Prohibition barware

The Volstead Act closed the bars of the United States in January 1920 and did not reopen them for thirteen years. What it produced, besides a great deal of bad whiskey, was the strangest and most inventive barware ever made - because every piece of it had to be either hidden or so obviously a joke that nobody could object.

So there are flasks shaped to sit flat against a shin inside a boot, canes that unscrew into a measure, books that open into a bar, and above all the novelty shakers: penguins, zeppelins, lighthouses, golf bags. They were not decoration. They were the furniture of a decade spent drinking in defiance of the law, and they are the only antiques we handle that are about the act of drinking rather than the thing drunk.

The market is real and it is not cheap. Sotheby's have run a dedicated sale of the period: a golf-themed set of 1926 carried an estimate to around US$7,000, and a single penguin shaker US$2,000 to 4,000. Good plainer pieces sit far below that.

There is a practical reason we like them as well as a romantic one. They are chrome, steel and heavy glass rather than cut crystal, so unlike almost everything else of this age they survive being posted to Australia.

We hold none of this. It is found to order, at auction and through dealers in Britain and the United States, which takes weeks rather than days. Tell us what you are after and we will go and look, say honestly what it is worth, and agree our part before anything is bid.