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Copyright
© 2003 by Michael Segers, All rights
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Open Salts: Worth Their Salt
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As I've mentioned, I enjoy hanging out in antique shops, not the shoppes ,
with all their attitude, but the ones where I can find things that I remember
from when I was a kid. Over the years, I've been puzzled by
some little pieces of glass, not like anything I remember seeing in my home, much too big to be beads (and they don't have holes
for stringing), but apparently too small (one is sitting on a quarter, right)
to be any sort of bowl, which they look like... maybe a bowl for a very
dedicated dieter.
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I've learned that they have various names, salt dips, salt cellars, salt dishes,
and most commonly, open salts. Their name reflects their use: they were
made as dishes for salt. They reflect the taste of an earlier time when
tables were cluttered with an assortment of specialized fish forks, bone plates,
and knife rests. Most of those quaint utensils may still have
their place, but open salts were made obsolete by one cute little girl with a big
umbrella.
Although obsolete, open salts are favorites among collectors, so much so that there is
a National
Open Salt Convention every year. (Look below
for information about a website devoted to open salts that I discovered after
writing this article.) As I have gotten more intrigued
by open salts, I've learned that they come not only in glass (of every variety
and color) but also in porcelain, pewter, silver, and just about any other
material in which a small dish can be shaped. For various reasons, I've decided that open salts
just might be the perfect collectible for these early days of the twenty-first
century. By the way, I've limited my acquisitions to colorless glass,
whether pressed or cut, but even such a limitation leaves thousands of little
treasures to choose from.
There are a few good articles about open salts on the Internet, such
as "Open
Salt Collecting," by Ed and Kay Berg, and "The
Wonderful World of Open Salts," by "pjt," a member of the
Glass & Pottery Sellers' Association, in whose recent newsletter the
article appears. I regret that the author of the second article chose
quasi-anonymity, because it was in that article that I learned that in the
painting of The
Last Supper Leonardo da Vinci placed
an overturned salt-cellar in front of Judas Iscariot.
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Open
salt dishes have a long tradition and have even contributed a phrase to our
language. In The
People For Whom Shakespeare Wrote, Charles
Dudley Warner describes a table from the poet's time:
The long
table was divided into upper and lower messes by a huge salt-cellar; and the
consequence of the guests was marked by their seats above or below the salt. The
distinction extended to the fare, for wine frequently circulated only above the
salt, and below it the food was of coarser quality.
Note
on texts: I
link to texts in the Blackmask.com
archives, currently offering over ten thousand titles, which, as far as I know,
makes it the largest online
library. I used its sometimes quirky search engine to find the Briggs
quote; the Warner quote, I found on my own.
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Although
collectors favor exquisitely ornamental little salts, Charles
Frederick Briggs has one of his characters give this advice in the first
volume of The
Adventures of Harry Franco:
When you
sit down at a table, always look at the salt first; you will find it a sure
index of the quality of the fare, nine times out of ten. Never knew it to fail.
Now look at this, ain't it a gem? none of your finical flutings and notchings
about it; but a piece of plain unpretending glass, polished like a diamond. How
nicely it is filled, how smooth and white on its surface: it looks like a piece
of alabaster inserted in a crystal. How fine and spotless! look, it scarce
touches the steak before it is dissolved; not a particle of it will grate
against your teeth, but its delicate flavor will gratify your palate without
your being at all aware that you owe an exquisite enjoyment to so common an
article as salt. See, the little heap on the side of your plate looks like a
snow flake just fallen.
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The modern bibliography on open salts is small. (Let me
correct myself. Check this page,
which I discovered after I wrote this article.) The best
known, even classic, work is 5000 Open Salts, A Collector's
Guide (1982), by William Heacock and Patricia Johnson.
Heacock was an authority on glass produced in the United States, and his area of
expertise shaped this magnificent book. To
tell the truth, however, it takes someone with eyes much sharper than mine to
match a stray salt to one of the many illustrations. A sad note: both the
authors died early. Let's wish a happier fortune for Sandra Jzyk and Nina Robertson,
whose Open Salt Compendium
appeared last year.
Although "salts" were made in many materials, glass seems to have been the
favorite, as discussed in the article "Open
Glass Salts," by Adele Kenny. So, it is not long until many a collector of open salts comes in
need of the Glass
Encyclopedia, although it is not specifically of interest to
collectors of open salts, but that is appropriate. Most open salts are
"cross-collectable." That is, they appeal to collectors of
various interests--not just of open salts but also of pewter, sandwich glass, or
silver. Then, there is the option of figurals. If you wanted to
eat your salt out of the back of a swan or the nest of a (removable) hen, you
were in luck. I guess I was traumatized by a 1950's cream pitcher that left
me believing that cream was a liquid regurgitated from the mouth of a cow so
that I don't want animals on my dining table - well,
for eating, not for serving.
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Almost any antique or junque shop you enter will have a salt or
two or three hundred tucked away somewhere... and then there is the 900
ton (or gigabyte) gorilla of collecting, eBay.
On any given day, you can find about a thousand open
salts on eBay. About fifty items down, you drop below twenty-five
dollars, and most salts are even cheaper.
That's the
first of my reasons for offering open salts as nearly perfect
collectibles. The second is that, just as we don't have much money
these days, neither do we have much space. Here you can see an assortment of nine of my salts cozy on a CD case.
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Before we go much further, perhaps I should explain what happened to open
salts. Progress, again. Salt was not always the predictable,
homogenous product that it now is. It was caked, messy, didn't always pour
when it rained, and so, in 1914 (the year Georgia's own Bert
Parks was born), when the Morton
Salt Company could proclaim that its salt resisted the vagaries of the
weather, it did so proclaim, loudly, memorably and with a little girl carrying
an umbrella... even to this day, although the radical innovation of the
slogan--"When it rains, it pours"-- may now be lost on us.
So, now, those of us who still find something to cherish about open
salts are left languishing in a sort of decadence. Oh, well, here is a
little gallery of some
photos of my treasures, with hopes that some of their appeal will shine
through.
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(Left)
Side
view (profile) and
top view of five salts, showing another facet of their
charm... their diversity!
(Below)
Not all salts are round.
Look at these squares and rectangles
as well as the hexagon
(fourth in row, left) .
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(Above)
An assortment of
my salts,
none of any great value.
(Below)
Another
of my open salts, which would appeal not only to collectors of open salts
but also to anyone who likes beautiful
things.
Learn
more about
the
photo cube. |
(Three
photos below)
Top
and bottom views
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The
photography session was unexpectedly interrupted. As I well know,
among parrots, patience is a necessity, not a virtue, and Dory, the
R&R parrot, suddenly decided more time than was necessary or
virtuous had been spent
photographing little bits of glass when, as he would say, there's a pretty
bird much more deserving of photo-documentation.
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Life is salted with irony, I suppose, since for about half my life I have been
"watching my salt" in an ongoing struggle with hypertension.
Now, I rave about the beauty of salt dishes. Mine, displayed close
at hand on trays, because for me there is a pleasure in handling them, are never
touched by salt, however, just occasionally by a vitamin tablet.
Many folks might fail to appreciate the attraction of these little
treasures, say, folks who collect lunch boxes with pictures from television
programs of the 1960's. Many of us seek to reclaim the fondest stories of
our pasts with our collectibles. Just come along with me some time to a
classic car show and look at all the muscle cars from the 1970's, lovingly
preserved by gents whose muscles seem to have settled just above their belts.
There's nothing so obvious in the appeal of open salts. One reason I like
to feel them is because they were used, and this use is reflected in the tiny
nicks ('fleabites") and chips that many salts bear. Properly, salt
was taken from the dish with a tiny spoon (which, nowadays, costs more than the
dish) or the end of the knife blade (before it had been used); informally among
family and friends, one could pinch the salt from the dish. So,
these are some of the stories that my salts tell me:
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Her sister's husband had collapsed at the table and
had died before they could get him to his bedroom. Looking at the table, she began
to move the dishes around, not really
accomplishing anything. "Stop," her sister commanded from the
door and then moved to the head of the table, where so soon before, her husband had
enjoyed his last meal. Then, she looked at the salt dish. Very
carefully, very carefully, she lifted the little square of glass and looked at
the print of her husband's thumb, where he had pinched the salt. Then, she
told her sister to open the cabinet, and very carefully, she set the dish on the highest shelf she could reach,
closed the doors, and vowed that as long as she lived, the salt
would not be disturbed.
"Oh,
pappa!" she cajoled. "Now promise me. Tonight when Jonathan
and his parents come to dinner, please, oh, please, use the spoon for the
salt... and don't blow your nose into your napkin!"
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Everyone
can
appreciate open salts.
The
family had only minutes to leave the house they had lived in all his life, that
his family had lived in for generations. He ran through the dining room,
looked at all the crystal that within an hour would be trampled under the
invaders boots, and slipped a salt dish into his pocket. |
Keep your feet (and salt) dry, your heart full of noble thoughts including gratitude for
the beauty of simple things, the simplicity of beautiful things that may come
into your life in the most unexpected ways. And, as Dory reminded me,
don't let things become more important than friends, even if your friends wear
feathers.
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After
writing this article, I sent notices about it to several e-mail addresses that I
had found, including that of Ed and Kay Berg, the authors of the article "Open
Salt Collecting," and they referred me to a website that I had
missed: OpenSalts.info. (Wow,
everything is up-to-date in open salts collecting. Notice that spiffy
".info" domain!) Lovingly maintained by Debi
Raitz, this site links to seven open salts clubs, and is full of information
on the history of salts,
books about salts, and a link to the Salt
Trader Quarterly!
Best
of all is a chat
room about
salts. where one of the brightest celebs in the open salts world,
Nina Robertson, who with Sandra
Jzyk wrote
The Open Salt Compendium, published last year, pops
in and chats like a real person. Someone mentions spending almost five
hundred dollars on a salt, while another recounts scouting out alleged salts at
K-Mart! Gee, all this salty stuff is enough to make me thirsty (yep,
California's best, again)
so here's a toast to Ed and
Kay for taking the time to tell me about this site, to Debi for maintaining it,
and to various participants in the chat room who have answered my questions.
I seem to meet the nicest people collecting open salts.
Want
to collect books?
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