Malcolm - the "twice the price of the fiddle" is, I thought, quite obviously something that the "bow snob" would quote to impress a student - or anyone with a lesser bow than his/hers - with the necessity of having a "better bow" than is common. As I noted, it's seldom actually observed.

The earlier "Baroque bows" had very stiff "bowed sticks" with no screw/nut to tighten the string. The string was wrapped around the fingers of the hand holding the bow to provide tension for the hair. While there were a few "transition period" bows with the classic "high arch" that had various mechanisms for tightening the hair, those would be - I would think - quite rare.

It's also unlikely that a Baroque bow would be found accompanying anything but a Baroque violin. It's very difficult to play a modern violin with a Baroque bow, since the modern neck angle is much smaller than for a Baroque violin. It's also quite difficult to play a Baroque violin with a modern bow. All of the old "classic" violins, most specifically the Amati family and Stradivari violins have had the neck reset to "modern angle" in order to be playable with modern bows. (There is rumored to be one Strad with original neck angle, but it's in a museum somewhere and is otherwise unplayable.)

It's not too uncommon to see bows in pawn shops and/or antique malls where someone has left the strings under tension and the "stick" has taken a permanent ugly set. Re-bending one of these is not a particularly difficult task, but it requires some setup that relatively few publicly accessible fix-it shops are likely to have, and is seldom worthwhile unless the bow has the potential to be a little better than average. Only someone with experience in re-bending a few has much chance of evaluating a "badly bent bow" to know whether working on it is worth the effort. More common shops may be able (willing) to "tweak" a tip on one that's in the more common condition of "only a little off."

Most mass sellers have cheap bows that probably shouldn't be used by anyone. If you're just wanting something to see if you like the instrument enough to try to learn to play, it doesn't take too much of a jump up into better quality to get a usable bow, but the prices may go up a little faster than the quality does. Advice from someone you know who plays is the most practical approach (and particularly from one who has a few students perhaps). If possible, you should get a knowledgeable friend to look at what you've got and to look at what you propose to add to your kit.

If you don't know someone who can advise you, take the fiddle and bow to a session, and ask a fiddler to play it for you during a break. (Be sure to emphasize that you can stand criticism, and be prepared to run very fast or to stand and defend yourself.)

John