GUEST: These belonged to my mother, who inherited them from her grandmother. They hung on my mother's dining room wall for as long as I can remember.
APPRAISER: These were made by a company that marked their wares very well. And everything we need to know about them is on the back.
GUEST: Okay.
APPRAISER: At the top, we have a castle, and then the word "Mettlach." And below that are the entwined initials "V.B." "V.B." stands for Villeroy & Boch, which is a huge manufacturing company, and still in business today. And Mettlach was a division of Villeroy & Boch, which specialized in making stoneware steins, pitchers, plaques and other stoneware objects. Below that is a German mark, which means something like patented or copyrighted. And then next is the stock number, an item number. This one in this case is 2361. And so every plaque that matches this one would have the same number. Now, this one right here says "07." That is for 1907. As a word of warning, I tell people whenever you see any kind of mark on a piece of pottery porcelain that looks like a date, always assume that it is not a date.
GUEST: (laughing)
APPRAISER: Because 95% of the time, it is not the date. In this case, it is the date.
GUEST: Wow.
APPRAISER: Now, these four-digit numbers that they have on the back tell us a lot about them, because we can look that mark up in a book and we can find out exactly what these scenes are. This one is Wartburg Castle in Germany, and the other one is the town of Königstein. Now, these are fairly popular on the market, and a retail price for both of these today would be somewhere between $500 and $800 each.
GUEST: Wow, my goodness, how nice.
