Many of you have expressed interest in seeing more pages of the catalog for the Ornamental Wood Company and I’m investigating ways to do this. I would not only like to provide this catalog, but others as well over time, so rather than find a quick solution, I’m trying to decide upon the best means to accomplish this for the long haul. Since I’ll be launching the revamped website sometime in April, I will try to have the catalog display solution coincide with that.

One of the key issues to work out is how to prevent wholesale downloading of these valuable catalogs. The individuals who have these in their possession spent money to acquire them and it wouldn’t be unfathomable that someone could attempt to take a downloaded version and resell it. Striking a balance between sharing this important information while protecting the owners of the originals is something to resolve. I also believe that we’ll get more contributors of these items if they know that there are some controls in place.

Some of these catalogs are at libraries and I think I’ll have a better shot at getting their approval to make them accessible to us if they know that the viewers can reference the documents while not downloading. For example, the Schrenkeisen catalogs will require approvals from the Winterthur Library in Wilmington, DE.

Thanks for all your interest in this and if anyone has original Victorian furniture-related catalogs that they’d be willing to share with the Rare Victorian community, please contact me.

I’m certainly open to feedback on this topic.

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Well, I’ve been looking for something like this for quite some time. These are excepts from a 43 page catalog exclusively detailing ornamental wood pieces that furniture makers could purchase to incorporate into their furniture. This catalog is from 1874 for Ornamental Wood Company of Bridgeport, Conn. They are certainly not the only manufacturer of these adornments from the time, so there are still many catalogs yet to be found out there.

Offered for sale in the catalog are doorknobs, shutter knobs, escutcheons, medallions, rosettes, panel ornaments, brackets, leaves, heads, curtain pins, sleeve buttons, jewel boxes, and ornamental buttons for clothing - made “In Natural Woods”.

The above page is one of the most interesting to me since it shows some familiar elements that we’ve all seen adorning furniture we own or see in the market. There are no carved bust furniture arms available in this catalog so I am still looking for a source that supplied some or all of the furniture arms for Jelliff, Schrenkeisen, J.W. Hamburger, and others.

In the images below you will see carved elements that are represented in the Ornamental Wood Company catalog that had been utilized on antique furniture made during the period. The lion head image is from the Herter Brothers bookcase that I previously featured in my blog postings and it is item #58 in the catalog. The top rosette on the bed footboard is from page 16 in the catalog. The female head on the table skirt is one of the heads pictured at the top of this post.

Thanks go out to Steve Rowe, a new Rare Victorian reader who is the owner of the original catalog. I hope Steve continues to share more of his knowledge and resources over time with the Rare Victorian readers. Thanks for sharing the images, Steve.

If any of you have resources or a story to share with Rare Victorian readers, please drop me a line. Thanks to contributors like Steve, we all learn more about this period of furniture-making that we all enjoy.

I would also like to open up the blog to other writers. If you would like to express yourself directly to the Rare Victorian readership and share some Victoriana with us, contact me. As this is a blog and not Time Magazine, we do not have to be professional writers, so don’t be put off by any concerns there. Over time I would like to add additional writers to supplement my postings and provide more content and value to the readers. It will take time, but that is a longer term goal.

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Not sure if anyone saw this shelf go up for sale on Ebay, but as far as shelves go, I think this is up there with some of the better ones. With a 32″ height it is also one of the taller shelves that I’ve run across. The integrated spiral columns are also an added twist, if you’ll excuse the pun. There were a few minor losses to the carvings but 10 bidders and 20 bids later, bidding ceased successfully at $661. More photos at the listing.

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