Oxford Half-Price Day Collector Plates

The Blackwells ran a three-day sale in Oxford last week, and we caught the tail end of it — half-price Friday, which in estate sale terms means the serious collectors have already been through twice and the room is starting to look like a library after a move-out. That was more or less the case here. Whoever the family was, the sale didn't leave many obvious clues about them, and by the time we walked in the better furniture and smalls were long gone.

What was still available in quantity: collector plates. Stacks of them, most still boxed. You can see the shelf loaded with Bradford Exchange and Kaiser Porcelain boxes, several marked "Made in Russia" and carrying the Cyrillic text that shows up on a lot of the Soviet-era decorative porcelain Bradford sourced in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Not the first thing we reach for, but the price was right and some of these closed-edition runs have quieter collector followings than you'd expect.

Up on the top shelf there's a little more personality. A pair of painted metal novelty tigers — articulated, springy, the kind of thing that sat on someone's desk or shelf for decades — and a silverplate footed bowl with a decorative charger underneath it. Off to the right, a set of what appear to be cast-iron or heavy bronze hand bells, the kind used in school or church settings, still showing their original wooden handles. Those stood out in a room that was otherwise pretty well stripped.

None of this is the most glamorous haul we've brought back, but there's something satisfying about the late-day dig — you have to look a little harder, and occasionally that's where the overlooked pieces are waiting. Items from this run will be listed across our shops as we work through them, so check back if any of it sounds like your kind of thing.