Lost Art Press

Ostensibly he keeps the village inn. His name appears over the door in the orthodox black letters on a white ground as a licensed seller of beer and tobacco. It is a pleasant little inn, and in the garden behind there are some choice plants of the old-fashioned kind in which the landlord takes a good deal of pride; but the trade in beer and tobacco is not very brisk.

They keep a gramophone at the ‘Swan’ at the other end of the village, and its seductive tones seem to have an attraction for the thirsty. Such customers as fall to the quieter tap of the ‘Lion’ are served by the landlady, an active, bustling body with some little contempt for the slow, niggling work which her husband puts into the old rubbish that she would consign to the flames. Not but what she admits that the money that the old things fetch is a welcome addition to the family purse.

The old man is not contentious by nature, but he enjoys a moment of quiet triumph. ‘She took on about an old chair I brought home the other night,’ he tells you, after glancing round to see whether the good lady is within hearing. ‘I gave five shillings for it. Well, it didn’t look up to much, certainly; but I tell you what, sir, it was a genuine Cromwellian chair, and I never saw another of the same pattern.’ Then, with a twinkle in his eye of self-conscious justification, he adds that two days later a passer-by looked in, saw the chair, and promptly gave him three guineas for it, and sent it across the Atlantic.
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Washington Feb 16.—Cabinet-Maker M.W. Dove, fitting dark green leather to polished mahogany with a border of brass nails, is busily completing chairs for Cabinet-Maker F. D. Roosevelt. Making the seats of the mighty is nothing new to Dove. He’s 54 years old now, and he’s been at it ever since his early twenties when he “worked right in the palace of the czar.”
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Order is Heaven’s first law, and in no department of our business have we found less of this law than in the trimming room. Some workmen will have their work-bench filled with tacks, knobs, buckles, chalk, paste—in short, a sorry hodge-podge of here a little and there a good deal of evidence of slovenliness on the part of the occupant.

The again, the patent leather is unrolled and kicking about the floor, the moss—nobody uses moss now-a-days—and curled hair are everywhere, and the paste is sticking to everything in use. We have seen trimmers, whose jobs have been “turned out” with such a variety of paste shading, about the top and other parts of the leather as to almost entirely spoil it.

Such workmen are not fitted for their profession. The old adage, “an ounce of prevention is better than a pound of cure,” was never more appropriately exercised than in the trimming department. We all know that leather, once soiled, can never be made to look as good as new. For this very reason, a trimmer should keep his hands clean, and his work, as far as practicable, as he proceeds, covered up.

Not long since, we saw in a trimming room any quantity of scraps hanging on the floor, and a pile in one corner, of dirt, and leather, and paper, and other material, as the merchants say, “too numerous to mention,” a fine place for one to raise his own fleas, and no doubt they find ample feeding ground near at hand—in the sloven’s own person!

But all are not like our hero. There are some trimmers whose habits are worthy of commendation—they are neatness itself; such we should hold up, to the class we have been describing, as worthy pattern for them to follow.

The New York Coach-Maker’s Magazine – November, 1859

—Jeff Burks