Missouri silver.(Books about antiques)(Missouri's Silver Age: Silversmiths of the 1800s)(Book Review)

Because books are published in absurd numbers a great many vanish like Shakespeare's "poor player, that struts and frets his hour upon the stage, and then is heard no more." Sometimes this swift and ignominious passage is planned before the book is on press. A world weary publisher I knew used to arrange with a remainder house that they take a title before it was even printed, and he then built the proceeds into his estimate of the profit the book would turn.

The compensation for this dismal trend are books that appeal only to a small number of readers but nonetheless refuse to disappear. These are useful books, and for reasons of economy they are rarely beautiful. They represent years of unpaid digging and only a heavenly reward. This self-indulgent reflection is by way of introducing Missouri's Silver Age: Silversmiths of the 1800s by Norman Mack, who, with his late wife Beatrice, resolved to acquire at least one piece of silver by every known Missouri silversmith. They gave what they found to the Missouri Historical Society, and they published what they learned in this little book.

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The introduction begins, appropriately for a book that will endure: "This book makes no claim to be a definitive history of Missouri silversmithing in the nineteenth century but rather hopes merely to serve as a useful reference for anyone interested in that subject." The silversmiths are arranged alphabetically from Adriance, Edward, to Woodbridge, Horace P., along with examples of their work and sharp photographs of their marks. An alphabetical appendix of marks is also included using the same photographs, some-what reduced in size. The silver illustrated, largely spoons, will be familiar to collectors, and even noncollectors. The taste on the frontier--and Missouri was the frontier--was for simplicity, not ornament. It is the biographies of the silversmiths that provide the surprises here. They are almost all from somewhere else, usually far away, and they roamed extensively before fetching up in Missouri. It makes for a pretty sophisticated frontier.

Immediately striking is the German or Swiss origin of the majority of the silversmiths, in keeping with the fact that in the early 1870s 36 percent of the population of Saint Louis was foreign born, and more than half of those immigrants were German. In addition to being well traveled, the silversmiths were often well trained, to judge by John B. Albrecht, a native of the duchy of Baden in Germany. He apprenticed with his father, a watchmaker, before moving to Switzerland, to work as a journeyman in Basel, and then to Neuchatel to study watchmaking. Later he went to Marseilles, France, to learn the trade of making fine jewelry. Only then did he set off to join his brother Joseph who had emigrated to New Orleans in 1847. In 1850, John Albrecht moved to Saint Joseph, Missouri, and ...