Stein beer mugs

Recently we acquired about forty Stein beer mugs from a lovely lady in Brooklands (south Manchester). Our good friend Dickie visited her intending to buy some beer glasses and just happened to see the Stein mugs out of the corner of his eye… It turns out they were her late father’s – Tony Harrison, from Shipley – who had passed away in 1999 aged 64. Having lived in Jamaica for ten years, and returning to the UK in the 1970s, he travelled with his young family every year to Europe – mainly Switzerland, Austria, France and Germany. It was at the Christmas markets and sometimes the beer festivals that these mugs were collected.

I should explain at this point our collecting policy. Most of the ad material that comes through our door is ‘two dimensional’ and paper based. Think: magazine. Almost all magazines have advertising content, and that’s our meat and two veg.

But we also collect ‘three dimensional’ items, such as beer glasses, counter cards, Victorian beer bottles and so on. These are all used as advertising. Collecting these though gives us a new set of challenges – how do we identify them, catalogue them, photograph them, store them, make them available for viewing, and so on? As part of our solution we are re-developing our photographic studio, with (what will be) near-professional lighting rigs, and this will allow us to take photographs of bottles, or take short videos of them rotating on a pedestal. We’re only just starting out on this and one of our volunteers, Ed, is giving us excellent guidance.

The Stein mugs come under this ‘three-dimensional’ category. Stein mugs are traditional drinking vessels from Germany and thereabouts, and have a history going back centuries. Ours, of course, aren’t quite so old – probably no more than forty years, say? – but they are wonderfully varied, and some with elaborate ceramic features or artwork. To show examples, all we have are snaps of samples (reproduced here), but these Stein mugs will soon be accessioned. Most are ceramic, but we do have some made of wood, and some of these with a hinged lid – I gather this used to be normal in years gone by.

As can be seen, they are great ways to advertise something, usually a beer or a festival (Oktoberfest).

We always need volunteers to help us catalogue all the objects in our backlog. A number of volunteers already come in to help us identify and preserve our beermats, but if you would like to help out with the stein mugs, do get in touch.

Meanwhile, are you stuck for a Christmas present? We have 4,000 ads for sale on our ebay shop: check us out and make it the best Christmas ever for your loved one! Go to: https://www.ebay.co.uk/usr/richard-roberts-archive