The Holt Howard honey pot: the giveaway is under the spoon, not on the face

By Matthew Partsch · Owl and Twig Vintage · September 20, 2026

Holt Howard's honey jar sold for a dollar in 1959, one of sixteen pixie-headed condiment jars just like it, and it has spent the decades since becoming one of the hardest to find in the whole line, proven less by the wink on its face than by three tiny marks hiding under its spoon.

A dollar jar built to look expensive

Grant Holt and brothers John and Robert Howard started the company in 1949 in Manhattan, importing and designing Christmas novelties before branching into everyday tableware. Growth pushed the operation to Stamford, Connecticut, in 1955, though the founders kept their New York showroom and later added one in Los Angeles.

In 1958 the company introduced Pixieware: ceramic condiment jars, each one a striped jar body topped with a flat-faced pixie head standing in for a lid. Every jar hid a built-in ceramic spoon inside, a piece collectors still call by Holt Howard's own name for it, the "Spoofy Spoon." By the most detailed collector tally of the line, the original run covered seventeen condiment jars: ketchup, mayonnaise, mustard, jam 'n' jelly, onions, cocktail onions, olives, cocktail olives, cherries, cocktail cherries, cream and sugar, instant coffee, relish, chili sauce, and honey, plus a British marmalade jar sold only in that market. Every piece was manufactured in Japan and, by that same collector's account, sold for about a dollar when new.

The honey jar followed the same formula as its stablemates: a pixie face on the lid, honey-toned stripes on the body, a spoon built to nest inside. Nothing about its original design marked it out as special. What marked it out, in the decades since, is how few of them turn up for sale relative to the rest of the line.

Why the honey jar was always the scarce one

Holt Howard never published production figures by jar, so nothing here comes from a factory record. It comes from how often a piece turns up for sale, which is the only measure collectors and price guides have ever had to work with. By that measure, the honey jar has ranked among the harder Pixieware pieces to find for as long as anyone has been tracking the line, in the same tier as chili sauce and instant coffee, while jam 'n' jelly, mustard, and ketchup turn up steadily enough to be considered common.

The gap shows in what each tier asks today. WorthPoint's own price-guide dictionary places the common condiment jars, including ketchup, mustard, and jar bases missing their lids, in a $35 to $200 range, and puts honey and chili sauce specifically into a $200 to $1,000 mid-range band alongside rare oil-and-vinegar sets. A specialist collecting guide is blunter about the gap: expect $700 or more for a honey jar against $65 to $85 for a common one.

How to read the mark on the bottom

Most Pixieware pieces carry a stamped mark on the underside reading "Holt Howard," the year, and "Japan," printed in black ink. Smaller items too small for a clean stamp instead carry, or also carry, a small foil label in the company's black and gold, reading the same information. The wording is specific enough that it is worth checking first on any piece offered as an original.

Nearly every honey jar this guide found documented is dated 1959. One seller's listing describes a single example stamped 1961 instead, a date the seller writes they had never seen on another honey jar, and says they contacted Walter Dworkin, author of the standard Pixieware price guide, who checked with company co-founder Grant Howard and confirmed the piece as a genuine, if singular, Holt Howard product. This guide could not independently verify that exchange, and presents it as one seller's account rather than a documented pattern. If 1961-dated honey jars exist in any real number, no source here could confirm it.

The three pin marks under the spoon

The stronger, harder-to-fake evidence sits underneath the spoon rather than on the bottom of the jar. Every Spoofy Spoon rested on three small supports inside the kiln during firing, and those supports leave three tiny pin marks on the underside of the spoon once it comes out, a detail longtime collector Sandy Shores notes as one of the only firing marks that shows up consistently across the whole line, in ceramics that otherwise came out of the kiln remarkably clean for a dollar's worth of goods.

A second check costs nothing extra: the spoon's painted color should echo a stripe already on the jar body. Because these were meant for daily use rather than a shelf, spoons are also the single most common casualty. The neck connecting spoon to lid is thin and was handled constantly, so a chipped, broken, or entirely replaced spoon is the most frequent flaw a buyer runs into. One listing for a Holt Howard honey jar, stamped 1959 on the bottom and otherwise genuine, sells it paired with a spoon from Lefton instead of Holt Howard's own, a mismatch the seller states outright, and a useful reminder that a jar and its spoon do not always leave a collection together even when both pieces are real.

Crazing, the fine network of surface cracks glaze develops with age, turns up on nearly every piece and is not itself a flaw worth worrying over. It becomes one when whatever the jar once held seeped through the cracks and stained the clay underneath. That kind of discoloration, along with a broken neck or spoon, is what actually moves a piece down in value.

What ended the line, and who kept the name

Pixieware ran from 1958 into the early 1960s before Holt Howard moved on to other lines. The company itself did not last much longer as an independent operation: General Housewares Corporation bought Holt Howard in 1968, according to WorthPoint's company history, though the price-guide reference Kovels dates the same sale to 1969, a one-year gap this guide could not resolve between two otherwise reliable sources, so both dates are given rather than one picked over the other.

Manufacturing under the Holt Howard name continued for two more decades after that sale before finally stopping in 1990. Company co-founders Grant Holt and John Howard then started a new venture, Grant-Howard Associates, producing new pieces in the same winking-pixie style, including, notably, a cookie jar that borrows the original Pixieware look directly. Grant-Howard pieces are marked GHA rather than HH, and they are a different company's later output rather than a reissue of the 1958-to-1962 originals. A GHA-marked cookie jar currently asks in the $300 to $400 range: collectible on its own terms, but not interchangeable with an original Holt Howard piece for either value or dating.

The other pixie jars on the same shelf

Holt Howard did not have the anthropomorphic condiment jar to itself. Davar, Lefton, Lipper and Mann, Menschik Goldman, and Norcrest all produced their own versions in the same postwar gift market, aimed at the same customer buying the same kind of kitchen whimsy. Some of them now outprice Holt Howard by a wide margin: Lefton's hotdog-head and hamburger-head mustard jars can ask $1,000 to $3,500 in top condition, well above anything in the honey jar's own range.

The quickest way to tell Davar's cruets from Holt Howard's own is the body decoration: Davar painted rings around its jars, where Holt Howard used vertical stripes. Readers curious about another mid-century Japanese ceramic character from the same shelf of postwar kitsch can see this site's guide to Lefton's devil figurines, made by one of Holt Howard's own direct competitors.

What a honey pot sells for now

A common Pixieware jar, ketchup, mustard, jam 'n' jelly, currently asks $65 to $140 on the secondary market, condition depending. The honey jar sits well above that: collector pricing guides put it at $500 to $700 or more, and one listing for a mint example with its original spoon intact was found asking $1,400, near the top of WorthPoint's own $200-to-$1,000 band for the tier honey belongs to.

No realized public auction price specific to a honey jar turned up in any source this guide could read. The Holt Howard lots this guide could open on LiveAuctioneers' and Invaluable's own sold-price listings covered common jars, cherries, onions, jam 'n' jelly, ketchup, mustard, Russian dressing, rather than honey. WorthPoint's brand-level realized sales, a Devil Brew decanter at $4,051 and a Kitchen Cubs ashtray and match holder at $4,298, both from 2024 and 2025, confirm the ceiling a Holt Howard piece can reach without saying anything about the honey jar specifically. Every honey-jar figure above is a current asking price rather than a confirmed sale.

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