I have this antique silver page turner without a handle and need to know which kind of style the handle should be.
Not sure what one would call the style, or even if it’s a page turner!
But we can say that it’s Birmingham, 1903:
https://www.silvermakersmarks.co.uk/Dates/Birmingham/Date%20Letters%20D.html
And the maker is Goldsmiths and Silversmiths Co, Ltd, with a mark registered in 1899:
https://www.silvercollection.it/ENGLAGOLDSMITHS&SILVERSMITHS.html
ETA: A bit puzzling, however, as the hallmark is Birmingham, but the maker’s mark was entered in London, though perhaps in other assay cities, as well.
I searched Ebay for page turners (and knives) made by this company and found nothing so I can’t help with a suitable style for a replacement handle.
However I have to correct Jeff’s identification of the hallmark. Jeff, you have misread the rather dirty London uncrowned leopard’s head as a Birmingham anchor. The hallmark is actually London 1899.
Phil
Thanks! I rather wondered about that, but couldn’t quite make it out.
Will it be worth the effort to make a handle? Do these items have any significant value?
If you just want to complete the item and restore its former glory, you can add a handle that fits the dimensions.
People in this forum like short crisp, precise answers to specific questions not long rambling theories of the origins of the items they have stumbled across and the marks identifying them.
I am quoting an old friend of mine whose expertise in matters of silver I have bowed to for decades and who was kind enough to read and comment on an earlier polemic of mine on a different matter in this forum.
So, Eriksen I have a crisp short answer.
What you have is most likely not a page turner but a page cutter, to be precise a cutter with a blade rather in the shape of a cricket bat that once had a pitch filled silver handle.
I am grateful to a gentleman named Ian Spellerberg, who lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. the author of “Reading & Writing Accessories: A Study of Paper-Knives, Paper Folders, Letter Openers and Mythical Page Turners”, now available from Oak Knoll Press.
“Spellerberg has become an important new authority on implements designed to do controlled damage to paper. In the process, he’s turned what most people thought they knew about these objects, particularly about page turners, on its head.
“Spellerberg didn’t set out to be a firebrand of the collectibles world, but as a professor of nature conservation at Lincoln University in Christchurch for twenty years and the Director of Environmental Sciences at Southampton University in England before that, his scientific side frequently takes over, even when it comes to something as ostensibly uncomplicated as a fondness for office antiques.
“I had never heard of page turners before,” Spellerberg told Ben Marks writing for Collectors Weekly in 2016. “The thought of using a hand-held blade for turning pages seemed rather romantic,” he told Ben.
“Impossibly so, as it turns out: After researching the topic for several years, Spellerberg concluded that page turners simply did not exist during the Victorian Era. In fact, according to Spellerberg, page turners didn’t exist during any historical period at all, making them the unicorns, if you will, of office collectibles, mythical objects that tell us more about how we imagine people lived rather than how they actually did.
Here’s the entire of Ben’s article on Ian and why page turners are a myth:
Now the fact that page turners are page cutters, why they are blunt rather than sharp and why we don’t use them anymore doesn’t mean that any of the final conclusions of the excellent research done by Phil, Jeff and Bartholomew is wrong just that they haven’t yet got a hold of Ian’s treatise on the subject on “controlled damage to paper”. and discovered it all applies to page cutters not turners if the gentleman from Christ church is correct, and nobody has contradicted him.
Okay that turned out to be a longer comment than I was planning on making, even if it wasn’t a page turner.
Christopher
Guildhall Antiques
Toronto
Thank U, Christopher!
Emeritus Professor Ian Spellerberg HFEIANZ - Environment Institute of Australia and New Zealand
As to value here’s a sterling silver handled cutter, wrongly described which failed to sell this week on Vancouver Island. Now it has an ivory blade which discourages US and other foreign buyers. https://www.liveauctioneers.com/item/197543390_hallmarked-silver-paginator-9-58-l-no-export. It occured to me you might acquire it and substitute your silver blade for the value reducing ivory one. CRWW