Antique Trader's Salt and Pepper Shaker Price Guide

I found most of the pottery and ceramic shakers fun, whimsical and something that definitely would be fun to have as a collection. From a collector standpoint, this book is well organized into two main categories, Shakers by Form and Shakers by Maker, making it quick and easy to go right to the page that might have the shaker that had the information you needed. Most of the pottery and ceramic shakers were colorful, and the pictures show the colors well.

I have only a limited number of vintage salt and pepper shakers, so approached this book with interest to see if I would want to expand my collection of Salt and Pepper shakers.

Fakes and reproductions are a serious problem in the collectibles world and there is a three-page article on this topic by Mark Chervenka, which includes pictures and good explanations.

I have a pair of vintage wooden Salt and Pepper shakers, and one disappointment was that there were no wooden shakers included in this book. Another disappointment was that many of the major pottery companies, such as Hull, included salt shakers as “go withs” to match a major piece such as a cookie jar. None of these seemed to be shown in this book. The front cover shows two Hawaiian pineapple shakers. This lead me to think that possibly companies like Treasure Craft, who made so many collectible shakers, would have some of their Hawaiian shakers in this book, but I found no shakers from Treasure Craft.

All of the pictures are shown on a light gray background, which works for the colorful pottery pieces, but many of the clear glass or crystal pieces shot on this background literally fade out.

The forward of this book indicated that all but a few of the shakers in this book came from a single collection from two owners. There is no problem with that unless the collectors do not have the full scope of shakers that are available, such as the wooden variety. This may mislead a new collector to think that what they collect is the only representation of these collectibles.

I would recommend this book to a collector with the comment that they should be aware there were many more types of shakers and more companies that made some very fun and interesting pieces that would be worth collecting, and this was just a representation of the taste of two private collectors.