Barbed-Wire Research in Boston

Lyn and I have been working for two days now in the Harvard's Baker Business Library.

We have collected hundreds of images of trade cards, barbed-wire journals, trade catalogues, and so on.

The photos I've taken with a digital camera are protected, for research only, so I won't post any of them here.

But the archives of the American Steel & Wire company are so full of good things that I' wanted to post at least one image.

As you can see, the image of choice is a wonderful section of marbled endpaper. The book is a leatherbound accounting book that lists, month by month in 1884-5, the manufacture and sales of Glidden barbed wire. The numbers are in the millions of tons. But for me the true beauty of this book is in the endpapers.