Gin-For's Odditiques consists of Ginny and Forrest Poston. I'm the one being used as a cat cushion in the pictures above. Ginny has the more refined picture.  I wanted top billing, but Forgin didn't seem to have quite the right ring to it somehow.  The odditiques part comes from our taste for unusual items, some just uncommon, others that are different in form or color. (Oddities combined with antiques equals Odditiques.)  I also like clean, classic lines when they're well done, but sometimes I've just got to have some eye-popping color, or form that goes in unexpected, somehow pleasing, directions.  As you might guess, that's what led to our interest in West German pottery.  When we started attending auctions in 1991, I bid on anything bright and cheap.  I didn't know the difference between grand, gaudy, and garish.  Since those were the days when we were buying box lots for a couple of dollars, it wasn't too much of a problem.

     Fortunately for us all, Ginny got one of her undergraduate degrees (I married a triple major.) in art before going on to Art History in graduate school.  She also has eyes that often see colors differently---one eye picking up warmer shades than the other, which has made her particularly aware of color variations.   After hearing her say, "You bought what" or "You paid how much" often enough, I finally learned to see, not just look.  I finally realized that something can be colorful, even gaudy, without being garish.  I'm getting better at the difference between a piece that catches your eye and one that brings your eye back for long looks.  The best are the pieces that make you smile when you enter the room, even though that piece has been on that same shelf for years.

     I can't tell you what you'll find on our site at any given time.  Sure, there will be American art pottery and American art glass, the things so popular in our country, but there will also be European art pottery, European art glass, dinnerware, metalware from all over, paintings, etchings, most anything that one or both of us looks at and goes, "Oh, yeah" or "Mine, mine, all mine" (Daffy Duck/Bugs Bunny).  We buy from numerous sources.  In addition to local auctions, I still roam to auctions and shops from Illinois to Ohio, and I pick up some neat oddities with some quirky searches on the internet.  With luck, we'll have new items every few days, just so you'll have to keep dropping in.

     You'll find at least one cat pictured on every page. You'll also find them featured on the "staff" page and the "Cor-purr-ate Story". The four included in our main picture are Sergeant Major (in the lap), Lady Selena (front center), Lancelot (with his tail draped over the Lady), and Triscuit keeping himself above the fray. We lost the "Mister Cat"(Sergeant Major) and Lady within two months of each other. After that, we added Glyph, also known as Glyph-the-Destroyer, who at about 6 months old managed to crack the toilet and the sink in one leap.  Some people find the cats "unprofessional," but we prefer a more relaxed, personal approach to everything, including business.  It doesn't mean we are any less careful in our selections or other business practices.

     On the non-business related side, Ginny teaches Art History and Humanities at the University of Southern Indiana.  Given the chance, I teach college level English (20th century literature and composition), but my tendency to give preference to students over procedure seems to bother people, usually just one administrator, but one's enough.  We're both still writing dissertations that should have been finished long, long ago and hoping for an eventual return to the Appalachian hills.  Given my special talent for bringing out latent insecurities in college administrators, that may take us a while yet.  I do most of the buying, so some of the items you see here will prove my sometimes odd tastes.  While Ginny's taste is typically better, she does go for peculiar choices at times, too.  Well, she did marry me, after all.

Experience: We started as collectors back in 1991 and became dealers when the house and garage were filled from boxlots about a year later. We started selling online back when eBay was small enough that you could browse the entire pottery section in a couple of hours. You can check our eBay feedback under the user name ginfor.  The antiques are a hobby when I'm also teaching and full time otherwise, most of the time. 

Over the years, I've published a few stories in Antique Week and one each in the Journal of the American Art Pottery Association and Northeastern.  Three of the essays about W. German pottery are among those included on this site.  In 2008 and the beginning of 2009, we were mentioned in conjunction with West German pottery in "House Beautiful", "Country Living", "Metropolitan Home", and "Antique Roadshow Insider".

On my Philosophy and Nonsense site, you can read more of my essays plus some poems.  While many of the essays focus on writing and education, there are also stories about how much the universe sometimes bends to help, and how I could still mess it up, meeting a fairy-god princess at Hollywood Video, and a variety of other subjects.