Gorham Martele. (Books About Antiques).

In his acknowledgments, L. J. Pristo thanks Fred for "rides back into town after the last bus, those extra minutes were precious." Fred Roy was at Lenox Incorporated in Smithfield, Rhode Island, which now incorporates the Gorham Company and houses those of its records not at Brown University in Providence. Pristo also thanks his wife, Debra, "for understanding why I needed to be gone so often and spend so much time writing over the last several years while she raised the small children.. ..Sony Tiffany that I was in Providence when my first grand child, Nicholas, was born. Sony Matt. I Love you all, and this book is dedicated to you."

Just short of five hundred pages later Pristo finished his labor of love--the most complete possible treatment of the Gorham Company's line of handmade silver, Martele. In his preface Pristo relates that he examined some fifty thousand photographs and more than one hundred thousand slips of paper documenting all the costs involved in making an object, since the company was obsessed with detail. A good many of the slips were handwritten, sometimes in writing so small that he needed a magnifying glass, at other times "the penmanship was so poor that the interpretation almost took on a forensic approach." The author is a match for the company, noting his "compulsiveness to created the perfect end product. With a background of teaching statistics and experimental psychology, and having published in the area of multivariate statistics, errors are seen as a function of poor work."

Pristo is also totally enamored of the look and feel of Martele quoting an early admirer of "the soft misty finish of innumerable little hammer blows, overlapping each upon each like fairy footprints upon moonlit sands." Since the word martele means hammered in French the appearance of Gorham's line is not accidental. The company produced Martele from the late nineteenth century into the 1930s. Each object began as a flat piece of silver, raised with hammering to the desired, often art nouveau, shape before being passed on to the chaser. The finished pieces show the hammer marks because they were not buffed. Sometimes they were partly oxidized and/or partly gilded to subtly emphasize the decoration. The author writes: "A friend's description that the virgin surface is similar to the dull side of a piece of aluminum foil gives a sense of what the untouched surface would look like." Buffing Martele is an error of upkeep left to subsequent generations of owners, who have very often succeeded in wearing down the carefully unfinished finish.

From the beginning, this Gorham line was expensive and exclusive, as it has remained for collectors today. Even at the turn of the last century the International Studio stated that Martele objects "appeal to the rich, who are supposed to be happy because ...