How It All Started
Last Edited: 18 Mar 2025Hello and welcome to Mini Oil Lamps . com. This site was started in December, 2022. Back then however it was under the domain name Mini Kerosene Lamps . com. In March 2025 a long sought after domain name was finally acquired at an expiry auction, and on 15 March 2025 the site was rebranded to Mini Oil Lamps . com.
This is a project of a private collector of vintage miniature kerosene or oil lamps and has been envisioned for over four decades. Well, actually the idea of creating a website is only around two decades but the collecting and desire to catalogue the lamps is about four. Finally after such a long time things are starting to come to fruition. It will be a long process though, likely dragging out for many years. The collection is estimated to contain over 1500 lamps with perhaps 1100-1200 unique lamps - it has been packed away for over 30 years, with more added along the way so one can only guess how many there are. I live in Melbourne, Australia and I am both the lamp collector and the developer of this website.
This first article will explain some of the history behind everything: how this website came about, the kerosene lamp collection, who is behind it, and the intended aims. It's a long read, so feel free to grab a cup of tea/coffee before reading further...
It all began in about 1980 when I went to Sunday markets (also known as flea markets or trash-and-treasure markets) with my parents. It was actually the Camberwell Sunday Market, in a leafy inner eastern suburb of Melbourne, Australia, where I bought my first lamp - from memory it was a small green glass lamp made in Hong Kong (I'll endeavour to put a link to it here when I eventually catalogue it). I was about 10 years old at the time. I recall the thrill of the chase, dashing in and out of the rows of stalls doing a quick scan to grab all I could, then repeating the process in a slower and more thorough search. I rarely missed anything, but perhaps the stall-holder hadn't unpacked it at the time I was there. Rarely I saw a small collection of lamps, say 3-5, and once even up to 20. Perhaps someone started a collection and lost interest. Maybe some of them saw an eager young kid buying lamps every weekend so they collected them to sell to me. Who knows? It was a lot of fun. I quickly got to see which ones were the most common and which ones were not. I also observed the "regular antique dealer" stall-holders and which ones they were selling, so I worked out what they thought was more rare or valuable. Sometimes they were right but not always. In time I learnt where they were likely made even if they didn't have the stickers/marks, the materials used (eg: solid brass, plated steel, etc), whether the glass was tinted or painted, and other characteristics. Looking back, these were the best years not only for learning but also for acquiring them. Back then many of these kerosene lamps were considered merely as junk to be gotten rid of by their owners. Today however they are viewed as vintage collectibles. In my opinion I wouldn't have a hope in hell of getting such a collection now.
But that's not the very beginning of my collecting. There was a man named Robert (Bob) Neylon who owned what was believed to be the smallest house in Australia, located in the suburb of Collingwood in Melbourne, Australia. You can find information on the late Bob Neylon and his former house easily by searching the internet. There is also some information out there on his collection. Anyway, in that tiny house he had just a small part of his own kerosene lamp collection. He collected the historic lamps from the early 1900s back to the 1800s. These were much taller and obviously more expensive, older and rarer than the smaller lamps that I could acquire at markets. It was likely him and his collection that inspired me to begin mine. I recall going there and seeing his collection and off in a corner were a few more modern functional but mostly decorative lamps like the ones I collect today, namely from Japan and Hong Kong and dated around 1950s to the 1970s. I think he even gave me a couple of those lamps when I was starting off. Bob passed away within a year or so after I'd met him, and I believe most or all of his collection was donated to a museum/s for historic preservation. I have no idea where they went to but I would love the opportunity to see them again one day - it was a magnificent collection.
Repeating just for clarity, the lamps in this collection are mostly from Japan and Hong Kong and manufactured in the 1950s, 1960s 1970s and 1980s. There are certainly others too in the collection, some from England for example and I think they're called Pixie lamps, which I may also put in to the database just so that I can keep a complete record of everything I have. And also again just for clarity, much of the information presented here is my knowledge built up over the years, and is simply the best I could determine or find out given the sparse information available anywhere.
So the years passed and my collection grew. Every Sunday was market day which I'd eagerly await. Often we'd even go to two or three markets on one day. Sometimes even country markets like Healesville or Daylesford whenever we went out of the city. The chase was on to get as many as I could. I'd work and earn a bit of pocket money on weeknights or Saturday and then much of that would go into lamps. By 1990 I had collected over one thousand lamps. Years earlier my parents had bought two used commercial glass display cabinets about 3-4 metres long - one was in my bedroom totally full of my favourite lamps while the other was in the garage full of the rest of them and all the spare parts. At this time I was about 20 years old. It was taking up too much space so I decided to pack them up and put them all into storage. At no time did I ever get sick of them, it's just that priorities change and space was at a premium. So I grabbed a whole lot of timber crates and proceeded to carefully wrap each lamp and pack them away. I wrote the date onto each crate. Looking at one of them now, it says "Packed 30-12-1990". It is now over three decades that they have been hidden away... I think it's high time to get them out and see them again.
Over those decades I had planned a couple of things. One was to catalogue them for my own purposes. It has been so long that I can't even recall what I've got and what I don't. Compared to the "old" days where lamps were a dime-a-dozen at markets, many have become ever more hard to find. Some of the beautiful ones I remember, I think it's highly unlikely I could ever replace them if I had to. Even with the advent of the internet, eBay and the like, some of those lamps are as rare as hen's teeth. So when I ever see another lamp anywhere I'll be able to either remember or check whether I've got it already. The second thing I'd planned is to set up a website for information purposes. As far as I know there is not a single website in the world which deals with lamps of this era. No information on these lamps is available at all. Nothing. If I could make a wish and have a wish come true, it'd be that a child or grandchild of the owners of the companies which manufactured/distributed these lamps to reach out to me and give me all the design, production and distribution data of every lamp they had ever made. But sadly I think this is just wishful thinking as I'm sure all that information is lost forever, and that's if that data ever existed at all. So whatever knowledge and information that I personally have is from four decades of collecting and chasing them and from the scant information I have been able to glean from the internet. But it is what it is. And I'd like to document that knowledge. Of course I'm sure and hoping that others will have knowledge that I don't and will give it to me too. In the end, this website does all of the jobs outlined above.
An important step along this path was a domain name. In the early 2000s I had already thought about this. I managed to register the name Mini Kerosene Lamps . com in 2004. Back then some good domain names were still readily available for just registration cost, unlike today where often investors sit on them and can ask for quite high prices. Subsequently they are never purchased by anyone with an intent to make a real website, they sit there waiting for visitors to generate domain parking revenue when you click on one of the advertisement links, or until a sizeable offer is made to buy it. That in itself is not an illegitimate use of the domain, but there can be more useful sites (like this one!) which have information rather than just sales links. Those domain investors hold portfolios of many hundreds or thousands of different domains and selling around 1% of them every year, using those sales to pay for the yearly renewal of their entire portfolio plus some extra profit. So at least this name Mini Kerosene Lamps . com was secured by someone who had a genuine need and desire for it and is putting it to good use. Update: the story of how Mini Kerosene Lamps . com eventually became Mini Oil Lamps . com can be found here: Exciting News - New Domain Name Soon!). Despite all the above, getting the domain name was just the easy part. I had tried multiple times to design a website but it was not so easy. I tried html, Macromedia Dreamweaver, plus others. While I could do some basics it was not good enough and I'd need months or years to improve my skills. No time for that. So the website planned was delayed many times. Then perhaps a year or two ago I came across Content Management Systems (CMS) in a web hosting account I'd had for years. I tried many different ones, some of them more than once. Each one had some benefits and some drawbacks. Finally I found this one I'm using now, Zenphoto, and while not perfect and everything I want it matches my needs enough and is easy enough to get started so I jumped right in and got going. I'm constantly editing, experimenting and tweaking things so the final look and function of this website is unknown even to me at this stage. I may consider getting some professional help in future if I feel I need to take it further beyond my skill-set, however at the moment that seems totally unnecessary.
At the time of writing this first article most of the lamps are still in wooden crates in storage. Ever since those crates were packed way back in 1990 I have acquired a few more lamps and they were just added to the pile, packed in cardboard boxes or shopping bags. But there is also a history with those crates. First, they were stored under my parents' house in an inner eastern suburb of Melbourne. Then in around 1999 I moved them to a "secret" storage facility out in the Victorian countryside where they stayed for perhaps 6-8 years. (That's also a bit of a story, but hey, I can't reveal all my secrets on the internet!) Then they came back to Melbourne and are currently stored in my garage. There they await "The Great Unboxing". There are even a few in a kitchen cabinet which I never got to pack away. Those are ones that I had randomly picked up in the last few years if I ran across any. I will likely start with photographing those loose lamps in the kitchen. The intention is to open every crate, box and bag, thoroughly photograph and document each lamp, label it with a unique ID number, clean it if required, and then re-pack it into storage again. Permanently or even temporarily displaying the entire lamp collection is a dream which at this time cannot be realised. Maybe it never will be but that's all the more reason to get this website done. Now is the time. Finally.
The ultimate aim for me, as a collector, is to have one of every lamp ever made and in perfect condition. Will I ever achieve that? I don't know. I sure hope so though. One method to achieve that is to make contact with other collectors. We will be able to buy/sell/swap doubles between ourselves and advance our collections. I recall the good old days of buying lamps on eBay, both within Australia and from the USA, and back then the user ID's were not masked, I had identified a few regular buyers of lamps. I never made any contact with them and all but one were from the USA, but I would sometimes just watch. Sometimes I would even bid against them! But I'd planned one day to get in touch with them, and then the US postal service cleverly decided to scrap their international surface mail option (starting from USD$4-6) and gouge international buyers USD$25 and upwards, so my eBay buying from the USA stopped. I remember one ID in particular bought exactly the same types of lamps as me, but one day she stopped and never bought again - did she pass away, what happened to her collection, etc??? But that's all in the past - THIS is now the future. Please get in touch. I hope to create a community of collectors from around the world and we can all work together and help each other. We could perhaps co-ordinate the buying of lamps together, have them shipped using the most economical method to the closest member, then ship in one lot and distribute them. Or not outbid each other on auctions. Or anything else. I'm sure that many of you out there will also be happy to contribute to this unique website resource, and I welcome it - to share knowledge and information or send me photos to add to the database. If I can't achieve the goal of having one of every lamp, then at least I would like to complete the database. You'll all benefit too.
And one final word for the record: there is no intention to sell any part of the collection, ever (except perhaps to trade with other collectors for the purpose of expanding the collection). Creating this website has now forced me to think about succession planning too - what to do with the collection after I'm gone. I'm only around 50 so hopefully plenty of time left. But I guess I'll have to observe my two kids' reactions to this site and the lamps to see if either of them are interested in keeping or continuing the collection. They are both around 10 years old and have never seen the collection, they have only heard a few sparse mentions of it. I would not want the collection to be broken apart and sold off piece by piece, I think the world would lose a significant collection and piece of history.
Well, that's about it for the history of this collection and the intricate and colourful timeline getting to where things are now. Hopefully that was an interesting read for you. Upcoming articles, hopefully not too far into the future, will focus on lamp information and documenting of "The Great Unboxing." So stay tuned.