Featured Sets From Marshall Fields & Neiman Marcus

Have a entire trunk full of this kind of stuff. At least 50 years old. I've had it for the last 35 years. Handwritten note on box says "White organdy tea cloth embossed in green". Table cloth and 14 napkins. The cocktail napkins came in the NM box.
These things are nice but it seems there is no real market for them. Not too sure what to do with it all. Maybe sell it as a couple lots. Do people even use cocktail & cloth dinner napkins anymore?

 

You can check eBay completed listings. I would think there would be special interest in those with the golf motif. None are labelled? The coat of arms, by way, is that of the Medici family. I suspect that means the napkins are of Italian origin.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/House_of_Medici

Debora

 

Heavens! They had enough for a convention, let alone a tea party.

 

Lovely and well preserved.

 

What a bittersweet reminder of times gone by . Imagine how lovely a luncheon table was with all those pretty linens. I especially like the chickens.

 

Your linens are gorgeous. If your trunk includes more than what you’ve pictured, you might have some Marghab linens, which were hand embroidered on Madeira and were sold at Marshall Fields, Neiman Marcus and other high end stores before the Marghab company closed in 1980. Some Marghab linens have sold recently on eBay for hundreds of dollars.

If you only have what’s shown in your photos, I don’t think they’re Marghab, except possibly the white organdy tea cloth and napkins, but I haven’t been able to find examples like them online. By the way, the note with them should say “embroidered” not embossed.

If you do have other linens in the trunk with embroidery, and would care to post photos I might be able to tell you if they’re Marghab. Or, you could do a Google image search or check eBay “sold” listings to see if they might be Marghab. A word of caution, however, not all linens shown online as Marghab are actually Marghab. They didn’t come with a label, usually a paper card and/or Marghab box.

I’ve sold and still have a few examples of Marghab linens. The quality and detail of the embroidery is exquisite and beyond most other embroidery--at least that I’ve seen.

For anyone who’s not familiar with Marghab, the following information is from Wikipedia: The company was founded in 1933 on Madeira (an island belonging to Portugal) by Emile and Vera Marghab. Vera (who was from South Dakota) designed all the linens herself, hired the women on Madeira to do the hand-embroidery as a home industry, and paid them per stitch, which for a single place mat could amount to seventy thousand stitches.

Vera died in 1995. She and her trustees have gifted numerous Marghab linens to the University of South Dakota Art Museum, which now includes over three hundred patterns and almost 2800 items.

Here’s a set of 6 Marghab cocktail napkins that sold recently on Etsy:

 

Thanks for helping out Joan, I learned a lot with your post.

 

Largest collection in the world.

https://www.sdstate.edu/south-dakota-art-museum/marghab-linen-collection

Debora

 

I will pull out some of the more interesting pieces and post them for you experts to critique.

 

@bluumz Any thoughts, recommendations?

 

Just to second everything that @Joan said!

Marghab is the real treasure to find among vintage linens but can be difficult and time-consuming to identify with confidence unless one has handled/seen a lot of it... which I have not been lucky enough to do! It's worth significantly more than most other vintage linens.
Other than than, vintage linens is a comparatively small collecting niche and there's not a lot of money in it. OP's idea of selling in lots, with low-ish expectations, is fine.

The Marghab identification site that I used to use is now sadly broken: https://www.antique-linens.com/MarghabPatterns.html (linking it in case it ever comes back).

 

I wasn't aware of that site--it would have been really helpful., but I wonder if this site belongs to the same person: http://www.antique-linens.com/marghabPatternList.html. [edit: I think it is the same site, but the URL has "PatternList" not Patterns.] It appears to include almost all of the Marghab patterns from A-Z and photos for most.

The South Dakota Art Museum sells the book, Perfection, Never Less, The Vera Way Marghab Story, by D.J.Cline, for $10 plus shipping, but it doesn't include examples of all the patterns.
https://www.southdakotaartmuseumstore.com/books-sdam002-marghab-perfection-never-less-cline.html
Amazon, eBay, and Etsy also have the book, but the prices range from about $29-$169.00. The Museum must have reduced the price because they used to sell it for $65. I don't own the book.

 

I checked this website again, http://www.antique-linens.com/marghabPatternList.html, and it includes about 240 of the 300+ Marghab patterns (some don't include photos). I didn't see a match to your green embroidered organdy tablecloth set. It may or may not be Marghab, or generic Madeira work, or could be Swiss made--they also produced beautiful embroidered organdy items.

 

Your links are broken for me, too, I get the "404 Not Found" error page.
Does this happen for anyone else?
@Joan what browser do you use? I'm using Chrome.

EDIT: I switched to Edge and the links work fine! That is indeed the site that I used to use. (Yay, I fixed the issue and the links now open in Chrome for me.)

 

Glad it works for you now. I use duck duck go on my phone and chrome on my laptop. The link works on both.

 

Good heavens! I have a trunk full of antique linens that I imagined were completely worthless. My mother and her older sisters embroidered and crocheted 'soft' goods back in the 20s & 30s. Bridge tablecloths & matching napkin sets. I should go dig them out.

 

I love old linens! Unfortunately, they are usually difficult to find homes for, especially the home-embroidered ones. But the Marghab ones are an exception, they can bring $$$.

 

Glad to get a refresher on Marghab. I think intuitively I'd pick something like this up at an estate sale because they look so finely done, but I also have the mindset that napkins like this can be a hard sell so might have passed. Will keep a look out for Marghab ones as they seem to have great resale.