The Holt-Howard Collection  ·  Profiles in Passion

An Obsession Born on Mother’s Day

It began, as so many obsessions do, with a single object glimpsed at eye level. Mother’s Day weekend, 2002. Kevin McDonald was living in Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood, working at a health insurance company headquartered in the Sears Tower, and spending the holiday with his parents before they headed back to the western suburbs. After lunch at a nearby diner, the family did what they always did: found somewhere interesting to browse. That afternoon it was the Broadway Antique Market, a two-floor operation on the north side of the city known for ceramics on the ground floor and mid-century modern furniture upstairs.

Somewhere in the middle of the first floor, in a square end-cap display case, Kevin’s eye caught something. A row of ceramic jars, white and striped, each one wearing a tiny face that was simultaneously impish, whimsical, and oddly compelling. He stopped. He looked more closely. He became, in his own telling, fascinated. He had his first cell phone — a state-of-the-art Sharp flip phone with a two-megapixel camera — and he used it to photograph the jars, including a close-up of the underside of one and its price tag. A jam and jelly jar. Twenty-five dollars.

When his parents dropped him off that evening he sat down at his computer and started searching. The jars were Pixieware, made by Holt-Howard, a Connecticut-based novelty ceramics company founded in 1949 by brothers John and Robert Howard — who had grown up in Walpole, Massachusetts — and their Amherst College classmate Grant Holt of Evanston, Illinois, backed by a $9,000 loan from their families. The company had imported whimsical kitchen goods from Japan from the early 1950s until selling to General Housewares in the late 1960s. The Pixieware line had been designed by Robert J. Howard Sr. — a prolific artist and product designer who passed away in 1990, whose creations had become, by the early 2000s, quietly sought-after collectibles. By the end of that evening Kevin had the broad outlines of the category in his head and the particular hunger of someone who has just discovered that a whole world exists that they didn’t know about. He has been collecting ever since.

Twenty-four years is a long time to pursue anything, and Kevin’s collection reflects the depth that only sustained, disciplined attention can produce. The centerpiece is his Pixieware — the vast majority of the American production run, plus two pieces from the John Buck British Pixieware line — produced through Holt-Howard’s 45 percent ownership stake in John E. Buck & Co. Ltd. of Colchester, England — and pieces from the early 2000s second-generation Grant Holt Pixieware revival, and the exceedingly rare orange Australian hors d’oeuvre pixie made exclusively for the Australian market. The striped and solid-color liquor decanters are displayed separately on the top shelves flanking the fireplace mantel, while the cocktail onions, olives, cherries, and chili sauce jars share a cabinet with the two second-generation pixie cookie jars. Together the holdings represent one of the most comprehensive Pixieware collections in the collector community — though Kevin is quick to note that Walter Dworkin and several other dedicated collectors he knows through the group have collections that rival or even exceed his own. What sets Kevin apart is less the collection itself than the documentation and pricing research he has built around it.

Kevin’s dedicated six-shelf Pixieware display cabinet, housing the majority of the American production run alongside British pieces and second-generation Grant Holt Pixieware from the early 2000s.

But Pixieware is only the beginning. Kevin also holds complete runs of the Lefton fruit and vegetable head line — including the extraordinarily rare hot-dog-topped mustard jar, one of only a handful known to be in collector hands, acquired in a private sale in 2018 when the market ceiling was approximately $700. He has substantial holdings in Davar, Menschik Goldman, Lipper & Mann, and Napco. His Holt-Howard collection extends well beyond Pixieware into Applejack, Buck’s County, Cozy Kittens, Coq Rouge, and multiple Christmas lines.

Most of the Applejack line displayed across the fireplace mantel — pitchers, mugs, dinner plates, canisters, a jam and jelly jar, salt and pepper shakers, creamer, and spoon rests — all in the line’s characteristic white, red, and yellow palette against an exposed brick backdrop. One piece remains elusive: the Applejack butter dish, known to exist in only two examples currently in collector hands.

The Christmas display, when assembled seasonally, occupies a full sideboard and part of a dining room table. The Pixieware cabinet is five shelves of carefully organized ceramic history. The house itself has been shaped by the collection. In the kitchen, a continuous border of framed photographs — Kevin’s own photography of his own pieces, shot against a consistent blue terrycloth backdrop he has used for twenty years — runs around the entire perimeter above the cabinets. Three Holt-Howard trivets are mounted on the wall between the pantry door and the stove: an Applejack apple, a Coq Rouge rooster, a Buck’s County heart-clover. The collection does not merely inhabit the house. It has become part of its visual identity.

The Holt-Howard Starry Eyed Santa collection laid out for photography — pitchers, mugs, treat trays, an ashtray, salt and pepper shaker sets, chip and cheese servers, and candle holders. The tags visible on several pieces are faithful reproductions Kevin made from reference photographs, used to help identify each item in display.

What separates Kevin from an enthusiastic hobbyist, however, is not the breadth of his collection but the infrastructure he has built around it. Over the past decade he has maintained a personal archive of 1,336 sold-auction records — screenshots of completed listings saved as PDFs, named with the piece, an example number, the sale price, and any relevant condition notes. This archive predates the pandemic pricing surge and extends through it, giving him a longitudinal view of the market that no published guide and no subscription service can fully replicate. He also maintains a detailed spreadsheet tracking every piece he owns: what he paid, current low and high estimates, and what he saved versus market value at the time of purchase.

He has more than fifty active eBay saved searches, generating daily email alerts. He monitors Mercari, Etsy, HiBid online estate sales, and Instagram, where he maintains a collecting page. He knows the market not as an abstraction but as a living thing, and tracks it the way a serious investor tracks a portfolio. The results speak for themselves: his Holt-Howard Pixieware has more than doubled in value over his holding period. The Lipper & Mann Flower Girls line has appreciated over 200 percent. Even pieces from less prominent makers have posted substantial gains above his purchase prices, though the HH and Lefton material has proven the most resilient — holding most of its pandemic-era gains while other categories have retreated somewhat.

The complete Menschik Goldman “Dolly Girls” condiment set — Sugar, Jam, and Cream in the back row; Mustard, Ketchup, and Relish in the middle; and the miniature Saccharin, Pepper, and Salt in front.

He also knows where the gaps are. His carefully maintained “In Search Of” folder holds reference photos of pieces he is still hunting: a Buck’s County coffee pot and dinner plates, an Applejack butter dish so rare he has seen only two examples in twenty-four years of looking, a Cozy Kittens Match Dandy figure. The list is short. That it is not empty is the only remaining evidence that the collection is not yet complete.

Several years ago the administrators of the Holt Howard Collectibles group on Facebook — which has grown from roughly 4,000 members when Kevin joined in 2016 to nearly 17,000 today — designated him a group expert. He wears the role lightly but takes it seriously. He visits the group two or three times a week, answers questions, and surfaces resources. He has scanned both editions of Walter Dworkin’s definitive price guides — the only published references for the category — made OCR-searchable PDFs of them, annotated them with his own corrections and additions, and uploaded them to the group’s files section, where they are freely available to any of the seventeen thousand members who think to look.

“At this point, I sometimes joke that I’m basically just collecting the guides.”

— Kevin McDonald

His annotations are not casual marginal notes. They include photographic errors in the published guide — jar tops photographed on the wrong jars, color variants undocumented because they were never seen in pre-internet collector circles, and pieces confirmed by his own holdings that Dworkin simply had no way of knowing about before the age of online auctions. Dworkin, who is himself an active group member and a personal friend of Kevin’s, was thrilled to see them.

A portion of Kevin’s Holt-Howard Christmas collection displayed on the dining room sideboard, centered on an illuminated vintage ceramic tree. Multiple Santa lines are represented alongside snowmen, reindeer, and other seasonal novelty pieces — a display that grows considerably once the off-season stored Christmas items are brought out.

That joke about collecting the guides contains more truth than modesty. Kevin has, over twenty-four years, become something rarer than a serious collector: he has become a repository. The knowledge he holds — about variants, pricing and provenance and the particular history of a novelty ceramics company that started in 1949, invented the coffee mug and made whimsical jars that people still search for at estate sales in Australia, Arizona and the north side of Chicago — exists nowhere else in quite the same density. When he eventually decides what to do with it, the community of people who care about these small and joyful objects will be better for whatever he chooses.

In the meantime, the fifty-plus eBay alerts are running. Somewhere, an Applejack butter dish is waiting to be found.

Read: The Man Behind the Pixie