Little has changed about the humble button since it first began being used functionally in the 13th century. From the Mongol invasion of Europe to last week’s annual Oregon Brewers Festival, buttons have held it together.

The half-inch circles that keep our shirts together don’t have much character and are mass-produced out of cheap resin.

But some people see buttons — particularly old and hard-to-find ones — as things of beauty. And they have a community that buys, trades and sells them. That community converges in Portland next week for the National Button Society Convention, which runs Aug. 4-10.

The community of collectors is largely made up of women in their 50s and 60s. Some of the buttons they collect date back to the 1700s and can sell for upwards of $1,000. Most are far cheaper, priced between $10 and $15. The buttons are art, painted with scenes of history and fables, engraved with ornate designs and decorated with glass, rhinestones or just about anything else. Their variations are endless.

The hobby is steeped in history. Buttons made 100 years ago are still considered modern. It’s the really old ones that serious collectors are after. They are artifacts of fashion history and reflections of the time they were made.

“There is nothing that happened in the last 400 years not represented on a button,” said Jocelyn Howells, an expert on buttons and button collecting.

Howells, 77, has been collecting buttons since 1979, when she bought her grandmother’s collection of about 500,000 buttons from her mother. She had never been interested in collecting before then. As a teenager, her grandmother tried to get her involved in the hobby, but Howells said she was more interested in music, schoolwork and boys.

An Oregon native who grew up in Albany and now lives in Happy Valley, Howells is a speaker at this year’s national convention.

The event is expected to draw several hundred button society members and local visitors, as well as button vendors from around the world. This year’s theme is mid-century modern.

Howells said she’s known as a rebel in the button society.

At conventions, buttons of the same variety can be submitted to be judged competitively. Howell fought for years to get buttons from uniforms allowed in competition. She has written two books on buttons, the first of which was published in 2003 and was specifically dedicated to identifying plastic buttons.

Before her book was published, plastic buttons were categorized into only a few categories. Howells said they were largely referred to as “just plastics,” and that drove her nuts.

Howells said she studied plastics for 10 years to be able to identify 13 varieties of plastic buttons with “all six senses,” (the sixth being common sense). When she published her findings in the button society’s handbook, she said her work was not well received.

“At the beginning, I was sabotaged, I was fought,” Howells said. “They tried year after year to turn over what I had done."

Now in her late 70s, Howells said she has a hard time getting around and is slowing down on collecting. She said she wants to finish curating her collection, sell the rest of her books and continue to mentor other collectors online.

Clubs across the state meet monthly, from Medford to Portland. The contingency of collectors is fairly small. Across the state, the Oregon State Button Society has around 150 members said Lori Franz, the publicity and membership chair of the state society.

The National Button Society has about 3,000 members, she said. Membership has shrunk over the years, but more collect without belonging to a club thanks to the Internet. Pinterest and Facebook provide room for the community to connect and buy buttons online.

On Pinterest, antique buttons are often grouped by color and displayed in satisfying, orderly grids or comfortable piles. On Facebook, button groups are often lumped in with jewelry, lace and other handmade items.

Franz, a collector herself, said she often points people to Pinterest when she’s trying to explain her hobby. She said collectors also use eBay and Etsy along with a forum called Button Bytes. They don’t have a name for themselves aside from collectors, but Franz said she sometimes liked to call them “button babes.”

Lori Franz, 63, sits at the kitchen table of her Tualatin home. She estimated that she has about 3,000 buttons in her collection.Photo courtesy of Lori Franz

Online, collectors can ask questions about their buttons or tell others what kind of buttons they’re looking for. The National Button Society began in 1938. Franz said that before the internet, from the 1940s to the 1970s, collectors would take out ads in the National Button Bulletin to tell people what kind of buttons they were looking for.

Collecting buttons initially became popular in the late 1800s, Franz said. She said girls often collected glass buttons and it was said that if she collected 1,000, she was ready for a suitor. Collecting became popular again during the Great Depression as a cheap hobby. Out of that, Franz said button collecting became increasingly popular into the 1950s.

Franz began collecting buttons 10 years ago when a member of her book club invited her to a meeting. She said she thought the woman was a little nutty, but after seeing the buttons and meeting the other women, she was all in. Now, she estimates she has about 3,000 in her collection.

At her home in Tualatin, there’s not much evidence of the thousands of buttons. She said she knows people who have button boards lining their hallways, and as much as she loves the idea, she knows her husband would never go for it.

A few button-themed decorations were in her living room, but they are a surprise for the national button convention, so she asked that they not be described or photographed.

Instead, her collection lives in her guest bedroom, ‘the button room’ as she calls it. Most were put away in small bins and boxes labeled with the type of button within. She keeps more in the closet.

Her collection includes a button from the mid-1700s hand-painted with watercolors. She bought it at the national convention two years ago in Denver. The seller told her it came from a collection owned by a member of King Louis XVI’s court or King Louis himself. Another button in her collection came from the estate of Carroll O’Connor, best known for his role as Archie Bunker in “All in the Family.”

She also keeps button reference books like “The Big Book of Buttons,” a huge red encyclopedia. The books are difficult to find and sell for hundreds of dollars online. Franz has pages tabbed and marked with labels such as “fables” or “theatre.”

Franz flipped through one book and came across a page of buttons from the 1800s. She warned that they were inappropriate. One button on the page showed a man riding an enormous penis like a man on horseback, reins and all.

“You won’t see that at Jo-Ann’s,” Franz said.

-- Peter Talbot

ptalbot@oregonian.com

503-221-5772; @petejtalbot

Visit subscription.oregonlive.com/newsletters to get Oregonian/OregonLive journalism delivered to your email inbox.