1980 I moved across the Hudson from a Manhattan loft to a Jersey City duplex. I had the top two floors of a Van Vorst Park brownstone, crammed with furniture and so-called objet d’art.

By the mid-1980s, living in urbanopolis had begun to pale for me. Despite ready access to museums, galleries, and the theatre, I didn’t go that often anymore. Sure, I saw the Monet exhibit—it was “required reading” for any self-respecting city dweller. But I also complained bitterly about the crowds jostling for better views. After you live in New York a while, you begin to add a veneer of cynicism to every experience, no matter how enjoyable.

Longing to live someplace where I could sleep undisturbed by neighbors’ salsa music, I began planning to move back to the Midwest. To do that, though, I realized that I would need to jettison as much stuff as possible to make the move practical. With that end in mind, I asked my good friend Jim Miller to join me setting up a booth at New York’s 26th street flea market. Jim’s Brooklyn house was also packed to the rafters.

We assessed what we had to sell; Jim felt we might not sell enough to pay for the booth. He suggested we go to one of the auctions near his country house in Pennsylvania to buy a few things to supplement our own.

* * *

It was raining at the auction. I opened an umbrella, much to Jim’s embarrassment. Umbrellas are an urban thing, I was told. I looked around—sure enough, no umbrellas. Slightly away from the main action, Amish women sold slices of Shoo-fly pie. I couldn’t resist the quaint name and tried a piece. Flour and sugar and not much else. Another urbanite mistake.

We bought well—enough to fill the back of a borrowed pick-up truck. It was an odd assortment of stuff—things we thought New Yorkers might buy.

And prices were good. We got a set of six chrome and leatherette lunch counter stools—the kind you can swivel around on—for twenty five cents each.

* * *

At that time the Sunday flea market occupied just two parking lots on Sixth Avenue between 26th and 24th streets. On our first Sunday, we didn’t sell much of our old stuff, but the things we’d brought from Pennsylvania did spectacularly well. Though the lunch counter stools lingered till late afternoon, a guy finally came through and bought them for his SoHo loft. And he paid us $200.

It was at that moment that Jim and I questioned our career choices. “I don’t like my job,” said Jim. I was tired of mine too. So for the next few years we alternated our Sundays between buying in the country and selling in New York. We could make a couple thousand bucks on a weekend— not enough to quit our day jobs, but still a nice chunk of change.

* * *

Working the market was grueling. The hours were nine to five, but you had to arrive before six in order to get a good spot. That meant I had to leave New Jersey by three o’clock in the morning to get to Brooklyn by three-thirty or so. I had to help load the truck, which we couldn’t do the day before. Are you kidding? By daybreak there’d be nothing left. We’d finish packing by five, and then head for Manhattan.

By the time we got our space and began unloading, the sharks would circle us with their flashlights. “Got any World’s Fair? Got any games? Got any cuff links?” Etcetera. We unloaded quickly, dreading the search for a parking space on a New York City street.

As we set up the booth all types of people would come by. The nearby dance clubs let out in the early morning, so we had punks, drag queens, and leather boys aplenty. This was the time to sell unusual clothing. Feather boas went fast.

Dealers were not allowed to pack up before five, so it was a long day, often with continuous crowds. If you hadn’t brought food or drink, you’d have to go across the street to the deli; likewise for a john—there were no Porta-Potties. And if it was raining, you stayed. The gate to the chain-link fence around the parking lot remained closed until five o’clock—no exceptions.

At five the lot became a madhouse. A hundred dealers all trying to get their vehicles on the lot, pack up, and get out. It was a logistical nightmare that could last three hours. Then you faced the traffic. There was always a mini-rush hour, with cars creeping back to Brooklyn, Queens, and New Jersey after a Sunday in “the city.” By the time we got back and unloaded the truck it would be about eight in the evening. We’d have dinner and count our money; by eleven I’d be driving back to Jersey, my body vibrating with fatigue.

* * *

During our first year we learned many valuable lessons. For example, if you buy a big, heavy, jelly cupboard and it doesn’t sell, you have to load it up and bring it home. And then you’ll have to bring it back again until you sell it.

We began to lean toward “smalls.” And smalls often included vases and jugs. When we found that they sold well, we began to specialize in them.

As an Arts & Crafts collector, Jim knew pottery well. I knew nothing, but I learned what sold. Matt green or blue went fast. One of the guys in the B52s would come through and buy up all the blue Niloak. The other guy in the band would buy all our Coppertone.

We would scour the malls and markets in Pennsylvania looking for pottery. At that time unmarked pots like Burley & Winter and Zanesville Stoneware were scorned by the Art Pottery crowd and could be had for as little as $5. We liked to take these back to Manhattan and mark them $60. Then we’d sell them for $45 so the buyers could tell their friends what a great deal they got.

To counterbalance our tables full of pottery, we always had one or two big showy items to attract attention. One Sunday we displayed a stage prop electric chair we’d found. When Bernard Goetz (the “Subway Gunman” on trial for attempted murder) came through the market, I picked up a camera and motioned for him to come over and have his picture taken in the electric chair. He laughed, but high-tailed it in the other direction.

The occasional celebrity was mixed in with our more typical customers: the Manhattan yuppie couple, dressed in black, looking bored to tears. Our display of pottery could be a revelation for them. One pot amongst a lot of other stuff gets lost, but a table full opens the eyes—and we were the only ones at the market with that much pottery.

Our couple could imagine how effective a smaller collection might look in their apartment. They’d buy one pot. Two weeks later they’d come back and buy another one to go with it. The next time they’d buy three at once. Then you knew they were hooked. In a matter of weeks they’d be coming up and asking for a fix: “Got any more Mountainside? No? Will you call us if you get any?” I felt like a drug dealer.

I got good at pushing pottery. I discovered that if I could tell a story about a pot— give it a pedigree, so to speak—the pot was easier to sell. I realized that the yuppie couple wanted to be able to justify the pot to their friends, wanted to make it sound important. “This vase was made in Sapulpa, Oklahoma. Imagine!”

I began to read everything about pottery that was in print. Paul Evans’ and Lois Lehner’s books became my bibles: Thus saith the Lehner: that this pot came out of Camden in the year 1932, and it was good.

Like any self-respecting drug dealer, I didn’t buy the stuff myself. I could appreciate a pot, I could evaluate and critique it, but I wasn’t hooked. It wasn’t good business. I could see Jim succumbing all the time—using his flea market money to buy Grueby! It was a dangerous road, I knew.

That all changed for me in a flash.

* * *

Before the market opened, one of us shopped while the other set up. One morning Jim came back with a strange little two-handled vase. The body was mottled cream and tan; the handles were bright orange. I turned it over and read the mark. “Ekeby.”

It was like being struck by lightning. I knew the word well. It occurred in my very favorite novel, The Story of Gostä Berling, which I had come across while a student. Gostä Berlingis a great, sweeping, lyrical novel, set in rural 18th-century Sweden. It has everything, including wolves chasing a sleigh.

The novel is unfamiliar to most Americans, only having been made into a Swedish silent film with a very young Greta Garbo. Ironic for me, because I once sold a pair of gloves to Garbo at the market. I didn’t know it at the time—somebody had to tell me. I never would have guessed that shrunken little old lady was Garbo.

In Gostä Berling, the title character is a priest who’d been defrocked for drunkenness and debauchery. Having lost his parish, Berling goes to live in Ekeby Manor, a home for “the bachelors,” maintained as a charity by a wealthy landowner. This was where all the county misfits ended up. What a perfect name for my big country house, I had thought—if I ever own one.

So here I was, looking at a pot marked with a word I’d filed away in my brain twenty-five years previously. I was stunned. I turned the pot back over and looked at it closely. Suddenly the vase became the most beautiful object I’d every seen. And its texture! It was thrilling!

I looked over at our booth. A shaft of sunlight streamed through two tall buildings to illuminate our pottery. I walked over. Everything was exquisite! I began picking up the vases, ecstatically turning each one in my hand as I admired the form and felt the glaze. I heard myself saying, “We can’t sell this—it’s too nice. Or this one either. Or this one.”

* * *

I had the disease. Chinamania. It’s an English word, coined in the late 19th century out of the necessity to describe this thing that happens to us.

As soon as I became afflicted I became suspicious of anybody who collected a particular kind of pottery—what did they know that I didn’t? Thereafter we never had any matt blue Niloak to sell. It was all at my place.

This kind of thing happened over and over. I’d become crazy for a kind of pottery and use my flea market money to buy every piece I saw. Then I’d get on to something else and buy all of that, forgetting the previous obsession. It was an odd cycle. Once I got something, I’d get bored and begin to look around. It reminded me a little bit of marriage. . . .

Predictably, when I finally did move in 1990, I had much more stuff than when I started. It was going to cost a fortune to move it all. I looked around the apartment and decided to sell a dozen pieces of Sunflower. I had been in love with them, but it was over.

Kari Kenefick, WPA Press Editor