The weights were clearly identified as fake by Paul Ysart.
Read the 1989 account here
http://ysartglass.com/Ysartnews/YsartnewsSpecial.htmThere was not one maker, it is high time that was clear. The first batch was made at two locations, one a glassworks, and the very first batch produced were near to perfection. The makers who continued when production needed to be stepped up did not have the same skills as the first maker. To be fair, the person who made the signature cane used throughout the Type 1 fake did give a clear indication. Only last year I got a new first hand account of the people involved.
If you can track them down a Les Spendly and Dennis Gould were the ones with detailed evidence of both stages of making of Type 1. I have not been able to locate either recently.
The whole episode was organised by a Scottish Dealer who addressed a wide variety of glass faking and misrepresentation.
There is little point in naming names most of the makers involved have good careers and respect and would be unlikely to produce Type 3. This was probably the first large scale faking of paperweights and there is every likelihood of it happening to the weights of other makers. Often the existence of a fake gets forgotten in time. The web publication of the PY fake weights has kept the knowledge alive.
Long forgotten is that at the same time a quantity of Jay weights were also faked and can be found with canes matching those in the fake PY weights.
As to value - these are mostly well made paperweights with all the added charm of the stories around them they do make a good addition to a Scottish weight collection. But there were some absolute disasters amongst them.
The first batch was tested on me, then an Ysart glass dealer in London's Portobello. At that time I had only found unsigned examples and leapt at the opportunity to buy (Was that me Daveweight?) I paid a lot for them and sold most quickly at a ten pound mark-up. I then bought a second batch and this batch got me worried as the seller said his source had hundreds and this second batch were clearly sloppier. After talking to collectors I contacted the Cambridge Paperweight Circle, Dennis had also been offered a large batch directly by the dealer mentioned above. Alarm bells, after checking out the story that they came from a storeroom at Caithness in Wick - I asked Colin Terris who denied this saying that Paul left virtually nothing behind and that some items that had been stolen were recovered.
I arranged for some to be shown to Paul, then in hospital, who confirmed they were not his work.
I bought back most of of those I had sold - though several of the buyers wanted to keep them and I just gave them an 80% or thereabouts refund. Ouch
There were a couple that never got the refund... sorry if you are reading! But I just did not know who they were then.
Later this dealer, very angry at me, for screwing up a lot of his other fake sales (A lot of collectors demanded refunds from him as ID'd altered Strathearn that they had bought as Monart) and spread the story that I was naming a particular maker. This soured my relationship with that particular maker for many years, and has still not really been overcome which I am very unhappy about. Particularly annoying as there were several others actually doing it.
Although the Police did an investigation they were so zeroed in on this dealer who was a bit brighter than them, that they screwed the investigation and were forced to halt after two failed raids to the wrong places. I later gave them addresses where this dealer stored his stuff but they had not known about them. So it goes.
What still irks me today is one elderly collector who had spent her life savings on buying the fakes from the dealers UK buddy in the North of England and never got any compensation.
Later some of the fakes were altered by polishing and faceting to try and hide their pedigree.
I guess that these matters while causing anguish and frustration do ultimately add to our passion for the family's work. After all to be the first weight maker to be chosen for systematic copying is quite an accolade. Only Paul Ysart's genius could not be copied exactly
Topic: Got a bad feeling about this, real or fake Paul Ysart? (Read 12937 times)
