Spoons. for Experts and Amateurs
Old Silver .Spopris of England. By Norman Gask. . (Herbert Jenkins. 258.) „.
Ma. GASK must be congratulated:6n haVing produced a book on English silver-spoons which- is both beautiful and useful, -The illustrations, largely from Mr. Lionel Crichton's " case. book," are admirable, and the author writes with the fire of - the collector and the knowledge of the expert. As a book of reference with regard to the earlier and rarer types like the diamond-point, the .maidenhead, the wrythe,n, or the acorn- knop his information is both exhaustive and compendious, and it is difficult to see how these sections could be bettered. Nor does he cater for the. expert alone, but for the embryo collector too, and his general hints on the conunoner types of spoon, such as the seal-top, the trifid, the " Hanoverian" rat-tail and its Georgian descendants should prove very useful in pointing out pitfalls. Perhaps more might have been said about the alphabets of date-letters, and in particular the scrapping of the 1678 alphabet in 1696 and the future commencement of alphabets in the " -sixes " 'instead of the " eights," and the tyro would have been helped by a few facsimile reproductions of the marks, giving the shapes of shields. In the same way the substitution of the first two letters' of -the maker's surname during the higher-standard period could have been made more easy to grasp by such examples as that of Paul Lamerie, who signed LA in this period and P.L. subsequently. The incuse king's head in the. first year of its introduction might also have been men- tioned. On more minute points there are but few criticisms to make,. .Mr. Cask might have quoted an authority (if there is:one). for sets of Apostle-spoons, including one of Our Lady, and the maker's name which he gives, 'withOut ide;ntification, as BV over a wicker-gate, is certainly BY, and belongs to Benjamin Yates, the gate being a rebus for Yates. He might alio have stated that wonfen-goldsmiths uivally enclosed their initials in a lozenge, and have added: Mitrie'llose to his list of them. But theSe are small points, and we welcome Without reserve Mr. Cask's admirable treatise.
B. F. BENSON.
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