Bugbear wrote: "I try to suppress my envy at residents of the big ol' U S of A,
and their endless supplies of pre 1900 Stanleys, Disston saws,
beautiful and ingenious Millers Falls (both drills and planes),
and ?1 Arkansas stones. So please, guys, don't begrudge us poor UK'ians
the odd Norris, Preston or Coticule :-)"

I know, I know, look to the blessings you have and shun envy. Even so, I do
begrudge the odd Norris. To me the UK is a place where you can find infill
planes (and, by the way, illuminated manuscripts, which are sometimes used to
replaced car gaskets) in every garbage tip and estate sale. You use the damaged
ones for paperweights and doorstops. Fifteenth-century cupboards are used to
store cleaning products the kitchens of your houses, and Sheraton tables are
covered with the equivalents of banana jello and three-bean casserole at the
equivalent of the church bake sale. I even know how to work pounds, shillings,
and pence, so I am prepared to be able to buy if I ever get over there.

OK, maybe my notion of the United Kingdom has a touch of fantasy in it.
Even so, a friend of a friend of mine, a knife collector, went on a visit to
England back in the late '60s and decided on a whim to leave the posted tourist
right-of-ways and visit Sheffield, like a visitor to Africa heading off the game
reserve roads into lion country. In the old George Wolstenholm factory, in the
assembly room, he saw hundreds of century-old knives still lying on the
workbenches, completed but never packed for sale. He asked the one old workman
still rattling around the place, a wrinkled-visaged white-haired fellow who
stooped like a Disney toymaker, how much he wanted for a Sheffield Bowie picked
up at random, a knife worth more than a Stanley #1 plane (another a friend of
mine got a #1 for free, but that's another story). "Coupla bob?" asked the noble
fellow in response. So my friend's friend took his Bowie home, pawned it for
more than his car was worth, borrowed on the rest of his knife collection, sold
his car, mortgaged his house, and tried to raise money on his wife, and went
back to Sheffield with $50,000 and bought up every knife he could find in the
old factories. And that, my chickies, is the story of the foundation of Atlanta
Cutlery, as told to me by my friend Hank Reinhardt back when the world was young
and-all.

Tom Conroy

The medieval manuscript used for a car gasket, not an illuminated one I expect,
happened in the late '40s when a young rare book dealer at the start of his
distinguished career was driving home from a country auction. Seventy miles
short of London a gasket blew out, and he used the only available material to do
a running repair. He dined out on it for the rest of his life; I heard the story
from a friend of his at an after-dinner speech at a book collectors club, not
many years ago. Not all manuscripts are valuable, and not all antiquarians have
the proper respect for low-priced ones. Hey, I have a framed page from a musical
manuscript, picked out of someone's trash on my way to work; having it disgusts
me, but it was better to take it home than to let it go to the dump. The friend
who got a free #1 Stanley is Kirk Eppler, who paid a fair price for a crammed-
full toolbox to someone whose address he didn't take, and who found the plane at
the bottom of the chest when he got home. I've lacquered up the story of Atlanta
Cutlery a bit, but the essentials are what Hank told me during one of my visits
to him in the 1970s (look him up in Wikipedia, he was as fine a man as I have
ever known, and pushed me into the best and most important decision of my life,
to go to college after dropping out of high school).