At the Vintage Optical Shop our goal is one and simple: provide genuine vintage and antique eyeglasses that is suitable for prescription lenses and daily use. Many of the vintage eyeglasses we get do not qualify as such for one reason or another and we therefore do not list them. With newer plastic frames such as vintage cat eye glasses on other 1960's eyeglasses such as Horn rimmed glasses the issues these frames can have often relate to the plastic being too brittle to have new lenses placed in them. The frames will break while having new prescription lenses put in. Being that we advertise all our frames as prescription ready we would not sell such frames on our site.
With 1950's glasses frames such as Browline eyeglasses (also know as combination glasses) the issue often can be the fact the plastic brow connection to the metal chassis has not conformed well with the metal chassis, resulting in the plastic part popping off and they are therefore not suitable for daily use. This is a shame since browline glasses are very popular but are not too easy for us to acquire genuine vintage browline glasses. There are modern day replicas made by companies such as Shuron but they are just not the same. Many of the browline eyeglasses that have survived as the ones that are fully aluminum. With older antique eyeglasses the issues are different. Sometimes the temples are broken on the older frames. Sometimes the nose pads are cracked and are riveted in place which means they cannot be easily replaced. Sometimes the screws are stripped making it impossible to replace the lenses. With pince nez the issues are generally a spring that has lost it's tension. Being that we only offer frames suitable for prescription lenses we do not sell any frames with these issues. We inspect all of our frames to ensure they are of good quality and can last the test of time.
We have been largely focusing on vintage cat eye glasses from the 196's, as well as many other early 1900's eyeglasses such as windsor eyeglasses or John Lennon Glasses, as well as other cable temple eyeglasses. We sell lots of vintage rimless eyeglass frames, some from the late 1800's with saddle bridges but some from later on, 1930's eyeglasses and 1940's eyeglasses. We generally write and blog a lot about the frames that we sell. Another type of frames we do not sell are really old antique eyeglasses that are mainly suitable for collectors and museums. We focus on vintage eyeglass frames from late 1800's to the 1970's but there are a few hundred years of antique spectacles from the years predating our frames that we do not generally sell. The result of this is that we do not write about these older antique spectacles as often as we would like. We have recently decided to change this and will start writing more about older antique spectacles. Stay tuned!