Home preserving is a gracious response to the abundance of a particular place. Preservers are often moved to their work by where they are: a new house with what turns out to be a lemon tree, a neighbor with extra apples too tart to eat out of hand, or the fortune of a favorite hike with a hidden huckleberry patch. Similarly, Johann Carl Weck, founder of the J. WECK Company, manufacturer of the iconic WECK jars, was also inspired by place.
Weck was a teetotaler; he abstained from alcohol and was also a vegetarian. Born in 1841 outside of Frankfurt, he later lived in the historic region of Baden, now part of the German state of Baden-Württemberg, on the east bank of the Rhine River. A region of mountains and fertile valleys, southern Baden was a preserver’s paradise of plum, apple, and cherry orchards and was even well suited for growing walnuts and producing honey.
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The Stapler
Staplers are all too often saddled with the trappings of the mundane. We think of them—inaccurately, I’d now argue—as standardized tools for monotonous tasks.
Image courtesy of History of the Heart.
I turned to Chad Lemke, stapler enthusiast and collector, to learn about the rich history and design quirks of paper staplers. Although he eschews the word “expert,” since 2007, Lemke has maintained Stapler of the Week, a site that “examines the memories and histories associated with” a single stapler from his collection each week. The site has been on hiatus for the past year, since as Lemke says “my one-year-old gets most of my waking attention these days,” but, as a childhood collector or erasers, I was delighted that he sat down with me via email to share a little of the vast world of staplers.
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