Hello everyone, I am new here and I already need your help !
Can you identify these marks ? They are on an articulated fish.
Thank you for your help
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I’m in a bind.
So no more Maltese Falcon? Now we’re stuck with Maltese Fish? Dasheil Hammett would turn in his grave.
I share your concerns about the marks. It looks to me like one of those mass-produced Chinese lucky fish they used for table decoration for certain holidays and I wonder if it is actually silver at all?
They used to make them out of Britannia metal or plate them and put glass eyes in them. Probably still do.
None of the marks seem to be in shields that are quite the same shape as the original. I think if I owned it I would test it for silver rather than relying on the marks too much one way or the other.
One things for certain. It’s fishy and the maker’s mark is most likely the one with multi- characters. The “EC” and the “R” and the Maltese cross, that has come out rather like a flower lacking water, all look like genuine marks which I think you have correctly identified.
But the owner should test it for silver, tell us the eye is a semi-precious stone and he is ready for. Chinese New Year.
In Chinese culture the fish represents prosperity, abundance, and good fortune, This symbolism is deeply integrated into daily life, special occasions, and traditional festivals, most notably the upcoming Chinese New Year.
Some claim The importance of the fish stems from a linguistic confusion, the Chinese for fish, yú (鱼) being a homophone for yú (余), which means “surplus” or "abundance, I think they just like eating fresh fish at their celebration meals as I always seem to get offered one, head, tail bones and all and they all look like this chap.
CRWW
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You’re right, Christopher!
Looks like chinese…
Rose Of Montrose - “…Maltese cross, that has come out rather like a flower lacking water…”?
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Every time Bogart’s picture wearing the trademark Sam Spade fedora is posted, Stetson and no doubt other makers sell out.
It is such a cool hat. Go back to the 1940’s even 50’s and everybody wore headgear and, I have no stats, but this style would have to have topped the charts.
It was the last thing you put on in the morning before heading for the commuter train to the office and the first thing to come off when you arrived back at the suburban home with a triumphant " Honey, I’m home!" and she came to meet you in the hallway with a Gimlet or a Gibson, a big smile and not much else. Okay, I’m dreaming a little.
Somehow we traded a all that in for a toaster oven and a dishwasher and now its the wife who goes to work returning home with a precooked chicken or pizza.
The hat reminds me of the great con of the 20th century played on both men and women. Equality. All it really mean is the mortgages to cover the bank loans got so high everybody had to go to the mine face and the birthrate dropped to minus something.
I think if MAGA dropped the baseball cap which nobody plays, at least not this time of year when its minus 22 up here, and took up Bogey’s trilby instead they might even get my vote.
CRWW
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Very Seville of you!
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So what do hatters and silversmiths have in common? The Lewis Carroll trope “Mad Hatter’s tea party” is what we know about this. The answer is mercury was used by both professions.
Hatters were considered “mad” because of mercury poisoning from the chemicals used to make felt hats, leading to symptoms like tremors “hatter’s shakes”, slurred speech, irritability, and hallucinations, a condition called erethism, which became a widespread occupational hazard and inspired the phrase “mad as a hatter”.
While Lewis Carroll popularized the trope in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, the expression predates the book, stemming from the real-life neurological damage in the 18th and early 19th-century industry.
In silversmithing it was the “lost mercury” system of guilding which accounts for the rapid turnover of silversmiths up until modern times and probably explains why the ones that did live long were actually bankers and why so many wives took over so many silversmiths’ business — book keeping being generally less lethal.
Here in Canada our contribution to the problem was limited to providing the beaver that provided the felt. We discovered exactly how unimportant that was to the British when Louis XIV’s court decided felt hats were out of fashion and in the 1763 Treaty of Paris, the French famously chose to retain their sugar islands Guadeloupe and Martinique over the vast territory of Canada which the Brits offered them.
This left the Hudson’s Bay Company with a coast to coast to coast hunting ground in the west coast all the way down to California. We surrendered that land in the 1855 Treaty when Lord Durham sided with the Americans against us
Despite that we did eventually to make the company into a colony and then a country. But it took disasters like the Battle of Vimy in WWI to do it and now we have finally got free of the Brits the Americans are chatting about Jeffersonian Manifest Destiny again.
Or maybe they are just talking through their hat in the White House.
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Daft as a brush, the whole boiling of you.
Straight down the rabbit hole.
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