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All around outrageous day

What a day. I drove down to Rockville Maryland to celebrate the Chinese New Year. Had an outrageous smorgasbord for lunch and I'm still full. Found an outrageous pair of pajamas for the annual Breakfast Party I attend in a costume shop four doors down from the Chinese restaurant. That was enough to call the day a huge success. I was driving back to H-burg on 15 and out of the corner of my eye I flew by a sign that said Antiques, left and then right at Lincoln. Something told me do as I was told. I did a U-ey and found this antique place in this podunk town. I didn't have a lot of time to browse so I was scanning the place pretty fast. And then there it was.

I'm a pretty jaded lamp collector (trying break the habit, and was doing great until today) but I think this is one of the most outrageous lamps I've ever seen. Take a look at this thing.
 
It's almost a floor lamp

This monstrosity is a whopping 43 inches tall! 3 tiered shade. The pics cannot do this thing justice. The center glass ball is crackle glass and there's an additional socket for a candlestick bulb to shine on the ball to highlight the crackles in the crackle glass.
 
Last picture

This angle show the little light bulb a bit more. You can turn on just the little lightbulb, the main lightbulb, both together or both off.

You can also kind of see in this pic that the polkadots are actually green, which matches the laundry room. Heck, the lamp also blends right into the table in my laundry room. Man oh man.
 
As "out there" as it is I'll bet that lamp cost a few bucks when it was new.
Now not near as outrageous, but I happened upon a lamp yesterday in the Goodwill. Here's a pic of it, I actually quite like it, it goes well with my furniture, the green cylinder is that lucite stuff with black sphagetti strings. It's kinda cool when it's on in a dark room
 
Very cool Pete.

Very cool Pete. That's actually a lamp/ashtray missing the ashtray. The ashtray would fit into the top. Canada pumped a lot of those things out. I have a few of them and they're tons of fun. I'm sure you can pick up an ashtray to fit the top if you care to. Works fine as a lamp.

By the way, I actually notice vacuum cleaners now. I was looking at some vintage ones today. A old GE cannister unit and another cannister unit by a company I never heard of. SVELT or something. Weird name. About five or six letters and ended in some strange letter combon like VT or something.
 
I thought it might be missing an ashtray, what with that handle on top and everything. I'll find a better corner for it and let it accent plants or something. Was a good day yesterday for me because I've been looking for a new cloth hose for my Electrolux AP280 vac and when I stopped in VVillage lo and behold there was another whole ap280 vac there with a hose that's barely worn but a power nozzle that was, so now I can make one good vac out of two.
 
BTW I always figured these lucite sphagetti lamps were popular with immigrant Italian/Portugese folks. They always tended towards very gaudy and ornate furnishings
 
Lucite

Very well could be. Man, I have some wild lucite spaghetti lamps, with plastic flowers in them and everything. Crazy man crazy.
 
Ashtray Stand

I don't know where the beatnik lingo is coming from all of a sudden. I think the new lamp is having an effect on me. Here are a few lighted ashtrays. I believe they all originated from Canada. First one has red lucite.
 
Hi Frontal

There are books out there on some specific lamp companies. I know there's one on the Moss Lamp Company. I know there is one called '50's Lamps. I don't know how much of a "resource" it is. I don't have any lamp books or reference guides or anything. I just know what I know from years of collecting the things.

As for my new lamp, I'm not sure that could be considered tasteful. They perhaps went just a little bit over the top with this one. I could post pictures of two other lamps that I don't own that clearly were made by the same company. They were perhaps slightly more tasteful than mine.
 
Pink Cobra

I'd love to know the company that made these. These things are ultra-rare. I feel 100 percent confident that the next two pictures were made by the same company that made my new lamp, whoever they were. The first was owned by a friend of mine and I tried to buy it from him but he wanted too much money for it. He eventually put it on eBay and get 450 for it.
 
And here's another one

And by the way, these things are HUGE. You really can't get a feel for how big they are in the pictures. My new lamp is 43 inches tall. My verstronic dryer is 44 inches tall to use as a comparison.

This next pic I swiped of eBay. This thing sold for 5 or 600 bucks.
 
Now that last one I like. Your lucite ones above look like they're probably from the same company as mine, probably back in Toronto or Montreal, where by the way there's a huge contingent of immigrant Italians and Portugese. Wrought iron is another of their idiosynchracies.
 
HW

I'm not aware of any reference book on lighting fixtures. That's not to say that one doesn't exist. I just don't know of any. When I'm at flea markets, I grab catalogs that were obviously given to customers who were shopping at lighting places. These catalogs have hole punches. I've got some by Virden, Lightolier, Moe, and others. They're fun to browse through and informative.

There are Wakefield reference books and I do own one and it was considered the bible of Wakefield for years. It's called Heywood Wakefield Modern Furniture and it's by Rouland. I know there are at least two other Wakefield guides.

It's astounding to me what has not been comprehensively documented.

Virtually all Wakefield furniture is branded with their eagle logo which has a HW in it. So, they're pretty easy to identify. They will almost always also have the date of manufacture stamped on them, the "model number" of the piece and the stain used. The vast majority of their modern furniture was stained in "wheat" or "champagne" finish, although there were some other finishes that they used.
 

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