The collector's whatnot : $b a compendium, manual, and syllabus of information and advice on all subjects appertaining to the collection of antiques, both ancient and not so ancientTarkington, Booth
General
The collector's whatnot : $b a compendium, manual, and syllabus of information and advice on all subjects appertaining to the collection of antiques, both ancient and not so ancient
Tarkington, Booth
Antiques -- Humor
The new wood, of course, must be carefully worm-holed. The crudest
variety of worm-holing is done with a shotgun. The result looks
sufficiently wormy to suit the most captious worm-hole collector;
but one can always find a Number 10 shot at the bottom of each hole.
The shotgun method, therefore, is not acceptable to members in good
standing in our Society. The worm-hole machine, which is used by
several of the leading Parisian _chineurs_, is a new and excellent
invention. Its front is a square plate with serpentine grooves in
it. When the plate is pressed against a piece of wood and the handle
turned, a number of slender augers push out and make a cluster of
worm-holes. A turn of a lever changes the position of each auger
slightly, so that the worm-hole pattern does not recur.
But the best worm-holes in the world are made in Italy by hand. The
auger with which they are made is bent in an irregular shape; and the
purchaser of a piece of furniture which has been worm-holed with it is
at liberty to thrust wires into the holes in order to investigate their
wormy crookedness.
The most thorough furniture manufacturers, knowing that the careful
collector will rap on the furniture in order to see whether dust falls
from the worm-holes—as would be the case if the hole is the work of a
normal worm—should be careful to fill the holes with wood dust.
In a number of the antique-shops along the Rue Saintes-Pères and the
Boulevard Raspail in Paris, one may see many specimens of carved wooden
panels about a foot and a half long and about five inches wide. Every
one of these has been taken from old châteaux and palaces which have
been recently torn down. This statement is obviously reasonable; for if
it were untrue, practically every château in France would be standing
to-day, whereas nearly all of them have long since been demolished to
provide the great number of wooden panels that have been placed on sale
in the past few years. The panels are attractive and not made by great
pressure—a method sometimes used in France and Italy in making cheap
antiques. Pressure-carvings, as they are called, always show a bent
grain; whereas the small carvings show a severed grain.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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