Mantorp Glasbruk

In 1969 Frank Höglind moved from Lindshammar to Mantorp, a small town in Mjölby municipality in Östergötland, with the dream of running a furnace of his own. Three more families followed him, and the result was Mantorp Glasbruk, a small Swedish hand-blowing glassworks that produced drinking glasses, bowls, paperweights, vases and animal figures for more than five decades. When a local paper visited in 2021, it called the fact that the works was still running in its 52nd year unusual.

Museum records from the early 1970s show pieces acquired directly from the glassworks in 1974, among them bowls and drinking glasses made in 1973. Many carry a rectangular paper label reading "Mantorp Sweden", and some add a designer credit. The glass itself is usually thick and tactile, blown into moulds or freehand, then ground or cut at the rim, with clear, blue and amber among the colours that turn up most often on the secondary market.

Only a few individual names are firmly attached to the output. Amie Stålkrantz-Lindqvist is credited on a cylindrical mould-blown bowl, a set of drinking glasses with a matt-ground flower in the base and a hanging lamp, all dated to 1973. Other museum entries name the people at the furnace and the grinding wheel: Gunnar Karlsson, described as a master glassblower, for bottles and vases; Stig Ferm for paperweights; Hans Holm for animal and fish figures; and Verner Jonsson as the cutter of a checkered bowl from 1976. Candle lanterns designed by Gunnar Muskos, which dealers date to the 1980s, also appear with Mantorp labels.

The best-known name of the later decades is Gert Brink. He started in glass as a teenager, worked at Reijmyre until 1978, when that company began to be sold off, spent some time at a lamp factory and has been at Mantorp since 1983, running the works himself. By 2013 he was producing alone, with his partner packing the orders, and local press noted that the business was profitable but had nobody to take it over, as skilled glassblowers were nearly impossible to find. Output at that time included candlesticks, and by 2021 oil lamps were among the pieces made at the furnace. The works also let visitors try glassblowing under his guidance.

In November 2025 the regional newspaper Corren reported that the glassworks would close after Christmas, with Brink, then 76, saying he had worked overtime for many years and the remaining stock sold to buyers in Järna. If the closure went ahead as announced, the glass made in Mantorp since 1969 is now a finished body of work.

For collectors, the paper label is a useful first clue but not a precise one. Because the works kept making similar pieces over five decades and many items were never signed by a designer, dating usually relies on form, colour and the few documented series, such as the 1970s designs credited to Stålkrantz-Lindqvist.