Yesterday I posted these items in my instagram and asked what are they? Only one person answered (!) but he got it wrong so it doesn’t count (sorry Garrett!) He thought they might be weights, and yes they are pretty heavy, but they are not weights. When I saw them on Sunday I thought - I should know what these are…but it wasn’t until I looked at the things that the seller had put in the box with them that I understood.
These are button dies, for making pressed buttons. And despite handling hundreds of antique pressed metal buttons over the years, I’d never thought to ask how they were made.
The two rows above are interesting and possibly recognisable, if you’ve been around French vintage and antique clothing or notions for any length of time. The top row is buttons for the French Navy uniform. These are quite old examples, but in various modified forms, this anchor is still used on French mariner’s buttons. The second row belong to the uniforms of sapeurs pompiers - firemen, although it’s a little disconcerting because the image is actually of a fiery cannonball. This has a very old origin - before the invention of power hoses and huge transportable tanks of water, firemen were often quite powerless in front of very big fires. This was especially true in packed quarters of old towns or villages where the ramparts and facings of the houses were dry wood, and things could get out of control very quickly. Just think about how intense the Great Fire of London was.
Faced with these sorts of conditions, often the only think that the firemen could do was to attempt to stop the fire from spreading, by running ahead of the fire and destroying buildings in an attempt to make a firebreak between those already on fire and those yet to catch. They used cannonballs to accomplish this in many cases, and the verb ‘saper’ from which the noun ‘sapeur’ comes from means ‘to undermine’ or ‘to crush underfoot’.
Interestingly, the man in charge of the City of London during the ill-fated year of 1666 was asked to make a call to knock down the houses in the path of the fire but at that particular point the houses in question belonged to a bunch of rich people who had kind of given him his job, and so he demeured and as a result lots of poor people lost everything. Plus ça change hey!
(It’s from this same root ‘saper’ that the English word ‘sapper’ comes from, a military term used in WW2 to denote a man who would prepare a battle ground by mining it, or de-mining it, and was involved in blowing up bridges and fortifications. In the beautiful book ‘The English Patient’, one of the characters, Hana, falls in love with a sapper working for the British Army but who has been seconded from the Indian Army, at that time still under British control, whose name is Kip.)
Anyway hence the cannonball, which now seems like a strange decoration for a fireman. Although in France, the fire department also doubles sometimes as an emergency services equipped with basic health gear - when I hit a deer whilst moving down to my new house, the man I flagged down on the highway happened (oh providence, how you must love me!) to be a volunteer firefighter and he instantly called the pompiers and they came in a snazzy red van equipped with all sorts of stuff, and made me lie down and took my blood pressure and checked all my bones and my head and asked me questions to see if I was confused and refused to let me drive off, and they also made sure my car was off the road and that the deer was also not going to cause harm to anyone else (the deer itself got hauled off and presumably ended up in someone’s freezer not long afterward.)
Back to the buttons. Here’s another strip.
These are military band buttons, hence the lyre, although can one even play a lyre whilst marching?
The die on the left was used to make buttons for someone a bit noble, you can see the crown above the double c’s, which was only legally able to be used by members of the nobility. The die on the left is super fab, it has a sun in the middle and then all the signs of the zodiac. These might not be French, the seller had Spanish and Mexican button dies. I would’ve bought them all if I could afford them but nope, and also they weigh a ton. They can go into my collection of scenic weights for holding down things. I do have buttons up on my website and some of them are metal. Although the oldest ones on the website are not cast like this, they were handmade and they are 18th century.
To be honest I don’t know so much about buttons. I know that the most beautiful of the mother of pearl buttons in France actually come from the Atlantic, and there was for a number of centuries a very specialised artisan sector skilled at making buttons in mother of pearl here in France. Some of the examples that I have seen but could never afford date from the 18th century and they are magnificent. Nearish to me there is a town called Argenton-sur-Creuse and there is a Museum of Shirts there, because the town used to be an artisan centre for shirtmaking. The museum is small but rather fab and there is a small corner dedicated to the Atlantic mother of pearl button trade. If you pass through, you should try to see (the town is perched on the Creuse and the houses that overlook the river are very wonderful!)
By the 30’s or 40’s most of the mother of pearl was imported from France’s colonies in Asia or from Japan because colonialism always tells and it was simply cheaper to source the raw materials and get them made there. But they were not at all the same quality - not because of a lack of beautiful mother of pearl or from a lack of skill of the people doing the work, but because mass-production using slave labour inevitably results in crappy products. This is why older buttons are beautiful, heavy, lustrous things and can even be resurfaced and polished, and the newer ones I can spot on clothing, especially when they are replacements and some of the older buttons still remain - the newer ones are far thinner and are almost always cracked, scratched and chipped with the layers visible, whilst the older buttons on the same garment may have lost some of their shine but they just need a polish. On my website, when I say Atlantic mother of pearl, these heavy buttons with a deep lustre is what I mean.
STORY SALE - I am having one on my instagram account starting at 11.30am tomorrow morning (Paris time).
This is something I started doing during covid lockdowns and it worked so well I kept it up. I find quite a few less-than-perfect items, and also sometimes when I wash what I thought was a perfect item it reveals all its flaws (which is one of the major reasons I wash everything) so instead of spending forever uploading them onto the website I put them up in stories on my instagram account. If you are a maker or looking for scraps or weird bits, this is the place. I also really hate it when people cut up good quality useable sheets, so to rectify this interdiction I put up damaged sheets in these sales as well.
A few things for anyone who doesn’t know how these work. Stories on instagram tend to flip by very quickly. You can stop the story flipping by placing your finger on the screen which will pause the flip. You claim the piece by messaging me and asking - first person to clearly ask gets the piece. I will delete the piece as soon as it is claimed, so if you want to know what it was please take a screenshot. This also means you must go through with the sale as newbies who don’t pay me within 24 hours tend to get permanently blocked (although my reputation seems to be working, I haven’t had a non-payer for months touch wood). I often don’t have time to answer questions during a story sale, I recommend if you are a first-time buyer you go read the section on my website called ‘Buying, shipping and returns’ . I tend to invoice at the end of the sale, because at this time of the year I am always working against the light.
I never know quite what is going up, and I tend to run them until I can’t stare at a screen any longer! I always have so many damaged pieces…I could keep going!
Have a lovely day xx
It's so cool to see these dies, I had no ideau how buttons were made. I love the ones with the lyras, so beautiful! Thanks for teaching me the ethymology of "sapeur", didn't know it either and hadn't even ever asked myself what it meant... Regarding mother-of-pearl, I once saw a wonderful exhibition when I lived in Compiègne, Oise, of ancient fans made from mother-of-pearl. I recall that there was a manufacture of mother-of-pearl in a town called Méru, in the same département, which now has a Musée de la Nacre et de la Tabletterie. "Tabletterie" means boardgames and small objects made of materials like wood, bones, mother-of-pearl, ivory, etc. The museum's trying to safeguard the know-how of mother-of-pearl button-making.
I have a plain flat brass chimney sweep’s button that was my mother’s. When she died it was the only thing I would have fought for out of a house full of her possessions, having borrowed it to sew onto my wedding dress. If you could convince a chimney sweep to give you a button it was considered the best of luck, and they were quite tricky to get hold of apparently. It has the stamp of the factory in Zagreb where it was made on the back and it is one of the few things I would save in an emergency.