{"id":115732,"date":"2017-09-20T11:00:25","date_gmt":"2017-09-20T15:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=115732"},"modified":"2017-09-21T12:46:10","modified_gmt":"2017-09-21T16:46:10","slug":"the-surprising-history-of-paperweights","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/20\/the-surprising-history-of-paperweights\/","title":{"rendered":"The Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights"},"content":{"rendered":"
<\/a>

Illustration by Ellis Rosen<\/p><\/div>\n

On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery<\/a>, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks were packed into the small white space. The table was laid with 117 new examples of paperweights. Almost none of them resembled the office accoutrement of last century, when open windows and fans sent paper sailing through reeking cigarette fog. These were objet d\u2019art. They ranged from the purely ironic (a furry outgrowth) to the purely beautiful (chain links encrusted in sherbet crystals). Many were ineffable abstracts, and a few were just satisfying (animal figurines drilled into each other). \u201cMy life doesn\u2019t justify a paperweight,\u201d a girlfriend remarked. \u201cMy life isn\u2019t settled enough. You don\u2019t buy one until you think you\u2019re not going to move.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paperweights had never struck me as markers of stability. But a month later, when I was laid off from the legacy media company where I worked for a print magazine, I surveyed my desk, picked up a stack of our branded notepads and a handle of whiskey and thought, At least I don\u2019t have to lug no paperweight.\u00a0\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Then Saturday came without Saturday\u2019s feel. In a vintage shop, I drifted from taxidermy pheasants to a shelf staged with dusted curio, and there was a Murano blown-glass paperweight. At its center, the softball-size bubble had a clear tubular ring, inside of which was a clear finial shape from which streaks of red sprayed in arches at 360 degrees. The thing was maybe five pounds? My fianc\u00e9 found me cradling it to my heart. \u201cYou\u2019re going to bring that home, aren\u2019t you,\u201d he said, meaning: Did my foolhardy troth to paper in the age of new media know no bounds? The paperweight seemed to englobe our opposed perspectives: he thought it looked like a nasty vortex; I thought it looked like a wine fountain.<\/p>\n

In 1495, a historian from Venice remarked, \u201cBut consider to whom did it occur to include in a little ball all the sorts of flowers which clothe the meadow in Spring.\u201d He was referring to the glasswork techniques the Romans had picked up from the Egyptians. The results were not paperweights, not least because the bottoms had not yet been shaved flat to prevent rolling. That was an evolution Paul Hollister, the late authority on paperweights, likened to \u201cturn[ing] the Venetian pumpkin into Cinderella\u2019s golden coach.\u201d (As a bonus, grounding the base removed the pontil mark, the scar from a glassblower\u2019s iron rod, and without a belly button, the orb seemed to come into the world by magic.)<\/p>\n

Three and a half centuries later, in 1845, a glassmaker named Pietro Bigaglia showed off his \u201cVenetian balls\u201d at the Austrian Industrial Fair, in\u00a0Vienna. The earliest paperweight we know of\u00a0dates to that year. French fair-going glassworkers\u2014wishing to goose their depressed industry\u2014ran with the idea. It was just three years before the February revolution and the creation of Napoleon\u2019s Second Republic. The time was right. With affordable paper and dependable mail services, letter writing had become a newly popular pastime, and something<\/em> had to keep those sheets in order. Glasshouses like Baccarat, Saint-Louis, Clichy, and Pantin revived ancient techniques such as flame working, filigree, and millefiori, \u201cthousand flowers\u201d wrought from brightly colored glass canes; they also perfected plant and animal motifs. These paperweights were useful, fashionable, relatively inexpensive, and cheery (a way to keep flowers on desks even in winter), and their manufacture spread through parts of Europe. Immigrant glassworkers brought the trend and their know-how to America. But by 1860, the bauble-bubble was cooling off.<\/p>\n

In\u00a0the late forties, Jean Cocteau arranged for a young Truman Capote to have tea with Colette at her apartment in Paris. They did not manage to discuss literature; instead, Capote was moonstruck by the Frenchwoman\u2019s collection of valuable antique paperweights, which she called \u201cmy snowflakes\u201d:<\/p>\n

There were perhaps a hundred of them covering two tables situated on either side of the bed: crystal spheres imprisoning green lizards, salamanders, millefiori\u00a0bouquets, dragonflies, a basket of pears, butterflies alighted on a frond of ferns, swirls of pink and white and blue and white, shimmering like fireworks, cobras coiled to strike, pretty little arrangements of pansies, magnificent poinsettias.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Madame Colette, with some of her paperweights, in 1950. \u00a9 Robert Doisneau.<\/p><\/div>\n

Colette suggested she might take them with her in her coffin, \u201clike a pharaoh.\u201d When she gave a Baccarat with a single white rose inside to Capote, he caught the fever. He sought paperweights at auctions in Copenhagen and Hong Kong. Once, he found a four-thousand-dollar weight in a junk shop in Brooklyn for which he shelled out just twenty bucks. In East Hampton, he successfully bid seven hundred\u00a0dollars for a millefiori (\u201cthe real thing,\u201d \u201can electrifying spectacle\u201d) worth seven grand.<\/p>\n

At home, my weight immediately found its use. When you are a paperweight, you have one job, and it is so easy. In theory, any lousy rock could do it:\u00a0be heavy (glass, crystal, marble, brass, and bronze have been standard issue), be flat-bottomed (spheres, pyramids, cubes, and discs tend not to topple), and sit pretty (on this last point, common geology would fail). If you can do that, you are doing great. Layoffs still involve paperwork, which, once printed, generally has to get notarized and posted; such documents can stagnate on your desk, along with odd to-do lists, tear sheets, bills, and greeting cards. But I found none of it was to be easily ignored or mislaid when it was pinned down by this shroom of glass that catches and carnivalizes the sky.<\/p>\n

Last year, Christie\u2019s mounted Dress Your Desk, an online auction of dozens of paperweights that had belonged to Arnold Neustadter, the inventor of that other once-ubiquitous desktop accessory, the Rolodex. He was \u201cthe most organized man I ever knew,\u201d his son-in-law told an obit writer. Adding, \u201cWhenever anyone put something on his desk that didn\u2019t belong there, he\u2019d move it.\u201d Carleigh Queenth<\/a>, head of ceramics at Christie\u2019s, told me, \u201cHe had a really lovely collection, including some incredibly rare pieces like a Pantin salamander weight.\u201d Only twenty of those are known to exist, and only extreme talent could have pulled off the forms, textures, and patterns (e.g., polka-dotted amphibian bod on floor of sand and lichen). A prior director of the Corning Museum of Glass<\/a>, which has assembled one of the most important exhibitions\u00a0of paperweights, regards these salamanders as \u201cthe greatest technical achievements of nineteenth-century paperweight makers.\u201d<\/p>\n

The French paperweight heyday, between 1845 and 1860, remained the high-water mark for the industry for nearly a\u00a0hundred years. Then in the sixties, in America, the studio-glass movement relocated glassmaking from factories to ateliers, where utility gave way to art. Art schools started to teach glasswork. Galleries started to show glasswork. And Paul Stankard<\/a>, according to Queenth, \u201cwas one of the first contemporary glass artists to elevate paperweights to an art form.\u201d Stankard is a living master, unrivaled. \u201cWhile flowers in nineteenth-century weights can be somewhat cartoonish,\u201d she said, \u201chis are always incredibly accurate, like botanical studies.\u201d She pointed to Stankard\u2019s bees. \u201cYou can practically hear them buzzing.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/a>

Paul Stankard, Field Flowers Cluster with Honeycomb and Swarming Honeybees Orb,<\/em>\u00a02012. Photo: \u00a9 Ron Farina<\/p><\/div>\n

When I phoned the seventy-four-year-old artist at his studio in southern New Jersey, he told me that, under the effect of an eighteen-hundred-degree flame, hot glass is viscous, \u201clike honey.\u201d He had attended a vocational school and begun his career blowing bespoke glass equipment for chemists. \u201cIt was a good trade, but I wanted to be creative.\u201d He imagined suspending the flowers of Delaware Valley from his childhood\u2014he\u2019s a Walt Whitman devotee\u2014in glass. He drove up to Corning and studied the antiques. In 1972, he left his job to become a full-time paperweight maker. Stankard weights are transcendent. \u201cBut you\u2019re welcome to put them to work if you want to,\u201d he said. \u201cThey\u2019ll keep paper down.\u201d<\/p>\n

While my paperweight helps me mind the gap between the analogue and digital worlds, perhaps paperweights will never become obsolete, even in the twenty-fourth\u00a0century, when human society will have gone paperless, at least in outer space and according to Star Trek: The Next Generation<\/em>. Even so, it is something to notice a shard-like crystal on the desk of Captain Jean-Luc Picard. The iconic prop appears in nearly eighty\u00a0episodes. It is not technology. It does nothing\u2014although Picard often handles it while mulling over tough decisions or speechifying, in such a way that the crystal recalls Yorick\u2019s skull. Trekkers have painstakingly attempted to re-create<\/a> the hunk in casting resins. No one knows what became of the original from set.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

Captain Picard\u2019s desk in his ready room on the USS Enterprise-D (1989, or 2365).<\/p><\/div>\n

Roddenberry Entertainment\u2014named after the creator of the original Star Trek<\/em> television series\u2014offers a faithful ninety-nine-dollar lead crystal replica<\/a>\u00a0on its web shop. The prop\u2019s geometry, the product description says, \u201cwas obsessively reconstructed using digital 3-D modeling software, referencing and reconciling hundreds of film frames of the crystal\u2019s appearances across the seasons of TNG<\/em>.\u201d (Ryan Norbauer, a software engineer whose r\u00e9sum\u00e9 includes stints at NASA<\/small>, the Center for Disease Control, and British Parliament, was on the project.) \u201cIt\u2019s a great way to add a bit of commanding gravitas to your workspace, whether that\u2019s the ready room of a starship or a tabletop at a caf\u00e9.\u201d<\/p>\n

Roddenberry\u2019s director of consumer products, Brent Beaudette, told me they made a run of five hundred\u00a0Picard desk crystals. About half have sold since they were released in August. I asked Beaudette if he thought the show\u2019s set designers, in imagining the future, might have retained a vestigial paperweight. He said, \u201cOur overall consensus is that it serves as a device to relieve tension or stress through simple repetitive movement. However, we can only speculate as to the original intent.\u201d<\/p>\n

Worrying my weight with my left hand, I thought back to Capote. He traveled with his paperweights in a black velvet bag, taking as many as six of them, even on two-day trips to Chicago. They were a comfort, he explained.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Chantel Tattoli is a freelance journalist. She\u2019s contributed to\u00a0the <\/em>New York Times Magazine, <\/em>VanityFair.com<\/a>, the\u00a0<\/em>Los Angeles Review of Books, and\u00a0<\/em>Orion, and\u00a0is at work on a cultural biography of Copenhagen\u2019s statue of the Little Mermaid.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. Some awfully cool looking folks were packed into the small white space. The table was laid with 117 new examples of paperweights. Almost none of them resembled the office accoutrement of last century, when open windows and […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":873,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[30656,30655,30651,8198,30653,30646,3450,30648,30654,30647,30649,30652,30650,30657,717,2705],"class_list":["post-115732","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-brent-beaudette","tag-captain-jean-luc-picard","tag-carleigh-queenth","tag-colette","tag-corning-museum-of-glass","tag-fisher-parrish-gallery","tag-jean-cocteau","tag-murano","tag-pantin-salamander","tag-paper-weights","tag-paul-hollister","tag-paul-stankard","tag-pietro-bigaglia","tag-roddenberry-entertainment","tag-star-trek","tag-truman-capote"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nThe Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"Even in our paperless era of new media, paperweights hold a hefty place in our hearts.\" \/>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2017\/09\/20\/the-surprising-history-of-paperweights\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Surprising History (and Future) of Paperweights by Chantel Tattoli\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"September 20, 2017 \u2013 On a Friday night this spring, I reported to the inaugural show at Fisher Parrish Gallery, in Bushwick. 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