Paperweights Of the World
by: Monika Flemming & Peter Pommerencke
1993, Schiffer Publishing Ltd., Atglen, PA & later editions
168 pages, $35. hardbound.
Introduction: “Caution: the passion for collecting beautiful paperweights is contagious! What is the secret of this boom in collecting paperweights that has thrived for more than thirty years? The paperweight is a microcosm in the hands of those people who have selected them and enjoy them. A paperweight, or “letter weight”, was already an anachronism just a few years after it was created in the middle of the past century, and it certainly is one today.
Never has more been written than today. Never before have more letters been sent—millions upon millions every day. But the overwhelming majority of these letters are computer-generated business letters. Letters that never require a paperweight and scarcely a file. Decorated little private writing-desks to hold them, such as were found in every middle-class house at one time, have not existed for over a century. Today’s paper lies in stacks on office desks. It runs just as smoothly through the shredder and piles up to form mountains at recycling depots. Who needs genuine letter weights today, to say nothing of genuine paperweights?
And yet, genuine paperweights have their best chance in this time of modern objectivity. Just as there will always be people who prefer hand-sown shoes, or those who know and love real handmade carpets. The genuine article, of high quality, will always be around. Those who have the resources to surround themselves with beautiful, valuable things may well turn to paperweights as fascinating collectors’ items.
Both authors have collected paperweights for some twenty years, and since 1976 they have run Germany’s first and, for some time, only paperweight dealership. Their worldwide contact with all the manufacturers and artists and their intensive exchange of experience with fellow dealers on an international level have made them experts whose advice is valued by beginner and connoisseur alike.
The tireless involvement of both authors with these exquisite objects of art has also predestined them to active collaboration in the Paperweight Club of Germany in Munich. They have mastered their subject; in this book you will find a thorough answer to every question. It offers advice, pictures, a price guide and a great deal of background information on an exciting area of collecting.
The famous French writer, Colette, once owned a choice collection of paperweights. Her daughter. Mme. Colette de Jouvenel, once wrote in a letter to the director of the time-honored Cristallerie de Saint-Louis, Gerard Ingold, himself a devoted paperweight collector and connoisseur, the striking sentence:
'Whoever has the ability to make emeralds and sapphires arise out of glass, captures the tones of color that only occur fleetingly in nature, the real and unreal shapes and colors, in an object no bigger than the palm of your hand—he may be only a modest magician, but he is a magician all the same'.”
