Contact Us

Karen Michelle Guido
4255 A1A South Suite 11 PMB 175
St. Augustine, FL 32080

phone (904) 471-3226
email karen@antiquetiles.com

About Me

My name is Karen Michelle Guido, I have been an antiques dealer, specializing in antique tiles for over 25 years.

My passion for research is what originally got me interested in dealing in tiles. When I first started buying tiles there were virtually no reference materials available.  Oh, there were certainly some books on Delft and Portuguese tiles - but that's not what I was finding for sale. I was finding "unmarked" tiles - or I thought they were unmarked.  It turns out that the patterns of raised or recessed lines, bars, dots, squares and triangles on the tile backs are the marks; at least for many of the antique English tiles. Sometimes the American tiles would have initials, or numbers and letters on the back.  Often times, absolutely nothing.

So the second quest became the hunt for tile reference material.  I collected anything I could find, which included too many pottery books with 1 or 2 pages of tile stuff. Some pieces of old catalogs, or catalogs copied so many times that they were almost illegible.  I was always squinting to figure out what the picture on the tile was - is that a flower or a person?

Since there was little out there in the printed world, I began to photograph everything- every back, every signature, and of course the front of every tile!  In the long run, I'm not sure this really helped - mostly because in the world of antique tiles, there are not as many duplicates as you might think. I have a heck of a photographic record now though, and it's certainly been extremely interesting looking back on what I've had pass through my hands. Yes, I'm still photographing all my stock - at least now it's digital as well as 35mm!