Starting to Collect Antique Jewellery

Starting to Collect Antique Jewellery explores a wide range of topics which students, dealers, private collectors and historians expect to encounter when embarking on this fascinating and absorbing subject. From cut steel to Cartier, pinchbeck to platinum, the book discusses a myriad of contrasting disciplines as well as offering practical advice upon "problem areas" such as valuations, fakes, forgeries and repairs. The text is accompanied by several hundred high resolution colour photographs which have been carefully selected to represent most aspects of jewellery collecting, embracing "affordable" subjects such as paste and tiepins as well as "high jewellery" including Fabergé, fancy diamonds and Lalique. The book is divided into over twenty key subject headings enabling the reader to locate any number of topics with ease, while the development of jewellery design is tracked chronologically from ancient times to the Second World War.