Early English trade catalogue of brass furniture hardware designs

SCARCE EARLY-C19TH ENGLISH BRASSFOUNDER'S CATALOGUE

Small oblong folio (ca. 20.5x32.5 cm). No title-page. 92 copperplates, some folding, showing several hundreds of hardware designs with their sizes in inches. Plates numbering: 20 n.n. (not numbered), 42-3, 2 n.n., 44-5, 47, 46, 33, 48-9, 1 n.n., 21-2, 20, 24, 23, 2 n.n., 25-6, 1 n.n., 29, 3 n.n., 30, 27, 32, 1 n.n., 41, 1 n.n., 106, 2 n.n., 108-9, 1 n.n., 110, 116-7, 114, 70-5, 2 n.n., 78-80, 1 n.n., 88, 1 n.n., 85, 2 n.n., 65, 127, 125, 126, 133-4, 2 n.n. Some pen annotations by some items throughout (prices?). Most plates are numbered and bound in mixed order. As usual, the catalogue includes both new items in production at the unidentified brass foundry and older standard hardwares already in production, thus the mixed plates and their not-always sequential numbering. Contemporary quarter leather and marbled paper over pasteboards, corners stiffened with vellum. A mark pencilled on the upper pastedown reports the catalogue number and the initials of the firm: "Livre N° 112155 W&L". The firm behind the initials W&L has not been identified yet. However, a number of similar catalogues produced between 1770 and 1850, mainly in Birmingham, are preserved at the V&A Museum in London and some of them show the same type of marking, "Livre n°..." followed by the firm's initials. The present catalogue is comparable to the V&A's catalogue M. 101. a., which has been studied and described with all the other catalogues by W. Arthur Young, who dated it around 1814 based on the watermark visible through its leaves. This catalogue has the number 1817 as a watermark, which should indicate the year of production. Young stated that "the paper helps a little in some of the volumes to fix a date... A book with a water-mark 1811 must have been issued after that date" and, concerning the issue of the initials, he added that "unfortunately none of the initials in the catalogues can be identified. There were, at the last date mentioned [1777], thirty brassfounders in business in town, using between them every year about 1,000 tons of brass". The plates show: castors of all sorts, fender feet, bolts, hinges, the newly invented patent spring socket bolts, portable desk furniture, butts, joints, turns, knobs, screws, nails, hooks and eyes, rings, handles, pullies, locks, thimbles, rollers, plugs, pulls, pins, escutcheons, capitals and bases, ends, clips, staples, and a final brass umbrella stand with iron bottom. This item is very rare and interesting. It includes also hardwares used on sailing boat.

The first English brass foundries started to operate in Birmingham at the end of the eighteen century, making it the epicentre of furniture hardware design. At the same time, trade catalogues, like the present, began to be issued by both furniture and hardware makers alike. As Young had it, "about the year 1770, manufacturers had begun to send drawings of their goods to their customers. At first these were loose sheets, if one may judge from the creases in the few plates that have been saved and passed down to us. Later these sheets were bound together, and so developed into the catalogue. Other manufacturers followed suit, and by the dawn of XIXth century lists had been prepared to illustrate a considerable range of English made goods." Although no engravers' names are identified, Young suggested that the foundries themselves produced such plates, utilising the talents of their own craftsmen, who by their very occupation would have been highly skilled at etching on metal. According to Young, such pattern books "illustrate the beginning of what was then a new movement in the conditions of the crafts, namely, the growth of the organised factory as a means of production and distribution, as compared with the earlier limitation of these functions to the efforts of individuals".

Symonds, R. W. "An Eighteenth-Century English Brassfounders Catalogue." Magazine Antiques (Feb. 1931), pp. 102-105; Young, W. A. Old English pattern books of the metal trades: a descriptive catalogue of the collection in the V&A Museum. London: HMSO, 1913.