Costume Jewelry Piece of the Day


"Mourning" Necklace and Married Earrings

This resembles "mourning jewelry." The necklace is composed of five strands of twisted seed beads. The clasp is distinctive and has two leaves with rhinestone flower accents on each section. There is no signature on the necklace.

The earrings are a pair of dangling seed bead hoops with seed beads on the cab. They're screwbacks.

I also have a white set that is similar, and a matching pair of white seed bead earrings. The white necklace is just a woven single strand of seed beads.

I think this may have been worn to a funeral, but cannot locate any pictures of a family member wearing the necklace. It could have been worn to my biological grandfather's funeral, but this would date the necklace to the mid-1930s. I do not believe it is that old.

Costume Jewelry Piece of the Day




This is a pretty milk glass necklace marked "Japan." The clasp is wonderful. I'm not sure if I have matching earrings, but have several pairs that might be the match. The beads are nicely strung.

Vintage Photos



Here are some vintage photos of family members that feature period jewelry.


Victorian

This woman appeared in a group photograph. She is a member of the Manning family, who were Texas rangers and ranchers during the "Wild West" period. She's pictured here wearing a 5-strand beaded necklace.

1940s This woman is dressed in pefect 40's style. She's looped a single strand of costume beads through the fold in her dress.

1950s

This is a close-up of the costume jewelry worn by a distant relative. She's wearing what appears to be a gold locket and an elaborate rhinestone fur clip shaped like a bunch of grapes.

This is a closeup of my grandmother, Reba Lou. The photo dates to the early 1950s. She's wearing a pair of silver Coro leverback clips accented with three blue rhinestones.

1960s

This picture is poor quality, but I was able to recognize the necklace Reba Lou wore in the photo. The picture came from a 1960s Christmas party.



Here is the necklace in the photograph. (My photo is not of the greatest quality, either ;0)




The necklace is a faux pearl pendant with rhinestone spacer beads.

Lime Green Set

This set is probably from the 1960s, judging by the color (which I can't get to photograph correctly). It's a shocking lime green. This wouldn't by too abnormal, but the necklace is in a 20s style. The bib is lined with cloth and the beads appear to be plastic, but may be glass.

There must have been a time when this was popular ;0)

West German Demi-Parure

This West German set is made of plastic, faux pearls, and several metals. The main metal seems to be pot. I really like this set. For some reason, the clasp on the necklace is stamped "M. Germany" instead of W. Germany.

Costume Jewelry Piece of the Day



Until recently, I had a smallish collection of costume jewelry from the 50s and 60s. When my paternal grandmother passed away, I asked that my father (her executor) bring her costume jewelry back to our home state instead of giving it away or selling. Initially, my mother resisted. "It's incredibly tacky," explained, "this is not the stuff that you're looking for. Believe me. So you'd better not be disappointed when we bring it up here and you don't like it!"

She was right in saying that some of the collection is tacky. The problem was that there was so much jewelry that it was impossible to see any of the decent pieces. There were three toolboxes (actual toolboxes), a quadruple tiered Lady Buxton jewelry box, a "box from the shed," and lots of little boxes. I thought it was wonderful.

My current project is to photograph some of the more interesting pieces and put them here. It's a nice way to waste time. My justification for this is that people like to see them and they make some people happy.



Unmarked Sets from the 1950s

These were probably purchased at the same time. Neither set came with any remnants of the matching bracelets. An earring back on the yellow set is broken; I have not repaired it yet. One of the pink earrings has lost paint around the inner plastic bead. Other than this, they survived in good condition. Both appear to be from the 1950s. It was a dainty, flowery time.

Being a paranoid soul, I've wondered if the paint on the pieces is lead-based. It has an odd look to it.

A bracelet matching the yellow set was featured in: Aikens, Ronna Lee. Brilliant Rhinestones: Vintage and Contemporary Jewelry. Kentucky: Collectors Books, 2003. p. 173.

Running Out of Ink . . .

Example of normal Deathly Hallows page*


Example of light and blurry page (for real--the page looks like this)


That Deathly Hallows book I bought contains a strange misprint that I've not seen anywhere on the Internet. I wonder if it's just mine.

The ones I've heard about contain upside-down and missing pages. The unhappy people who obtained these books are now selling them on E-Bay for egregious sums of money to make up for their "lost Harry Potter" moment.

Mine's pretty cool. At first, I thought it was a trick that I was too stupid to understand. After I realized I had a misprinted first edition, I lamented eating the chocolate bar while thumbing through the book. It's RARE, so I should have worn gloves while reading it.

Here's what happens: At one point, Harry and Ron and Hermoine are off looking for Horcruxes when they go to find Luna at her father's house. So they're having a big fight over whether or not Harry can say the "V" word and then Ron decides the saying of the "V" word by Harry is how Voldemort (oops) is tracking them down. And then Harry says:

"Because we used his name?"

And Ron responds:

"Exactly! You've got to give them credit, it makes sense. It was . . ."

And then the next two pages appeared to be blank.

When my eyes adjusted, I realized they weren't blank--just grey and fuzzy.

Ron continued, lightly and blurrily:

"only people who were serious about standing up to him, like Dumbledore dared to use it. Now they've put a Taboo on it, anyone who says it is trackable--Quick and easy way to find Order members! They nearly got Kingsley--"

Okay, so that explained that. The text was grey from 390 to 391. Then it went back to black until 398 to 399 to honor the trio's arrival at Lovegood's house. It turned grey on 406 to 407 to signal how important it was that Hermoine read "The Tale of the Three Brothers" aloud to Ron and Harry. And then it turned grey again on 414 to 415. I don't know why. They're only just blabbering about the Hallows on these pages.

It looks like the printer ran out of ink. I had to laugh. Imagine this book being sent to the printer via some ghostly railway line and then it gets there and they run out of black ink.

This happened because there's another Horcrux out there.

* Note: I do not have a good camera and the images were changed from color to black and white so that the white space did not show up as yellow. It doesn't photograph well, but you get the idea.

Intimidation



I told a family member about the Gutenberg website and gave them the link. It appears they sat before the main page completely intimidated because they "couldn't think of a single good book to read." So they clicked on the most popular books, but that had things like "The Karma Sutra," a surgical anatomy text, and a health textbook from the early 1900s. Now I must send them a list of classic books that I KNOW they wanted to read.

The webpage kind of intimidates me, too. It does so in a way Wikipedia never will. The latter website always seemed to be the genius friend that "knew everything," but suffered from occasional bouts of insanity.

Lately, I've been interested in the "false document" device, non-existent texts used in a larger work. Here are some quick examples:

• The Hitchhiker's Gude to the Galaxy (Douglas Adam's Hitchhiker's Guide the the Galaxy series)


• The original copy of The Princess Bride (William Goldman's The Princess Bride)


• Tom Riddle's diary and the textbooks/library books at Hogwarts (J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter series)


• The Necronomicon (H. P. Lovecraft)


• A mysterious book given to Dorian Gray by Henry Wotten and the picture created by Basil Hallward (Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray)


• The student film in The Blair Witch Project

In other words, it's a common device. The King in Yellow, which I finished reading yesterday, caught my attention because it's false document, a play, was supposedly the inspiration for Lovecraft's Necronomicon and it appeared to contain references to Oscar Wilde's Salome and Dorian Gray. It's not a terrible book. I haven't had the time, nor the resources, to research the critical stuff that's out there on it, but there seems to be a pronounced lack of interest in it. As Scott D. Emmert wrote in the Journal of American Culture (1999), "little criticism exists on this influential work."

The false document in The King in Yellow is a supressed play that shares its name with the books title. The play's history resembles Salome's: it is never produced, rumored to be beautiful and contain "terrible truths," and is having a cultural impact in spite of its censorship. In the first part of the book, copies of the play turn up at random. Nobody wants to read it. Nobody admits to reading it. Yet everyone has heard about the play and it seems to be always lurking about, ready to turn up in the most innocent of places.

It seems to me (having just read the book for the first time), that play functions by attacking the supports of either Western or American society. The first act seems to argue in favor of what everyone assumes to be true and contains a great hook. The second act dismantles the false claims of society and establishes a "real" and "terrible" truth. In the first part of The King in Yellow, the play infects our beliefs about history, the American goverment, society, religion, art, and love. After it's accomplished this feat, the play drops out of the narrative completely. Shortly after its disappearence, the book seems to be infected with it. There are a number of "paths" that lead out of the infection, but several seem to lead to isolation and an inability to connect with the Other.

My thoughts on this aren't clear right now because I just read the book and haven't read it again. It doesn't help that there is little to confirm or deny my hypothesis. There has to be more critical writing about book. I probably should have kept my old university account active . . . Why has no one said anything about the book's apparent connection with Wilde?

Project Gutenberg

Project Gutenberg is an excellent resource, so I am surprised when I hear people say they’ve never heard of it. Created by Michael Hart, the site exists merely to distribute copies of e-texts.
E-book collections like this can be beneficial to students and instructors in two ways. Students can instantly access literary works, even those that may not be held by their library (or are currently on loan to someone else). For instance, I was recently looking for a fictional book called The King in Yellow. The local college library does not appear to have a copy of the book. Neither does the local regional library. I could attempt to do an Interlibrary Loan for the text, but the copy might not arrive for several weeks. But I was able to pull up the e-text for the book in under a minute and start reading away. The search and feature can be helpful to instructors in labs who want to demonstrate something in a text quickly. While lecturing, you can access any of the documents on the site, project them using a Boxlight, and highlight the particular passage you want to emphasize.
The downside is that the Guttenberg Project does not contain multiple editions of the books it collects, so the edition stored on the database may not match the edition your instructor is using. But it is good for accessing printed works quickly, or simply if you want something to read on your computer for pleasure.

Project Gutenberg Website