It's Your Turn

 

QUESTION: I’ve always loved playing board games. When I was a kid, my family would have game nights. Each member of my family take turns choosing the games we played. While we played more modern games, I’ve always been fascinated by antique board games. How did board games get their start? What were some of the more popular games in the 19th and early 20th centuries? If I were to collect old board games, which ones would be the best to collect?

ANSWER: Collecting board games can be fun. The shear number of games produced during nearly 100 years of game production offers a wide variety of games to collect. Many people who collect games collect the ones they played as children. It’s a great place to start.

People have been playing games since ancient Egypt. The Romans loved to bet and rolling dice was popular. By the Middle Ages, playing cards was all the rage. Games became more sophisticated by the 17th century, as backgammon caught on. The Industrial Revolution and the introduction of electricity enabled the middle class to have more free time and by the late 19th century, parlor games, especially board games. The reliable light source encouraged people to seek evening amusements.

One of the most popular of these amusements was the game of checkers. While the more elite were more inclined to play chess, everyone else played checkers, often while sitting out on the porch on a summer’s eve or around the pot-bellied stove in the local country store in winter. While commercial manufacturers produced checkerboards, those that collectors love most are the handmade versions of light and dark wood inlaid in a contrasting pattern. 

Much the same can be said of backgammon and Parcheesi boards, some of which were made of glass with the board design painted in reverse on the back. Many of the game boards were beautiful works of art, with bold designs and bright colors, featuring fanciful characters or outrageous cartoons, often based on nursery rhymes, fairy tales or stories plucked from the headlines.

The counters, playing pieces, that people used to play these games range from the plain wooden circles of checkers and backgammon to elaborately carved pieces of exotic woods, jade and other semiprecious stones, and ivory for chess.

Board games offer the greatest variety for collectors. Most board games involve a race to the finish between two or more players who move their pieces along a printed track at a rate determined by the throw of a pair of dice, the turn of a numbered spinner, or the selection of cards.

In the 16th century, the Italians played Goose, the earliest known board game. But it wasn’t until the 19th century that board games existed in greater numbers. From about 1870 to 1960, when watching television gained popularity, manufacturers produced thousands of board games for the market. Some didn’t quite make it out of the gate while others gained phenomenal success.

The Mansion of Happiness, a game with a religious theme, first appeared in 1843 and was still popular over 40 years later in the 1880s. Winning, based on the Puritan view that success could be achieved through Christian deeds and goodness, required players to advance by landing on spaces denoting virtues like piety and humility and move backward when landing on spaces like cruelty and ingratitude. 

In 1860, The Checkered Game of Life rewarded players for mundane activities such as attending college, marrying, and getting rich. Daily life rather than eternal life became the focus of board games. The game was the first to focus on secular virtues rather than religious virtues, and sold 40,000 copies its first year.

By the 1880s, many games had a rags-to-riches theme. In Game of the District Messenger Boy, players are rewarded for landing on spots with attributes like accuracy and neatness and deducted for loitering.

Most games originated in New York City, as it was the center of the board game industry. The Game of Playing Department Store from 1898 showed what a novel concept it was for Americans to do all their shopping under one roof. Round the World With Nellie Bly from 1890, illustrated the Victorian fascination with travel and exploration, while Rival Policeman from 1896 used as its base the real-life story of a time when New York had two competing police departments.

Board games tell a lot about the culture in the United States at different times in its history from the mid 19th century to the mid 20th century. 

Probably the all-time most popular game to this day is Monopoly. Originally conceived in the late 1890s under a different name as a game of the poor versus the rich, it was mostly a game with rules and game boards that players customized themselves. Sometimes they used a piece of oil cloth for the board and whatever little objects they could find for the game pieces. But it wasn’t until 1935 that Charles Darrow, a broke and out-of-work man in southeastern Pennsylvania, took the game idea, using various concepts created by players over time, and packaged it into a product that he sold through Wanamaker’s Department Store in Philadelphia. While many accounts claim Darrow as the inventor, he wasn’t. But he eventually sold the game to Parker Brothers, the largest producer of board games in America at the time, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Collectors have a lot of reasons for collecting board games, but one of the main ones is the artistic and often complicated graphics which adorn the boards and box covers. Game manufacturers lithographed the graphics onto the boards in black and white, then carefully had low-paid young women hand tint them. But by the 1880s, chromolithography made it possible to produce multicolored boards. Some were faithful images of Victorian dress and customs while others were more abstract. In either case, the game’s box cover was what sold it. And even today, if a game’s box is lost or damaged, most collectors won’t purchase it. Ironically, the absence of game pieces, cards, dice, and spinners isn’t that important, though will detract from the game’s value.

Even though manufacturers produced thousands of games, not all that many survive in good condition and even fewer in pristine condition because nearly makers used cardboard and paper to produce them. Board game and moisture are a bad combination. 

From 1880 to 1950, three companies dominated the market for board games. One of the earliest was W & S.B. Ives Company of Salem, Massachusetts. Ives developed the game with the longest name—Pope and Pagan, or the Missionary Campaign, or the Siege of the Stronghold of Satan by the Christian Army. Like many other late 19th-century board games, Pope and Pagan had a religious theme. Board games of the time were meant to be educational and not just for amusement. Some taught geography or simple bookkeeping or social values, such as honesty and a respect for hard work.

Two other major board game producers were McLoughlin Brothers of New York City and Parker Brothers of Salem, Massachusetts. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about "folk art" in the 2023 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Rustic Can be Beautiful

QUESTION: Recently I bought a pair of chairs at an outdoor antique show that seem to have been made of rough-hewn logs and branches. The dealer said they came from the Adirondack Mountains in New York State. They’re well-built and with a couple of pillows on each are rather comfortable. What can you tell me about this style of chairs?

ANSWER: Your chairs are what’s known as rustic furniture, also known as Adirondack furniture, even though it wasn’t restricted to just the Adirondack Mountains.

Rustic furniture is furniture made of sticks, twigs, or logs for a natural look. The term “rustic” came from the Latin “rusticus,” meaning “peasant”.

The idea for rustic furniture came about in the late 18th century at the beginning of the back-to-nature movement, a change from the world of classic, predictable furniture patterns to one of more fanciful design using natural materials.  

Little summer shelters appeared in city gardens, often covered in vines or surrounded by trees and shrubs. These summerhouses also provided a small green refuge that shut out the discomfort and ugliness of city life. 

Designers copied nature's lines in drawings for chairs and settees for these shelters and the garden paths around them. Their plans called for gnarled, distorted limbs of shrubs and trees to make a chair or bench, instead of the usual marble or plain wooden seats. Gardens, themselves, became more picturesque and less formal, with curving paths taking the place of straight ones. Designers strategically placed rustic chairs, benches, arbors and gates throughout the plantings. 

The rustic furniture movement reached its peak during the mid- to late-19th century. In the 1870s, several American firms specialized in rustic furniture. Adirondack craftsmen produced high quality pieces for new woodland camps of wealthy New Yorkers. These included Camp Pine Knot, Kamp Kill Kare, Camp Uncas and Great Camp Sagamore. The National Park Service also adopted the style for its park lodges. The first and largest manufacturer of such furniture was Old Hickory Furniture Co., established in 1890.

Although basic living conditions were the rule in the camps and cottages that sprung up  in the mountains, the original coarse, primitive furniture evolved into fanciful and rustic as camp owners updated their amenities. 

By the late 19th century, America’s millionaires filled these camp resorts, and although they considered themselves naturalists, they dressed and lived formally in the midst of the rustic furniture, for they had no intention of roughing it.

Some of these naturalists set up their own camps with tents and log cabins and built rustic furniture for them or had local craftsmen do it for them. Eventually, the log cabins became large log houses with all the latest amenities. Soon they became known as compounds or family camps.

Typical pieces of rustic furniture included chairs, love seats, tables, desks, smoking stands, clocks, chest of drawers, rockers, coat racks, mirror frames, beds and lamps.

Rustic outdoor furniture filled the porches of these camp houses and spilled onto the grass. Couches and chairs made of rough pieces of local woods, holding loose cushions, adorned the sitting rooms. Even the beds showed off the rustic style, often with fanciful patterns on the head and foot boards. 

Rustic furniture had a functional style and was made of organic materials, such as the tree or shrub limbs and roots or the trunks of saplings indigenous to the area of the maker. Although roughly made, the style was often sophisticated and imaginative. The more knots there were in the limbs, the more the furniture makers favored them. They even left the bark on the wood whenever possible to give each piece more texture and individuality.

Many of the rustic styles reflected the personality of their maker, with techniques such as chip carving, silver or gold brushwork, milk paint, peeled bark and other decorative enhancements. But people often referred to some rustic furniture as primitive because it displayed a lack of craftsmanship.

Furniture makers used two basic types of rustic-furniture construction—bentwood, for which they harvested fresh sticks or steamed them to make them supple, then bent into a variety of structures and decorative shapes and twig work, consisting of straight, curved, or forked sticks assembled into structures and decorative shapes within a structure. Sometimes, they employed both types in the same piece. Some rustic furniture makers also used mortice and tenon construction while others simply nailed or screwed pieces members together.

For their furniture, makers used many different woods, including willow, hickory, mountain laurel, and Alaska cedar. In the Deep South, some occasionally used palm fronds.

Makers used large, gnarly roots in their furniture designs, making them into table legs and chair arms. To produce a striking veneer for their pieces, furniture makers preferred birch, a slender tree with bark that peeled in strips. These pieces quickly became known for their geometric designs made of the white birch bark veneer, especially on case furniture, such as chests and cabinets. Also, many of the intricate veneered designs included various kinds of split twigs, carefully chosen by color to form patterns. 

Unlike their Adirondack counterparts, Appalachian furniture makers took pride in knowing how to get wood to work for the intricate twists, bends and weaving for their furniture designs. They knew just when and how to bend saplings while they were still growing, letting nature do some of the work before they were ready to use the wood. They preferred laurel, hickory, and willow because of their flexibility and strength. They built their furniture with graceful loops and interwoven curves, weaving each piece of wood to create tension, resulting in a hidden strength disguised by the fragile look of the design.

Today, rustic pieces often appear at higher-end antique shows. Occasionally, they appear at flea markets. But people consigned a lot of pieces to the bonfire after they went out of fashion in the mid-20th century. So prices tend to be on the high side because of the uniqueness of the pieces. Twig rockers can sell for $150 and up, while lounges and settees can go over $2,000.

Case pieces—chests and cabinets—rarely come on the market and when they do, their prices are exceptionally high, often in the four and five figure range. The most common pieces are various chairs and plant stands, priced anywhere from $75 to $600. 

As the 20th century moved forward, individual craftsmen found it hard to keep up with the volume of orders, so factories opened to meet the need. Business remained brisk for the rural craftsmen until the 1940s and by the 1950s, rustic furniture was no longer popular. 

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "The World of Art Nouveau" in the 2022 Spring Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

The Wonderful World of Oz

 

QUESTION: Ever since I was a little kid, I’ve enjoyed the story of the Wizard of Oz I looked forward every Spring to the televising of the award winning 1939 film. As an adult, I ran across a copy of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz at a book sale. I had no idea that the author, L. Frank Baum, wrote so many books about the Land of Oz. So I began to collect Wizard of Oz memorabilia, including copies of Baum’s books. Can you tell me where Baum got his idea for the Wizard of Oz? And how collectible is Oz memorabilia?

ANSWER: Most people associate the Wizard of Oz with the 1939 movie of the same name. But the character goes back even further in the works of L. Frank Baum. 

Children looked forward to birthdays and Christmases when they could unwrap their favorite gift—a L. Frank Baum book recounting magical places, especially the Land of Oz. Children couldn’t get enough of them. 

Lyman Frank Baum was born on May 15, 1856, in Chittenango, New York. A prolific writer who wrote under six different pen names as well as his own, his first published book was a guide to raising fancy Hamburg chickens. When Baum wrote The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in 1898, no publisher would accept it. He insisted on color illustrations and publishers didn’t want to take a chance on the expense of that. In 1900, Baum finally paid the firm of George M. Hill in Chicago to publish it.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz filled the fairytale niche in American children's literature. Baum worked with the book's illustrator, W.W. Denslow, composer Paul Tietjens and Julian Mitchell to create a traveling musical stage play based on the book. Debuting in 1902, it brought its two leading men instant stardom. People flocked to see Fred Stone as the Scarecrow and David Montgomery as the Tin Man, in this production that featured chorus girls and songs about football. Imogene the Cow replaced Dorothy’s dog Toto.

After The Wonderful Wizard of Oz succeeded, children begged for more Oz books. Baum wrote at least one Oz book a year from 1904 on, at the same time completing other juvenile series. In 1910, he tried to end the Oz series with its sixth book, The Emerald City of Oz, by ceasing communication between Oz and the 20th-century world. Fortunately, the silence didn’t last. Baum published a new Oz book in 1913 and every year after until his final book appeared posthumously in 1920.

Despite success during his lifetime, Baum was unable to keep money in his pocket. He made a few bad business choices, including backing several Broadway flops, running a failed newspaper, and going bankrupt while working as a shopkeeper at his own Baum Bazaar in Aberdeen, South Dakota. He understood people having a hard time and gave everyone credit.

Following Baum's death in 1919, his publisher commissioned Ruth Plumly Thompson to continue the story of Oz from 1921 to 1939. The illustrator for the series, John R. Neill, wrote three Oz books, and more appeared off and on until the 40th book in 1963. 

The 1939 film, The Wizard of Oz, was a huge success and generated enough collectibles from 1939 to the present to keep the most ardent Oz collectors happy. The variety of Oz collectibles included such items as a metal lunch box with original Munchkin signatures, sets of playing cards, Tarot cards, movie posters, cookie cutters, bookmarks, character glasses, coffee mugs, refrigerator magnets, Oz T-shirts, dolls, nesting figurines, books, buttons, paper ephemera, records, games, Japanese Hallmark Christmas ornaments, collector plates, jewelry, and handmade tiles. 

There’s even edible Oz----a can of funnel cake mix bearing the Tin Man's face and a bag of rainbow-colored marshmallows.

Wizard of Oz so ingrained itself in popular culture, memorabilia can be found everywhere, almost every day. It appears in live and online auctions, on eBay, in antique shops and flea markets, or in one of several Oz-themed shops. 

Some Oz collectors with unlimited budgets vie to own a piece of the historic movie. The dress worn by Judy Garland in the 1939 film, auctioned at Bonhams in London in 2005,  sold for the equivalent of $267,000 to a British collector. 

In August 2005, a thief stole one of four pairs of ruby slippers used in the 1939 film from the Judy Garland Museum in Grand Rapids, Minnesota. The slippers, on loan from a private collection in California, had an insured value of $1 million. 

One of the hottest collectibles is a little jewel box given out at the 100th showing of the movie that features a picture of the Cowardly Lion.

Learn more about the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz by reading "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" in #TheAntiquesAlmanac.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the "Pottery Through the Ages" in the 2022 Winter Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

The Jewelry of Royalty

 

QUESTION: I recently saw an exquisite brooch made by Cartier at a charity antique show. I always associated Cartier with fine watches. Can you tell me more about Cartier and how the company got its start in the jewelry making business?

ANSWER: While most people associate the name Cartier with fine watches, the company actually began repairing fine jewelry and later creating it. 

Louis-François Cartier founded Cartier in Paris in 1847 when he took over the workshop of his master, Adolphe Picard. In 1874, Louis-François' son Alfred Cartier took over the company, but it was Alfred's sons, Louis, Pierre and Jacques, who set up their own design and manufacturing operation and established the brand name worldwide.

Louis ran the Paris branch, moving to the Rue de la Paix in 1899. He was responsible for some of the company's most celebrated designs and exotic orientalist Art Deco jewelry, including the colorful "Tutti Frutti" jewels.

Cartier has had a long history of sales to royalty. King Edward VII of Great Britain referred to Cartier as "the jeweler of kings and the king of jewelers" For his coronation in 1902, Edward VII ordered 27 tiaras and issued a royal warrant to Cartier in 1904. Similar warrants soon followed from the courts of Spain, Portugal, Russia and the House of Orleans.

The firm had always had an illustrious clientele, including Henri and Maurice de Rothschilde, Ira Nelson Morris, Florence Blumenthal, Daisy Fellowes, Mrs. Cole Porter and Barbara Streisand.

The Cartier style was diverse, encompassing fashion accessories, as well as jewelry. It was a style which owed less to the prevailing design trends and more to the global travels and interests of the Cartier brothers and their intrigue with novelty. Their pioneering use of the much stronger platinum instead of silver, as a setting for diamonds made it possible to work in such a thin gauge that the diamonds seem to float in space in an intricate embroidery.

Attention to detail saw even the ring bolt catches studded with minute diamonds, and seed pearls on a tasseled pendant exquisitely graded in size.

But Cartier made its jewelry to be adaptable. One diamond fern spray brooch could also be a long corsage, a necklace or a tiara. A central jeweled motif could be removed from a necklace and placed in a brooch setting which, with a tiny screw-driver, was packaged beneath the velvet of its padded box. Long necklaces, known as sautoirs, sometimes contained pendant watches and could be lengthened or shortened, even turned into Brooches were made to be divided, if desired, for wearing on each shoulder.

Pierre Cartier established the New York City branch in 1909, moving in 1917 to 653 Fifth Avenue, the Neo-Renaissance mansion of Morton Freeman Plant (son of railroad tycoon Henry B. Plant) and designed by architect C.P.H. Gilbert. Cartier bought it from the Plants in exchange for $100 in cash and a double-stranded natural pearl necklace valued at the time at $1 million. By this time, Cartier had branches in London, New York and Saint Petersburg. 

By 1910, Cartier had found another medium to work with-pieces of rock crystal, a colorless, hard stone which was carved with foliate scrollwork. Always open to experimenting with materials, the jewelers began using blackened steel as a setting for rubies and diamonds in 1913. 

When the firm started to design its own jewelry, the Art Nouveau style of flowing, floral lines was at its peak. But Cartier chose to look back to historical Renaissance or Neoclassical architectural ornamentation for inspiration. A pendant in the form of an Ionic column, for instance, with scrolls from ancient stonework, is a good example. Cartier had a simplicity of design work with geometric patterns.

A trip to St. Petersburg in 1914 through 1915 and the popularity in the west of Faberge, inspired Cartier's Russian period. The trip was essentially to sell diamond and platinum jewelry and to purchase Russian enameled, gold objets d'art, but a year later Cartier had produced its own Russian style pieces and began exhibiting regularly in Russia, selling pieces to Russian nobility.

After the Russian Revolution, many of Faberge's American and European followers switched to Cartier, and this style continued to be produced until the 1920s.

The overseas influence set a trend in Cartier design. The brothers' admiration of the past led to ancient designs from Egypt, Persia, India, China and Japan being reworked in a modern way. The discovery of the tomb of Tutankhamen in 1922 unleashed worldwide Egyptomania. Cartier produced pieces, such as a vanity box in the form of a sarcophagus. Designers looked to source books and museums, such as the Louvre and the British Museum, for inspiration. 

The collecting instincts of the Cartiers was evident in the way they included ancient fragments in their pieces, such as in a winged scarab brooch which included blue glazed wing pieces which would have been found on the chest of a mummy.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the Sears Catalogue and the items sold in it in "Sears' Book of Bargains" in the 2021 Fall Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Breaking Out the Best for the Holiday Table

 

QUESTION: As the holidays approach, I get out my Oneida silver flatware and polish it up for another joyous season. Beginning with Thanksgiving dinner, I use a setting for 12 that’s been in our family for four generations. Except for the classic beauty of this tableware, I know very little about it. Can you please tell me more about Oneida?

ANSWER: The holidays, especially Thanksgiving, are all about traditions in many families. Your use of your Oneida family heirloom is no exception. But Oneida didn’t always make silver flatware. In fact, at one point early in the company’s existence, it made grizzly bear traps.

Oneida, Ltd. actually began as a utopian religious commune in 1848. At that time, there were several such communities that existed in the northeastern United States. Oneida was one of them. 

John Humphrey Noyes and his followers founded the Oneida Community in Oneida, New York. Members of this Protestant, religious sect referred to themselves as Perfectionists because they believed that spiritual perfection could be achieved by them in this world. This was a common concept among 19th-century utopian communities. Much like the Shakers, members contributed all their worldly goods to the community when they joined it. The community held all possessions in common, and it provided for everyone's needs. They called this practice "Bible communism.''

But the Oneida Community is best known for its unconventional family arrangements. Members practiced what Noyes called complex marriage—every man was married to every woman, just as every woman was married to every man. Although neighbors surrounding the community saw this as "free love,” the Perfectionists defended complex marriage as noble and unselfish, since all were expected to be loving to each other. It discouraged individual relationships. During its early years, the community also discouraged child bearing, but by 1869 when the community had become more prosperous, its elders selected couples with desirable qualities and encouraged them to bear children. John Humphrey Noyes himself fathered several, including sons who were later very active in the affairs of the future company. Oneida, Ltd.

At first the Perfectionists tried to support themselves by farming and by preserving and selling fruits and vegetables. But this didn’t provide sufficient income, so they branched out into several industrial activities. An 1890s ad offered a booklet which told how the community came to make such interesting and incongruous things as delicious preserved fruits and traps for catching grizzly bears, fine sewing and embroidery silk, d steel chains, and beautiful flatware. Let’s face it, not many silver companies started out making traps for grizzly bears.

By 1877, when the Wallingford, Connecticut, branch of the community started making tin-plated spoons, the original Oneida Community was beginning to break up. In 1879, Noyes moved to Canada and members abandoned the concept of complex marriage. In 1880, the assets of the community were distributed to its members in the form of stock in the newly formed corporation, Oneida Community, Limited, making it one of the earliest joint-stock companies in the United States.

The new company, under the leadership of P.B. Noyes, one of the sons of the founder, first moved its silverplate production to Niagara Falls, New York, and later to Sherill, New York, within walking distance of the original Oneida Community property. It began production of silver-plated flatware and hollow-ware in 1899 using the "Community Plate" mark. 

When the community became a corporation, some members found it difficult to adjust to the new business practices and divided into factions, each competing to control the board of directors. But the younger Noyes remained in control and moved the company into manufacturing higher quality wares in sterling silver, including a flatware line called Avalon in 1901. In 1929, it purchased the William A. Rogers Company began producing a lower-quality line of products using that company’s mark. In 1935, the firm changed its name to Oneida, Ltd.

By 1961, Oneida, Ltd. began producing stainless steel flatware. And by the 1980s, Oneida made at least half of all flatware purchased in the United States. At the end of the 20th century, Oneida fell upon tough economic times, becoming the last remaining U.S.-based manufacturer of flatware, knives, forks, and spoons. The resulting economic troubles resulting from 9/11 forced it to close or sell off most of its factories.

It filled for bankruptcy in 2006, and after finally stabilizing, Monomoy Capital Partners, an equity fund based in New York City, acquired it. Today, it services much of the food service industry with both china and flatware.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about the Sears Catalogue and the items sold in it in "Sears' Book of Bargains" in the 2021 Fall Edition, online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.

Product Premiums—An Idea Whose Time Had Come

QUESTION: My grandmother has what she calls a “Larkin” desk. It doesn’t look like a normal desk but more like a tall oak bookshelf with a drop-down writing surface. She remembers her parents acquiring it around 1911.  Can you tell me more about it?

ANSWER: One of the most popular items from the Larkin Company was the drop-front combination bookcase/desk, also known as the Chautauqua desk. This desk became a common piece in homes at the beginning of the 20th Century.

In 1875, John D. Larkin opened a soap factory in Buffalo, New York, where he made two products— a yellow laundry soap he marketed as Sweet Home Soap and a toilet soap he called Crème Oatmeal. He sold both products using wholesalers and retailers. Larking originally sold his Sweet Home Soap to street vendors, who in turn sold it to customers along their routes. By 1878, he had expanded his product line to nine types of soap products.




His brother-in-law, Elbert Hubbard, the eventual founder of the Roycroft Arts and Crafts Community, came up with what he called "The Larkin Idea"—door-to-door sales to private residences. To establish brand identity, Hubbard, inserted a color picture with the company's logo into every box of soap as an incentive for customers to buy more soap. Housewives accumulated and traded these picture cards, and eventually the cards became more elaborate. This concept of offering a gift directly to customers was a new approach to marketing. And by the 1890's, Larkin’s premiums had become an overwhelming success and a vital part of the company’s   marketing plan.

The premiums Larkin offered included handkerchiefs with toilet soap, towels with soap powder, or one-cent coins. Eventually, Larkin inserted certificates into the packaged products which could be redeemed by mail at the company’s Buffalo headquarters. A $10 order of soap resulted in the awarding of a premium with a retail value of the same $10. By 1891 he placed his first wholesale order of items to be given as premiums, $40,000 worth of piano lamps. The next year he acquired 80,000 Morris chairs and 100,000 oak dining chairs—all to be given away with the purchase of soap.

Larkin and Hubbard knew the key to mass merchandising was to eliminate the sales force and sell directly to the consumer via direct-mail catalog. Larkin realized he would be better off if he made not only the products he sold, but also the premiums he distributed. His pitch was that since he manufactured the products he sold, unlike Sears & Roebuck and Montgomery Ward and sold them directly to the consumer, he was eliminating the "middleman" and giving the customer better value for the money. The Larkin Company motto became "Factory to Family." By the end of the 19th century, catalogs jammed people’s mailboxes.

The plan worked. Both his product line and his premium line expanded. By 1893, the Larkin Soap Manufacturing Company was sending semiannual catalogs to 1.5 million customers.

His first venture was the furniture assembly plant in Buffalo that made furniture from parts cut and milled in Tennessee. Here for the first time was a major catalog distributor who actually made the furniture they shipped. Furniture was one of the company’s primary premiums. Since Larkin was appealing to the mass market, he made sure to offer furniture premiums that appealed to ordinary people and not the wealthy.

His most famous premium was his oak drop-front desk with open bottom storage, first appearing in the 1901 catalog, that the company gave as a premium for a $10 purchase of soap. Constructed of either cold or quarter sawn oak plank, assembled with nail and glue construction, with a golden finish, each desk featured applied ash or maple molding and trim and back panels of three-layer plywood. Better desks also had stamped-brass escutcheons and brass hinges on the drop panel. Cheaper ones had iron-butt hinges. A somewhat oval French beveled mirror finished off each piece. Variations included a glass front case with a drop-front desk attached to the side, two glass front cases with a desk in the middle, or simply a drop-front desk with a small open bookcase below the drop and candle stands above it, with a mirror in the high . This small desk reflected the taste and style of the Golden Oak period of American furniture in a form modest enough fit into any middle-class home.

This type of desk became "Everyman's" desk and was a common item in most homes of the period. It became a trendy decorating item and remained so for many years. People began to associate Larkin's name to the form, even though his wasn’t the only company to manufacture them, and so evolved what has become known as the "Larkin Desk." Today, Larkin desks sell on eBay for around $400 and sometimes higher.

John Larkin and Elbert Hubbard not only provided the means for a growing American population to stay clean at a reasonable cost, but they also helped them furnish their homes for free.

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Symbols of Tomorrow

QUESTION: Many years ago I purchased a snowglobe from the 1939 New York World’s Fair that contains a miniature Trylon and Perisphere. What’s unusual about this snowglobe is that the snow in it is black. Have you seen one like this?

ANSWER: I get almost as many questions about souvenir items from the 1939 New York World’s Fair as there were items sold or given away at the Fair. Well, not really, but pretty many.

This snowglobe, featuring the Trylon and Perisphere, is one of the rarer souvenirs from the Fair. Originally, the snow inside the snowglobe was blue and orange, the colors of the State of New York, but over time, they reacted to the water and turned black or brown.

The Trylon and Perisphere were two monumental modernistic structures designed by architects Wallace Harrison and J. Andre Fouilhoux that together were the Theme Center of the 1939 New York World's Fair. Harrison later went on to design the United Nations Headquarters.

After considering many different designs, the Fair Committee chose the Trylon and Perisphere to represent the Fair’s futuristic theme.

They chose the name "Perisphere," combining the Greek prefix peri-, meaning "all around", "about", or "enclosing" and the name "Trylon," coined from the phrase "triangular pylon." The simple structures could be seen from mid-town Manhattan as the Trylon was the tallest structure in Queens at the time.

Adjacent to it stood the Perisphere, a tremendous sphere 18 stories tall and 180 feet in diameter, connected to the 610-foot spire-shaped Trylon by what was at the time the world's longest escalator. The Perisphere housed a diorama by Henry Dreyfuss called Democracity which, in keeping with the fair's theme "The World of Tomorrow," depicted a utopian city-of-the-future.

The exhibit took up a space more than two-times the size of Radio City Music Hall. After paying 25 cents, visitors viewed the exhibit from two rotating balconies, dubbed “magic carpets,” that encircled the model while a multi-image slide presentation appeared on the dome of the sphere. Every six minutes a recorded narration extolled the wonders of this utopian city, and the lights dimmed to mimic nighttime as phosphorescent paint made the buildings look like they were lit from the inside. The theme song “Rising Tide” by William Grant Still accompanied the narration.

After exiting the Perisphere, visitors descended to ground level on the third element of the Theme Center, the Helicline, a 950-foot-long (290 m) spiral ramp that partially encircled the Perisphere. The 18-foot-wide Helicline had a mirrored underside.  Since it was one of the highest locations at the fair, the Helicline became a popular spot to take in views of the fairgrounds.

It took 2,000 cubic yards of concrete and reinforced steel, more than 7,000 individual pieces, to create the Trylon and Perisphere. Their combined weight came to approximately 10,000 tons. In order to test the durability of the design, models were subjected to 70-mile an hour winds in a test tunnel.

Originally, the designers planned for the Perisphere to be covered in a smooth and seamless layer of concrete. However, due to the high cost of that material, they decided to use gypsum instead. Unfortunately, despite the best efforts to smooth it out, the gypsum created an uneven texture and had visible seams. Also, surrounding fountains damaged the fragile coating and their arches of water had to be lowered.

The design for the Perisphere called for eight relatively small hidden support pylons,  giving the illusion that the sphere was floating. Strategically placed fountains and mirrors covering the supports enhanced the effect. At first, the fountains didn’t provide enough coverage, but the Fair engineers increased their pressure and added additional ones to create the desired effect.

At night, projectors with custom designed batteries and the largest long-focus lenses ever commercially made projected moving images of clouds and other things onto the Perisphere from nearby buildings using specially designed glass-mounted slides. Since the amount of light needed to project the images would have burned through regular film, the exhibit designers enclosed the slides in glass.

The Fair Committee licensed the image of the Trylon and Perisphere for use on an estimated 25,000 different products, including this snowglobe. In 1939, licensing was a  new concept, but it still earned the Fair $1 million in the first season alone.

Every visitor took home some sort of souvenir, from small toys to three-legged folding cane/seats to wallets, bracelets, woman’s compacts, and thousands of pins—all with the image of the Trylon and Perisphere on them.

Learn more about 1939 New York World's Fair souvenirs by reading "Souvenirs from the 1939 New York World's Fair Highly Collectible" in #TheAntiquesAlmanac.

To read more articles on antiques, please visit the Antiques Articles section of my Web site.  And to stay up to the minute on antiques and collectibles, please join the over 30,000 readers by following my free online magazine, #TheAntiquesAlmanac. Learn more about  the Industrial Age n the 2020 Winter Edition, "The Wonders of the Industrial Age," online now. And to read daily posts about unique objects from the past and their histories, like the #Antiques and More Collection on Facebook.