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Glassmaking

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  • subtitle: Espionage and the Secrets of Craft on the Island of Murano

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Image of glass recovered from a ship wrecked circa 1025 near Serçe Limanı, Turkey. Image via the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

Glass from when glass was precious. Recovered from a shipwreck from c. 1025 near Serçe Limanı, Turkey. Image via the Institute of Nautical Archaeology.

As anyone from Alfred the Great to Dr. Moreau will tell you, an island is a great place for defending secrets. Italy’s Venetian Lagoon — and in particular the island of Murano — has been trading off its closely-guarded glassmaking methods for over a millennium (the earliest works dating back to the reign of King Alfred). It’s a true cottage industry, one that has enjoyed no less then two periods of global domination of the decorative glass market.

In that time, the island of Murano and its skilled workforce have been venerated, ostracized, plundered, restored, canonized, brought under the control of numerous empires and much imitated, but never bettered for sheer craftsmanship.

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Museum of Obsolete Objects

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  • subtitle: An Obituary for Dead Technologies

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Here at Kaufmann Mercantile we can really get behind some tried and true technologies. Coffee makers that don’t need to be plugged in. Pens, pencils, paper. Wood instead of plastic; sea shells instead of plastic. Enter the Museum of Obsolete Objects to remind us of the technologies that have fallen by the wayside. Some of them are irretrievably obsolete and happily so (even if you could get into a time machine to the 1980s to pick up a floppy disk drive, would you want to?).

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Show Card Writing

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  • subtitle: Handmade Typography and How to Do it Yourself

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A vintage sample of showcard writing

Mixed type and tense lines. From Simplified Show Card Writing, Carl Rousseau Havighorst, 1942 via The Annie Show via Newhouse Books

This post is an appreciation of one type of hand drawn signage: show card writing. Not Route 66 roadside signage, not painted shop signs, gold leaf work or that by walldogs, not barns, not hot rod lettering, nor Wayne White (the guy who paints words on cheap oil paintings like the cover of Lamchop’s Nixon album); though they all have a place in this discussion and are cool as hell in their own way. This post is about those ephemeral show cards that you might find in the window of an off-price clothing store (of old) or in a grocery store advertising “Ground Chuck — $1.69 lb.” in blue and red letters eight inches high.

But what’s the fun in just watching the past recede further into the distance? Keep reading for links to learning the art of show card writing (or keeping artists alive by commissioning it, if that’s more your style).

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Automata

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  • subtitle: For the Love of Pulleys, Ratchets and Gears

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It never ceases to amaze me that there are whole genres of human exertion waiting to be discovered. Automata is a world with a history dating back to what seems like the beginning of time, when King Solomon decided to have a throne built surrounded by bowing automaton animals and a brass eagle swooping over to crown him each time he sat down. Technically self-automated machines, the mesmerizing world of automata never seems entirely useful, something opposite the goal-oriented, computer-bound, non-movement of many of our lives. (The video below comes via Cabinet of Wonders)

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Futures of Yore

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  • subtitle: Paleofuture's Catalogue of the World as it Would Never Be

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Detail of going to the opera in the year 2000, as imagined in 1882. Paleofuture.

Going to the opera in the year 2000, as imagined by Albert Robida in 1882. Image via Paleofuture.

Ever wonder about the material dreams and desires of our forebears? What they wanted, which problems they were certain would be solved by hope, the ingenuity of their fellow men, and the passage of time? The excellent Paleofuture blog knows. It seems the desire to shop online was recorded as early as 1967, apparently at a time when strict gender roles were ossified, not fossilized. (See video below of shopping housewife, then anxious husband receiving the handwritten bill in the “his” of their his-and-hers companion consoles.)

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Shear Trade

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  • subtitle: Scheming Industrialists, Xenophobes and Scissor Blanks

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Not many of us are overwhelmed with patriotic feelings when we think about scissors but they have been a highly protected manufactured good for much of America’s history. In the tariff act of 1922, the tax on imported scissors was 45%, which was pretty high for that time. In the 1990s, the tariff on “cheap scissors” was 23.6%, which is super high for our era of low tariffs.

The Free-Trade Bugaboo Circa 1880s

The Free-Trade Bugaboo, 1880s, by Charles Jay Taylor, Courtesy of Georgia State University Library

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