Ebook The Pewter Collector

It is usual in a preface to express a hope that the book may fill a long-felt want. One may hope that it may, and that is all; but one cannot say that it will.

There is a difficulty in writing from the point of view of the collector because there is now so little good pewter generally available which is fit to collect, and that little is being sold at such ridiculously fancy prices that the average collector cannot hope to enter the lists and compete.

The main interest in pewter must be historical and archaeological, for its metallurgical side can be dismissed in a few sentences and will not interest the ordinary reader.

The writer, in 1885, saw a round dish lying in the gutter in Bruges near a stall in the market-place, and as the dish had a crack in it, and its rim was rather badly battered, the writer became the owner of it by handing over to the dealer the sum of five francs.

This was the genesis of his interest in pewter. He cleaned it and many years later - for in 1885 he did not know how to do it - repaired it. Two years later, merely because he was the only one present at a committee meeting who owned a piece of pewter, he was constituted a subcommittee of one, with power to add to his number, to arrange for "Pewter" as a subject for discussion by what was then a small Society of Artists, and to find someone to read a paper on the subject. He failed to find this someone, and his own notes made the basis of a contribution to the evening's discussion.