263: From the day . . .
Herb ’n’ Lorna, Chapter 4 continues
From the day that Herb sold his first piece of erotic jewelry, he had ambiguous feelings about the product he sold. On the one hand, he was proud of its quality, and he had reason to be, as Cecelia Pecksmith, chronicler of the American coarse-goods trade, notes early in her Collector’s Pricing Guide to Under-the-Counter Jewelry:
Mass-production never cheapened the quality of erotic and pornographic jewelry, because the market for these goods was never large enough to justify mass-producing them. Its craftsmanship was, for some buyers, sufficient justification for their buying it, and well-to-do collectors often professed to buy “coarse goods” only because they represented the last vestige of the kind of craftsmanship that had been common-place when they were in their prime, the level of which, they were sure, succeeding generations were not likely to attain again, since each generation is inclined, in its late years, to see itself as having represented, in its prime, if not the end of civilization, then civilization’s highest ascent, the pause before its accelerating downward slide.
But if the jewelry was of good quality, it was also, for its time, obscene, and so Herb was at once proud of and ashamed of the studs, links, fobs, stickpins, buttons, and buckles he sold.
Herb never tried to sell the jewelry on the basis of its prurient attractions. To have done so would have been too risky; there was the possibility that the customer, offended by the thought that Herb took him for the sort of man who bought such things, would be aroused to anger or to the pretense of anger. Instead, Herb sold it on the basis of the quality of its workmanship. To give himself a means of introducing the topic of workmanship, he carried a cheap pocket watch that he never wound. When he had maneuvered the man of the house onto the porch for a smoke and had completed the book deal, he would take his pocket watch out, shake it, mutter under his breath, and then say aloud, “It should be a criminal offense to sell a shoddy piece of goods like this. A new watch, and it simply won’t work. I tell you, it’s becoming impossible to find really fine workmanship today. Don’t you find that so?”
The man was likely to say, “True, true,” or something of the sort.
“Now you take this shirt stud,” Herb would say, handing one to the man. “Just look at the workmanship on that. It takes your breath away, doesn’t it? Take a closer look. Here, use this glass.”
Because Herb was one of the best salesmen the Piper family had ever produced, he simply couldn’t keep himself from selling his cover. He sold Professor Clapp’s Five-Foot Shelf of books with a degree of success that not even his Uncle Ben had ever achieved. Nor could Herb resist putting his predilection for tinkering to the service of the goods he sold, and that was how the Piper nemesis, that misdirected enthusiasm, caught up with him. He invested considerable time and money in designing and manufacturing a shelf that expanded as his customers received their monthly books, eventually reaching a full five feet, but he lost money on each one he sold. He developed clever hideaway boxes and false bottoms for dresser drawers, which allowed his coarse-goods customers to keep their collections out of sight, but on these too he lost money.
[to be continued on Friday, May 20, 2022]
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In Topical Guide 263, Mark Dorset considers Projects: Practical, Impractical, and Both; Hobbies: Tinkering and Bookshelves: Expandable from this episode.
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