Wooden fretwork and ceramic match holders

     Berkeley Heights Public Library invites the public to an exhibit of antique match holders in the lobby display cases. The collection can be viewed during regular library hours through the month of January. The collection of ceramic, carved wood and metal match safes and wall-mounted match holders belongs to children's librarian Laura Fuhro.
When asked how she began collecting match holders, Laura explained that while visiting friends in Maine in the 1980's she visited a flea market where a collection of match holders caught her eye. She likes the idea of collecting things that used to be very common and essential in every household, but now people don't want them or need them anymore. Her original acquisition was a Horace Greeley match holder and Laura has been collecting ever since that original purchase,

      "I can't stop. I have over 200 made of every material - metal, wood, ceramic. Most date from the 19th century through the World War I era."

     Most people don't need to keep matches on hand in the kitchen anymore since gas stoves have automatic ignition now. However, Laura finds that the little wall-mounted match holders make very convenient spots to keep nails, cat toys or other bits and bobs that would otherwise be relegated to the kitchen junk drawer.


     The lobby display has signs explaining the invention and development of safety matches as well as the "Fretwork Frenzy" era of woodcarving, a technique used to create many of match holders in the display. Small kits of woodworking tools were sold for home projects and many women of the late 19th century made small wooden crafts in their homes using the tools. Fretworking was the craft craze of the times.

    How many of our readers remember having a match holder in your kitchen or near the fireplace? In the 1950's, it might have been designed to hold a rectangular cardboard matchbox, explained Laura, but I haven't seen one in recent years in anyone's home.

My face when I find out that someone doesn't go by their first

My face when I find out that
someone doesn't go by
their first name                    

To a reader, the names of the characters in a book seem effortless and are rarely given a second thought. Yeah, the name “Hermione” was probably stumbled over and made fun of when the first HP book came out but seven books later, that’s just who she is. No one would dream of changing her name to Anne or Deborah.

Readers associate a character’s personality, attributes and appearance with his or her name to the point that it seems impossible that he or she could be named anything else. We do the same thing with people. For example, I have a friend who goes by her middle name exclusively. When I discovered her first name I kind of freaked out inside because someone who I’d known as X had Z on her birth certificate. Crazy.

To me, names are incredibly important. Have you ever played that game with friends where you try to come up with “a name that they look like”? Maybe not, but my friends and I used to do it all the time. We’d usually be hanging out and someone would say, “You know Danielle, I’ve always thought you looked more like a Margret.” The conversation would continue until all of us were given a different name. The only hitch was that the new name never seemed to fit anyone as perfectly as the name they were known as. Maybe this is why I find it so interesting that some people just up and change their name to whatever they want, but I digress.

I feel confident the Imagineers could do wonders with reference material such as this.

I feel this is a unique choice because it features a sort of Italianate or Gothic style of architecture – both of which were hugely popular in United States during the mid-19th century – and also turn of the century items and instruments that would have been considered “futuristic” at the dawn of the 20th Century. Personally, I think this fits quite nicely in that distinct juxtaposition that is Main Street USA, Tomorrowland, and Cinderella Castle. Additionally, the domed copper roofs would mirror nicely the iron and glass dome atop the Crystal Palace.
If not this style, I feel confident the Imagineers could do wonders with reference material such as this.

Some of my favorite coin designs

Just about every American collector knows this coin. And for good reason: the Saint-Gaudens gold twenty dollar Double Eagle is one of our most interesting pieces of currency.
In 1904, President Theodore Roosevelt decided he’d had enough with what was, in his opinion, his country’s butt-ugly coinage. Shortly after viewing an exhibit of ancient Greek coinage at Washington D.C.’s Smithsonian Institute, he wrote up a letter to Treasury Secretary L. M. Shaw, asking him to fix their coinage, which he called “artistically of atrocious hideousness.” (For an example of one of the coins Roosevelt was talking about, check out the slabbed coin in this post. Personally, I agree with Teddy.) Roosevelt suggested he hire Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a then-famous American sculptor who had designed many celebrated monuments.
Saint-Gaudens took the job and produced the design that would become the new Double Eagle. The new twenty dollar coin featured a walking Lady Liberty on the obverse and an eagle flying over the radiant Sun on the reverse. The original series ran from 1907 to 1932, when President Franklin D. Roosevelt criminalized private gold ownership in an attempt to prevent wealth hoarding during the Great Depression. Executive Order 6102 required all US residents to deliver all their “gold coin, gold bullion, and gold certificates” to a Federal Reserve member bank and levied high fines and imprisonment on those who disobeyed the order.

Above, a familiar face on an unfamiliar bill. In the early part of the 20th century, you’d have been able to exchange one of these twenty dollar gold certificates for a twenty dollar double eagle.

This executive order didn’t actually result in any convictions. However, it did inadvertently create one of the rarest coins in the world. As a result of order 6102, ownership of the 1933 Double Eagle was effectively made illegal, and the US Mint melted their stock of that year’s gold coins after sending two 1933 Double Eagles to the Smithsonian to put on display.
Despite the ban, several 1933 Double Eagles slipped out of the Mint’s hands and turned up in auctions later on, where they sold for stupidly large sums of money. Since ownership of the 1933 gold coin was technically illegal, however, the government decided that the 1933 coins in question must have been illegally obtained, and it has ever since made a policy of confiscating the coin from private owners who try to put it up for auction. One case is still on appeal, with government lawyers arguing that the ten unaccounted-for coins were illegally obtained and the family of the deceased owner arguing they weren’t.
But the Saint-Gaudens Double Eagle would eventually make a comeback. In 2009, the US Mint released a limited-run reproduction of the twenty dollar gold coin in “ultra-high” relief (relief meaning how far the coin’s features stick out of the coin’s surface, basically.) This was the way Saint-Gaudens had originally wanted his coin to look. As a modern reproduction, the 2009 coin doesn’t have any numismatic value, but it’s still nice. Saint-Gauden’s Lady Liberty design was also retained for the American Gold Eagle 22k gold bullion coin that the US government began minting in 1986, though it uses a different eagle design on the reverse. So, you know, don’t confuse the two.

Meat rolls

 

The Horse-World of London – W. J. Gordon,

Blackhorse Road, London, E17. Photo © Roger Dean 2012

A good many of the coal horses are blacks and dark bays, and by some people they are known as ‘the black brigade’; but the real black brigade of London’s trade are the horses used for funerals. [...] The ‘funeral furnisher’ is equal to all emergencies on account of the facilities he possesses for hiring to an almost unlimited extent, so long as the death rate is normal. The wholesale men, the ‘black masters,’ are always ready to cope with a rate of twenty per thousand – London’s normal is seventeen – but when it rises above that, as it did in the influenza time, the pressure is so great that the ‘blacks’ have to get help from the ‘coloured,’ and the ‘horse of pleasure’ becomes familiar with the cemetery roads.

Small Happinesses

There is so much tragedy, so much heartbreak, so much sicknesses and illness and disaster in this life. We see it in the papers, hear it on the radio, watch it on TV and the internet.  It can weigh us down and suck the very life out of us.   Even the small bumps in the road of life weigh us down.  The crying babies and shedding dogs;  burnt dinners and late spouses;  horrible traffic and poor gas mileage.  It bogs us down, wears at us, eats away at our joy.
It may seem that there have not been any big happinesses in life lately, but the good is there.  The happy is there.  We just need to look a bit closer, think a bit smaller.
The January (I’m a bit behind in my reading!) 2012 issue of Family Circle‘s article “Be Happy Now”, had some great advice:
“Appreciate the little things.  Spend 10 minutes before bedtime writing down three positive outcomes from the day…The mind is like your tongue swishing around life,  looking for a cavity…Instead, focus on what’s going right–and savor it.”
1.  I heard the crickets chirping while on my evening walk.
2. The sun was shining and it was a beautiful day.
3.  Best of all, I  have a couple of dahlia’s blooming!  So there, you slugs!