Under the glaze on the base of that casserole there's usually more than a factory name — there's a whole paragraph in miniature. Most hunters read the maker and stop, the money hides in the small print around it.
Pattern names come first. Dinnerware factories often printed the pattern right into the backstamp, and the pattern is what the comps run on — a maker name alone gets a shrug, maker plus pattern gets a matched sale and a real number. Same factory, same decade, one pattern brings triple what its shelf-mate does. Which pattern is on yours?
Those bare numbers aren't random either. West German pottery is the classic case: a mark like 517-30 reads as form number and height — mold 517, thirty centimeters tall. Half these pieces carry no maker name at all, just digits and "W. Germany," and collectors have spent years matching form numbers back to factories like Scheurich and Bay. On that shelf, the number is the name.
A tiny hand-painted monogram or a scratched cipher near the stamp is often an artist's mark. Some potteries let their decorators sign in code — Rookwood's painter monograms are the famous American example — and a documented cipher can move a piece from shelf-common to collected. Worth a careful look before it goes back in the bin. Whose hands were on this one?
Some factories even baked a calendar into the stamp. Wedgwood pressed three-letter date codes into its wares starting in 1860, the last letter naming the year, and plenty of dinnerware makers worked month-and-year codes into their backstamps too. On British pieces, "Rd No" followed by digits means a registered design — those numbers begin in 1884 and climb, so the number sets the earliest the design can be. The piece itself might be years younger, mind — the code dates the design, not the firing.
Flip it over — the story's usually on the bottom. The maker's name is just the headline, partner; the fine print is where the price lives.
So read the whole stamp before it goes back on the shelf: name, pattern, number, cipher, code. Photograph the base while the light's good — half these marks vanish in a dim booth. Could be nothing, could be a payday. What does the small print say on yours?