Paperweight - Briefbeschwerer - Presse-papiers - Fermacarta
German paperweights about 1900
By Bernd-Ingo Friedrich - Translated by Erhard Maroschek, Austria
The complete paperweight special in German at briefbeschwerer.kulturpixel.de
The more developed the arts,
the more useless things there are.
(Chinese proverb)
The arts have been granting beautiful things to us, too, and therefore, arts are useful also, as mankind does not live on bread alone. These beautiful objects may seem a little useless today, but their charming, untouchable tiny inner worlds created by glass makers once were useful: when letters had an important part in communication, those weights prevented the papers and letters from being blown from the desk.
"Paperweights" were not actually „invented“ by one person. The first step is the piece of glass (which is called gather) and when the maker takes it out of the furnace, step two was to include decorative elements, adding some colored or shaped glass, - the idea of „weighting“ papers with stones, wood or other materials was not a new one. It lacked only one step, and it was made by Pietro Bigaglia, a Muranese glass master who worked there and in Venice. He introduced the colorful glass balls to the public at the Trade Convention in Vienna, in the year 1845.
It seems as if all the world had just waited for those millefiori balls and expected his great success. The weights became very popular, and in the same year the famous Saint Louis factory in Lorraine began the production of glass balls „alla Veneziana“, and is still continuing nowadays.
Other companies followed. "Mille Fiori" means "thousand flowers", and before other decorations were included, paperweights were following the example of the Venetian prototype. Bigaglias glass balls became classics, and were not only used as weights, they were collected instantly. These paperweights (and their contemporaries until 1849 from France and England) are considered to be the only „genuine“ paperweights in a strict sense of the collector. All others are called „ordinary“ paperweights - including the local production in the smaller glass works in Lusatia, Silesia, Bohemia und Thuringia – don’t let this disappoint you- and enjoy their charm.
Glass makers, who wandered across Europe in search for income, were responsible for the spread of various skills in the glass finishing, and so the first paperweight soon appeared in Silesia, where glassworks already had a long tradition. Snuff bottles, vases, marbles or glass seals were little useful glass things, and the glass makers produced them secretly, as pause works or friggers („geschundenes Glas“ in German, literally „tortured“ glass). Where the term originated is controversial - it could refer to the time that was gained while working during the breaks. The resulting pieces of art improved the income and were used as presents for anniversaries, birthdays and similar occasions, or even to pay the worker’s evening beer.
Although some of these pieces seem to be quite simple, a lot of craftsmanship, design talent, a lot of skill and a little luck at last, was needed to finish it, because the supposedly successful work could always shatter during the cooling from internal tensions or the incompatibility of the various materials used. All kinds of waste glass, colored and shaped glass bits and powder were sometimes included to form petals, symbols, stripes, and letters in the local glassworks. Probably often as gift from other workshifts, millefiori rods, and sometimes copper wire, sheet metal or ceramic material came in. This is actually very humble, and if you consider the few and fairly crude tools used by the glass makers, one is astonished by the diversity and beauty of the art pieces made in a hurry.
Colette de Jouvenel, a relative of the French writer Colette, was a passionate collector of the colorful glass weights, wrote about paperweight makers: "Whoever possesses the ability to create emeralds, rubies and sapphires out of glass, to let the color tones shine steadily which are just fluctuant in nature, in an object not bigger than our hand, is perhaps only a modest magician, but he is a magician."
My grandfather Hermann Kraiczek was such a magician. He made two paperweights, encasing colored glass arches like in a Gothic cathedral – so called "Bohemian Spiders" which originated from Bohemia. He had the prospect of good money and was attracted to the booming village of Weisswasser in 1873. Weisswasser developed within 50 years, from a village of under 700 to the largest glass manufacturing industrial site in Germany with almost 13.000 inhabitants. Many worked here and stayed with their families, as my grandfather did. His sister in law, Erna Himpel, born Schmidt, was one of my grandmother’s many sisters. All were involved in the glass industry somehow, she facetted the paperweights, also the one with the white "stalagmite" ground.
P.S. Market prices are rising to unpleasant heights due to the rising number of collectors and dealers. Do not expect too much value yet, and do not sell them unless the 30 to 60 Euros are worth it - Weisswasser paperweights probably are still not highly rated outsiders. But as a collector, like myself for example, I would not part from a nice piece at the price mentioned above and therefore rather keep it. Just save it from being used as children’s bowling toy - they are becoming rarer and rarer ...
More about paperweights on kulturpixel.de:
About the production of paperweights
Of a glass maker and his paperweight
Of a glass maker and his paperweights
Of a glass engraver and his paperweight
About the "ironing" with paperweights
Paperweights from Lusatia/ Germany before 1945
Paperweights from Lusatia/ Germany after 1945
The history of a paperweight
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