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of glamour and elegance. Severn hard shakes over your right shoulder and you can travel back in time, back to the splendor of Hollywood movie sets, with Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, luxurious hotel lounges with gleaming chrome. The world of F. Scott Fitzerald and The Great Gatsby, and watching William Powell instruct a bartender on the proper way to shake a martini, The Thin Man movie of 1933, the thoughts are endless.

Cocktail shakers as an original American art form reflect the changing nature of the various styles of art, design and architecture of the era between the two Great Wars. We see the graceful lines of Art Nouveau in the early Twenties being replaced by the rage for jagged geometric modern design. This geometric cubism of Picasso that influenced so many designers of the1920's was then replaced by the craze for Streamline Design in the 1930's.

By the early 1930's cocktail shakers were taking the shape of the new deity of American architecture, the Skyscraper; both giving the appearance of movement and speed in a slow economy. They were here to penetrate the gloom of depression, ready to propel us into the future of prosperity like some Buck Rogers rocket ship. Both perfect symbols of generative power, of our perpetration into better times ahead.

Cocktail shakers and architecture took on the aerodynamically sleek industrial design of the automobile and airship. It was as, Norman Bel Geddes said, a quest for speed. All sharp edges and corners were rounded off, even the sharp notes of Jazz music into Swing.

Cocktail shakers have all the classic qualifications of a premium collectible; They're easily found at auctions, antique and secondhand shops, flea markets and yard sales. They can be had in all price ranges. They require little study to identify one manufacture or period from another, and last they are not easily reproduced.

The sleek streamline cocktail shakers of "moderne design" are valued by collectors of today. Those made by Revere, Chase, and Manning Bowman have taken the lead in this race. Also commanding high prices are figural shakers; Penguins, Zeppelins, Dumbbells and Bowling Pins. From town Criers Bells, to Aeroplanes, even a cocktail shaker in the shape of a Lady's Leg. They're all out there, waiting, waiting to be found, waiting to be recalled to life. Recalled to hear the clank of ice cubes and to become again the symbol of elegance.

Learn more about this author, Stephen Visakay.
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