Method

What this site is built from, and where that source stops.

One source, cited by page

Every factual claim on a maker entry is transcribed from William Chaffers, Marks and Monograms on European and Oriental Pottery and Porcelain, 1891 edition (Reeves & Turner, London), working from the scan held by the Internet Archive. Each claim carries the page it came from. Nothing is added from memory or from other websites.

Two kinds of mark, and the difference is shown

Chaffers draws some marks as engravings and describes others only in words. Those are different levels of evidence, so each plate says which it is. A mark shown as an engraving is cropped from the page scan. A mark the source only named is set as type and labelled as such — never drawn, because drawing it would show you a picture the source never made.

How the groupings are made

You can browse by what is on the base of the piece — a crown, crossed swords, a monogram, block capitals — and by place, ware and period. Those groupings are not opinions about the engravings. Each one is derived from the source's own wording, and every plate shows the phrase that put it in a group: the Worcester Flight & Barr mark is filed under crown because Chaffers wrote “with a crown”, and the page says so next to the tag.

The consequence is worth stating plainly. If Chaffers described a mark briefly, that mark carries fewer tags than a fuller description would earn — absence from a grouping is not evidence that the feature is absent from the mark. Dates work the same way: a period comes from the first year in the source's own date line, so a mark Chaffers left undated has no period here rather than a guessed one.

Where the source stops, and it matters

Chaffers was published in 1891. It therefore does not cover:

• American art pottery — Roseville, Weller, McCoy, Grueby and Haeger all postdate it and none appears in the book at all.
• Most twentieth-century British and Irish potteries, including Arklow, Ellgreave, Bretby and Moorcroft.
• Twentieth-century backstamps generally, including later marks of factories the book does cover. A Denby entry here describes the nineteenth century and says nothing about a 1960s Denby stamp.

If a maker is absent from this site, the likeliest reason is that it is absent from the source — not that no mark exists.

Doubt is reproduced, not smoothed away

Where Chaffers questions an attribution, the entry carries the doubt and labels it. The E. BOURNE stamp is the worked example: it is widely listed as a Denby mark, and Chaffers judges it more probably from the Bournes of Fenton, Staffordshire.

What this site will not do

It does not value objects, authenticate them, or tell you what yours is worth. It reports what a nineteenth-century reference recorded, with the page, so you can weigh it yourself.