This is a lovely vintage paperweight entitled Uranus.
It is an early and much rarer weight and is dated on the base 1971.
It was designed by Colin Terris and made by Peter Holmes: both have their etched signatures on the based.
It is one of a series of four designs of the Planets - they were sold as a set of four. Other ones in the set included Jupiter, Neptune, and Earth.
This is from the second planets series - the first one was released in 1969 and featured: Mars, Mercury, Saturn, and Venus. These planet-themed weights were the first-ever sets issued by Caithness and are important items in the history of Caithness weights.
This one is 458 out of a limited edition of only 500 weights.
Both sets were fully subscribed - and issued with high ticket prices.
They were very popular with the American market and many are now in specialist museum collections Stateside, such as the Bergstrom-Mahler Museum of Glass (Wisconsin) which holds the largest, most representative collection of glass paperweights in the world. The museum collection contains a nearly encyclopedic collection of Caithness paperweights produced between 1968 and 2002.
The weight imagines what the surface of the planet might look like - with its dark blue ground and blue and white speckled waves on the base surface inside the glass. Inside the clear dome, float three large red glass globules and tiny halos of controlled bubbles,
I have taken lots of images for you to look at all the details in close-up.
In lovely vintage condition with no damages - inscribed with issue numbers to the base etc.
Height is 2 1/2 inches - and with a diameter of 3 1/4 inches.
Unpacked it is nearly 800 grams.
Again, this is not such a common weight - and certainly an interesting historical one! This is reflected in my asking price.
UK Postage will be £4.95 with Royal Mail Recorded Postage. This will be applied at check out.