hardware store literature

When the going gets tough, the tough shop the hardware aisles...

Guy Trebay. The Fashion Report of 1920 : Some clothes, like Barbour, Filson and Red Wing, never change, and this is their moment. The New York Times (Thursday Styles), 23 October 2008

The hardware store is both a real and an imagined place. Clustered around the expression are ideas of toolkit for living; down-to-earth practicality (versus theory); stability and dependability (examples being in the Harlequin romances); resistance to marketing, retailing and other fads, &c, &c. Its stock includes dangers — sharp tools, solvents — and innocent tools susceptible to misuse. And the inventory is subject to editing always. This list has been years in the gathering, though accelerated of late. Heterogeneity rules, as in a library. I can imagine any one of these links/citations/poems wondering how it came to be sharing a page with these other guys, the way a drill bit might be found just an aisle over from lead wool, hinge, clothespin or naval jelly.

art

Russ Johnson. Forty Years with Mister Oswald (1968)
Image from page 241 of this book. While Jerry contemplates bolt length, Oswald eyes the Van Boodles, a wealthy couple (Mr Van Boodle is owner of the beet sugar works) who are looking over color television sets... (shown here without permission, for now).
Mister Oswald ran for many years in the trade magazine Hardware Retailer. Rob Stolzer’s illustrated interview with Russ Johnson can be found at Hogan’s Alley : online magazine of cartooon arts. See also Stolzer’s fine Russ Johnson gallery page.
Crest Hardware Art Show
Crest Hardware in Williamsburg, Brooklyn makes room, amongst its mundane inventory, for an exhibit of tool-related art that in summer 2009 observed its eighth year.
Read about it here (The New York Times, 6 July 2008).
Also —
Crest Hardware Art Show ’08 (Flickr set by Collin Mel)
Crest Hardware Art Show ’09 (another Collin Mel set)
and
interview with Joseph Franquinha, Crest Hardware (Gothamist Blog).
Walker Evans. Beauties of the Common Tool : A portfolio by Walker Evans. In Fortune (July 1955)
Described, and some scanned pages, here.
I don’t know much about Evans’s career or oeuvre, but apparently his work in the 1950s is considered to have been a decline from earlier achievement. James Guimond, in his American Photography and the American Dream, quotes this handwritten note by Evans himself : Time and again a man will stand before a hardware store window surveying the tools arrayed behind the glass; his mouth will water; he will go in and hand over $2.65 for a perfectly beautiful special kind of polished wrench; and probably he will never, never use it for anything. (University of North Carolina Press, 1991)

We’ve seen that notion of eyeing and purchasing tools that will never be used, elsewhere in the literature, e.g., Phyllis McGinley her Please Lock the Hardware Store, or The Temptations of Oliver James (see under poetry, below).
The Tool as Object, the catalog of an exhibit of Anglo-American Hand Tools at the Craft and Folk Art Museum, Los Angeles (1976)

158 items described in the catalog of representative tools; 26 tools shown in halftone photographs by Donald A Hall. Edward F. Tuttle curated, and wrote the smart three-page introduction, in which utility and the extra-functional formal qualities of tools are addressed. Precisely because tools are so dominated by their intended function, one’s attention tends to be drawn immediately to this aspect, and their other qualities risk passing unnoticed or little heeded... [Formal features] are always abstract relative to the narrative in tools...
Pete Hamill. Tools as Art : The Hechinger Collection. New York: Henry N. Abrams, 1995
link at Pete Hamill’s website
The Hechinger Company annual report for the year ended January 28, 1989, features that family’s tool art collection
Alice Hutchins. Magnetic works.
Uses materials obtainable from hardware stores, and magnets, to create re-configurable art. Associated with Fluxus. More here and here, where we read about Hutchins’s association with hardware store culture.
Hardware Sculpture (Complete Instructions and Full Size Patterns for : Airplane, Antique Coupè, Antique Roadster, Locomotive & Space Module)
Creative American Craft Series by Hazel’s guest artists. HA-59. City of Industry (California) : Hazel Pearson Handicrafts, 1977. Editorial and Layout by Irene Zachario, Lynette Eastland and Stephen Van Handel.
Hardware sculpture is one of the most unique of the popular crafts! Composed of a wide range of materials, not usually associated with art objects, these sculptures utilize nuts, bolts, screws and nails; things you might use to build a wall, but never hang on a wall! Here we present 5 projects to keep you visiting your workshop, but not to work in it.
Inax. Shokunin no mikurokosumosu (The Microworld of the Craftsman : Workplace and Tools), published by the Japanese sanitaryware maker Inax in 1985.
Not about hardware retailing, but its photographs of tools in situ, showing signs of years of use (in some cases) and the close spaces in which their users attend to their craft, day after day, are quite beautiful.
The exhibit was curated by Okamoto Shigeo. Essays (rough translation of their titles) and authors : Endo Motoo, The Craftman’s mentality, today and yesterday; Yasuda Takeshi, Craftsmen I’ve known; Naito Masatoshi, Tea ceremony chasen; Endo Toshikatsu, Wood carvers in Takayama; Rokaku Kiji, Workplace of lacquer artist; Murota Takeshi, Post petroleum; Tagi Koji, The body as tool.
Inax (galleries in Kyushu, Osaka, Nagoya, Tokyo; publisher; in Japanese)
Carol Johnson, a painting of the interior of Wolgast Hardware, in Alta Vista (Wabaunshee County), Kansas.
Collections of the Kansas Historical Society, Topeka
Shown above (with permission) and described here.
Wolgast Hardware was in business from the 1920s until 1970.
Katerina Seda, It Doesn’t Matter
exhibit at The Renaissance Society at the University of Chicago, January 06 – February 10, 2008
Katerina Seda — known as a participatory artist — got her grandmother (77) to draw every tool she could remember from the hardware store she worked at for over 30 years, as a way to stay engaged with friends and family. The gallery-speak description follows :
Czech artist Katerina Seda’s primary media are her friends, family, and community of her native town Lisen. Seda (b. 1977) uses performance, staged activities, and public interventions to reactivate social concourse as it is the basis for a sense of self predicated on group identification. The Society will present It Doesn’t Matter, a series of over 600 drawings executed by Seda’s 77-year-old grandmother, cataloging in size and type the various tools and supplies sold through the Brno hardware shop her grandmother managed for over thirty years under communism. While therapeutic in intent, the result is a profound reflection on memory and subjectivity as expressed through, rather than in spite of, alienation.
Only a few drawings are shown, most images are installation shots. Perhaps the event is more important than the drawings? But some of us come at this via hardware stores. Really nice idea, however.

More on this project at Frieze Magazine 107 (May 2007), here. Or scroll down to image from It Doesn't Matter at theartblog (May 3, 2009), which clicks to a good enlargement. This critic finds the drawings oppressive, perhaps because of their tool/hardware subject matter?
Tim Taylor. Houghton Hardware Captured on Ornament by Dining Services Cook
in University of New Hampshire Campus Journal, 2 December 2009 here
Sure enough, the longtime business moved out of town a couple of years ago. In recent weeks, the building was demolished. But the memory of what was there will live on in this year’s Durham Business Association’s Christmas ornament, which bears an image of the hardware store painted by Taylor in 1998...
Sherry Thurner. Ace Hardware (Janesville, Wisconsin).
12 x 12 inches, acrylic on canvas board
Shown here with kind permission of the artist, and more fully described in her interesting book and painting-filled blog sherry-latebloomer.blogspot.com.
Something about the lettering brings Ed Ruscha to mind — not so much his Ace (1962), but maybe something like See (1992)?
Calendar Art
Back around the pipe threading machine, one might have found the Ridgid tool calendars featuring swimsuit-clad models in suggestive poses with dies, reamers, pipe wrenches and other tools. Here, for example, is a flickr set of the 1975-76 calendar.
Before Ridgid went to photographs, Cheesecake illustrator George Petty made his mark in this specialty genre. See his Ridgid calendar work here (the ASIFA-Hollywood Animation Archive, well worth an extended tour). Columnist Steve Duin of The Oregonian has blogged about this phenomenon here.

fiction

Anonymous. The Man Who Felt Sad. Appeared originally in the Detroit Free Press, and reprinted in Phineas Garrett, comp., The Speaker’s Garland and Literary Bouquet... (1905, but presumably dates from 19th century).

Can you speak of hardware to me at a time such as this?
more...
Yossi Abolafia. Yanosh’s Island. New York: Greenwillow Books, 1987
summary — When Vicky and David supply Yanosh with the nut he needs to complete the airplane he is building, Yanosh flies off looking for an uncharted island. The term hardware store appears only on dustjacket flap, and nowhere within the text; Yanosh operates a repair business.
Roderick Anscombe. Shank. New York: Hyperion, 1996
Included here only because of one bookdealer’s description of the book —
He would have been like any nice guy driving a UPS truck or working at the local hardware store, but things didn’t work out that way.first his wife found out she was HIV- positive and begged him to kill her, but he got time for it anyway, and then he fell in love with the prison nurse and she helped him escape, but when that guard got in the way he finally did something wrong.
The dealer is ABCCBOOKS in Reno, Nevada, from its AbeBooks description here. I’ve not found mention of hardware stores in the book which, incidentally, is readable. The dealer’s mention of hardware store uses it in its metaphorical sense of normal, which, given the state of remaining hardware stores, is more fiction than reality.
Ann Bell. Contagious Love. Uhricksville (Ohio) : Heartsong Presents, 1994
from back cover — Whatever happened to the simple, happy days of Rocky Bluff? Edith Harkness Dutton feels those days are gone forever, and with good reason. Despite the promise of Edith’s joyous second marriage to Roy Dutton in the autumn of her life, life in this Montana hamlet is anything but blissful. ¶ A former standout high school basketball star abuses his wife and is now stalking her despite a court-imposed restraining order... Edith’s son, Bob Harkness, struggles desperately to save the family hardware store from bakruptcy only to watch it go up in flames... and Roy always seems more tired than he should. — As these seemingly isolated events entwine, Edith is drawn into a maelstrom of emotions and needs. Never before have her unwavering faith and contagious love been in such demand.
Thomas Berger. Feud. New York: Delacorte Press / S. Lawrence, 1983
The Beelers, who live in Hornbeck, have a series of encounters, ranging from the hostile to the amorous, with members of the Bullard family, who own a hardware store in the adjoining hamlet of Millville.

Have not examined.
J. S. Borthwick. Bodies of Water (a Sarah Deane mystery). New York: St. Martins, 1990
Oh I've done this and that. Rope horses, drill wells, tend the store, keep the old wheels spinning. Actually, my front is a hardware store, but at heart I'm a rolling stone.

Have not examined beyond this page, but that’s a good line!
Bonnie Burnard (pseudonym of Jean Scott Creighton). A Good House. New York: Picador, 1999.
Bill Chambers has come home from WWII with several fingers missing, but with the will to restore his family life. He wants the best for his wife and children, and with his steady job at the hardware store the future stretches out before him. Yet as the future takes hold, generations pull apart and come back again, and love creates its own snares.
Kristin Butcher. Zee’s Way. (Orca Soundings.) Victoria, B.C. : Orca Book Publishers, 2004
publisher’s summary — Zee is torn between making a statement with graffiti and making art. and description : Zee and his friends are angry that their old haunt has been replaced by stores that are off-limits to them and storekeepers who treat them with distrust. To let the merchants know what he and his friends think, Zee paints graffiti on the wall of the hardware store. After the wall is repainted, Zee decides to repeat the vandalism, but this time with more artistic flair. A store owner catches him in the act and threatens to call the police — unless Zee agrees to repair the damage. (product details here).
Jackie Calhoun. Friends and Lovers, A Romance. Tallahassee (Florida): The Naiad Press, 1993
blurb — Seeking recuperation from the harsh pain of a divorce and the end of her first lesbian love affair, Danny has returned to Wisconsin. Living quietly with her mother and teenage daughter will bring her peace... won’t it? ¶ Working at a hardware store while she waits for a teaching position to open, Danny becomes embroiled in a project begun by two gay men — a Bed & Breakfast catering to AIDS patients. She also meets Chris, who makes no secret of her attraction to Danny. But Danny finds herself drawn to the alluring Maureen. ¶ There’s a very major complication: Danny’s closest friend Kara, long-time married, wants more than friendship with Danny. ¶ Marital anguish is nothing compared to this minefield of romantic and erotic fireworks. Then Maureen’s ex-love shows up... and Danny’s ex-husband... and Danny’s daughter learns Danny’s a lesbian ¶ Let Jackie Calhoun tell you all about peaceful, quiet lesbian life in midwest America...
Marisa Carroll. Last-Minute Marriage. Harlequin SuperRomance 942, October 2000
Mitch Sterling has a lot on his plate. He owns a hardware store that’s competing with a big national chain. he’s taking care of his elderly grandfather — though Granddad might argue about that — and he’s a single father to a young child. On top of that, he’s just met a very pregnant, very stranded, very single woman who needs a friend. And if Mitch is honest with himself, he’ll admit that he wants to be more than her friend...

This is one of six books projected in the Riverbend series, all set in the Midwest town of —
Riverbend...home of the River Rats — a group of small-town sons and daughters who’ve been friends since high school. The River Rats are all grown up now. Living their lives and learning that some days are good and some days aren’t — and that you can get through anything as long as you have friends.
Mark Crick. Sartre’s Sink : The Great Writer’s Complete Book of DIY. London: Granta, 2008
A very funny book, by the author of Kafka’s Soup : A Complete History of Literature in 17 Recipes. London: Libri, 2005.

The Table of Contents : HANGING WALLPAPER with Ernest Hemingway; BLEEDING A RADIATOR with Emily Bronte; REGLAZING A WINDOW with Milan Kundera; REPLACING A LIGHT SWITCH with Elfriede Jelinek; PAINTING A ROOM with Haruki Murakami; TILING A BATHROOM with Fyodor Dostoevsky; PUTTING UP A SHELF with Julius Caesar; REPAIRING A DRIPPING TAP with Marguerite Duras; BOARDING AN ATTIC with Edgar Allen Poe; PUTTING UP A GARDEN FENCE with Hunter S. Thompson; APPLYING SEALANT ROUND A BATH with Johann Wolfgang von Goethe; REMEDYING A DRAWER THAT STICKS with Samuel Beckett; UNBLOCKING A SINK with Jean-Paul Sartre; and PAINTING A PANELLED DOOR with Anais Nin.

Preview at amazon.co.uk. Or watch the author perform "Hanging Wallpaper" and "Boarding an Attic" via guardian.co.uk, here. This book should be stocked by every hardware store in the land.
Paul DiFilippo. Lost Pages. New York, London : Four Walls Eight Windows, 1998.
Parallel world (alternative universe?) stories, in which authors and other notables appear, rearranged, in oddball situations. In Linda and Paul, Phil(ip K) Dick works for his father-in-law at Ronstadt’s True-Value Hardware Store; Linda has gotten the notion that she wanted to be a singer. A pro. All quite opaque to me (although it appears that Ronstadt’s father was a prosperous machinery merchant (according to wikipedia). See the author’s website No Delusion Too Small.
Jennifer Greene. Lady of the Island. Silhouette Desire No. 463. Silhouette Books, 1988.
Jarl Hendricks is the strong, silent, patient and capable owner of a hardware store north of Detroit. While vacationing (and hunting) by a lake for a month, encounters Sara Chapman, a woman with a lot of baggage and a son. Evidently (I’ve not read the book) he helps her sort it all out.
Rebecca Hill. Among Birches. William Morrow 1986, Penguin 1987.
Nine years of togetherness in Hancock’s Best Lumber in Bracken, and now Aspera wanted out. She desired it more with each day that passed, just the way Will desired another store. (p49)
Sunni Jeffers. The Start of Something Big. One in the Tales from Grace Chapel Inn series. Carmel (New York): Guideposts, 2005
From the back cover : ...And when a Do-It-Yourself Warehouse opens in nearby Potterston and threatens Fred’s Hardware, Jane takes it upon herself to save his store. In the process, she strikes up a friendship with the manager of the rival superstore and struggles between loyalty to her friends and loyalty to her own heart. Could this be the start of something big or simply a test of Jane’s faith?
Jane Howard is saved from decisions by Todd Loughlin’s ex-wife Brenda's reappearance on the scene, ready to reclaim her husband. Being a good Christian, he must give her the second chance. Todd is the lumber-department manager in the superstore and, naturally, a nice guy. All ends well: Fred Humbert is forced to rethink his business, and add an equipment rental service to it, which promises to turn out well. Unrealistically — but this is, after all, a Christian romance series — the superstore business’s market research shows that there’s plenty of business for both. And so Acorn Hill gets to enjoy the prices and offerings of the DIY superstore, while retaining the traditional hardware store, supplemented now by equipment rentals. And the Howard sisters’ operation of a B&B called Grace Chapel Inn continues.
Here and there in this literature is found a certain quaint characterization of hardware stores and of the males associated with them. It’s nowhere more clearly expressed than here:
We stopped in yesterday and they were swamped with customers, Jane said. She smiled, thinking about Fred’s new venture. You should have seen Fred in the parade. He was just beaming as he drove a small, shiny orange tractor. I’m sure it’s very useful, but it looks like a big toy. I bet every many in Acorn Hill wants a chance to rent it. (p246)
Men are boys, who like their toys. Women do the thinking and negotiate crises.
Barry Kenney. Through the Deadfall. Toronto: Doubleday Canada Limited, 1997
Protagonist Jack Thorpe’s hardware store will go under, should a bridge-and-tunnel project link Vancouver Island with the mainland. Fuller story accounts available elsewhere (e.g., amazon canada. The hardware store isn’t doing too well, neither is Thorpe’s life : There you are again, my wife called from the front of the hardware store. Always doing something. ¶ ...I’m sorting screws in the storeroom! I yelled.
Jo-Ann Mapson. Blue Rodeo. HarperCollins 1994, HarperPerennial 1995
Sheep were simple enough to tend that Owen could work afternoons three days a week at Rabbott’s Hardware and Lumber. He put on his green vest with the dual waist pockets and checked stock against the yellow packing slips. Next he replaced fast-moving items on the floor—screws, ballcocks for toilets, keychains that lighted up when you squeezed them around the middle... They had steady customers and lumber sales kept them flush, but a week might go by without a significant sale in hardware...
this from the publisher’s blurb : Those who do not remember family history are condemned to repeat it...Haunted by a failed marriage, a resentful son left deaf by a bout of meningitis, and the slow death of her artistic aspirations, Margaret Yearwood takes refuge in Blue Dog, New Mexico. There, in the shadow of Shiprock Mountain, and in the unlikely arms of Owen Garrett, she finds the courage to love again, and to be loved. And she comes to realize that even the most primal wounds scar over and that there’s nothing so renewable or so healing as passion. This is a bittersweet story of ordinary people who must learn to heal family bonds before they are permanently severed.
Kevin McColley. Praying to a Laughing God. Simon & Schuster, 1998
dustjacket language — When Clark Holstrom goes each morning to open the hardware store he has operated for years on the main street of Credibull, Minnesota, he asks himself why he even bothers.
Kent Meyers. The River Warren. Saint Paul (Minnesota): The Hungry Mind Press, 1998
From jacket blurb —
When Two-Speed Crandall crashes a semi-trailer of someone else’s cattle in downtown Cloten, killing himself and his wife in the process, he unleashes the entire town’s gossips, half-truths, and memories. The novel is framed, Rashomon-like, in the accounts of seven different characters, including Angel Finn. The writing is tight; the book reads well.

The truck hit the bank, smashed its automatic teller, destroyed its facade, its plate glass, its plants inside the windows. Then it went back across the street to smack Angel Finn’s hardware store, sending files and hammers and hip waders spewing across the sidewalk. A twelve-pound maul, through some strange physics, few across the street and embedded itself in the wooden front of the pool hall, where Walt Latham, the proprietor, had the good sense to leave it, as a draw to customers and an aid to conversation... (14)
Leigh Michaels. Once and for Always. Harlequin Presents No. 1245. 1990
She’d sworn never to set foot in Iowa again. Jill Donovan loved big cities and the fast pace, and the prospect of spending her days as the wife of a small-town hardware merchant had never appealed. Yet her latest modeling assignment took her back to Springhill — to pose on an all terrain vehicle in the middle of an Iowa cornfield. Sure enough, Scott Richards — the man whose proposal she’d rejected ten years ago — was still manager of the hardware store. Only the store wasn’t the small business she’d imagined, and Springhill certainly wasn’t boring.
Speer Morgan. The Whipping Boy. Boston, New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1994
Set in 1894 in the Oklahoma Territory. The story revolves around Dekker Hardware and a land-grab scheme; one of the three protagonists is Jake Jaycox, an aging hardware salesman.
Lesley Mouttet. Love & the Hardware Store. In Island Woman Series No. 1, Love and the Hardware Store, and other stories. Port of Spain (Trinidad): Inprint Carbbean, 1977 : 9-14
Mr. Lall had arrived... fat, soft fingers covered in rings, large yellowed teeth, their gold fillings flashing behind the leer. Mr. Lall — rich with his own hardware store and Ma’s choice for her... (p 9-10)
John O’Hara (1905-70). The Hardware Man. The Saturday Evening Post, 29 February 1964
A moral tale, setting two hardware men against each other — Lou Mauser, with a deficiency in the humanity department, and old-style, plain-spoken Tom Esterly. One of O’Hara’s Gibbsville (Pottstown) stories.
Allie Pleiter. Bluegrass Courtship. (Kentucky Corners Series, Book 2) (Love Inspired #482). New York: Steeple Hill Books, 2009
publisher’s description — The celebrity host of TV’s Missionnovation, Drew Downing is comfortable with his fame. He’s become accustomed to the cheering, starstruck townfolk that usually welcome him as he renovates churches countrywide. Usually. Then he and his crew set up in tiny Middleburg, Kentucky, to rebuild the church’s storm-damaged preschool. The very lovely, very no-nonsense hardware store owner Janet Bishop is suspicious of Drew’s true motives. It looks like Janet Bishop’s faith—in God, in herself and in love—needs some serious rebuilding. And Drew Downing is just the man for the job.
and from within the novel — You don’t see too many female owners in the hardware business, he offered. Especially in small towns. How’d you get into it? ¶ Janet was well aware of her uniqueness...
Alvin Rakoff. Baldwin Street: A Novel. New York & Charlottetown (Canada): Bunim & Bannigan, 2007
A sequence of stories set in a Jewish milieu in 1920s-30s Toronto. The hardware store connection appears well into the book, in the chapter 178 Baldwin Street —
My name is Leonard Abelson. I lived on Baldwin Street. 178 Baldwin Street. Our store was called Abelson’s Hardware. Not a good name. A misnomer. Wrong. Because aside from pots and pans, glasses and dishes, we didn’t sell much hardware. No screws. Or nails. No hammers. No wrenches. Light bulbs, yes. Electric plugs, yes...
The misnamed business is Leonard’s idea, to claim superiority over other similar businesses. Most of the stores on the street—we had a lot of competition—that sold clothes had the words Dry Goods writ large on the outside awnings. Not us. Abelson’s Hardware.
My own website goes by such a misnomer, though employed for a different end : a last connection to the business. And too, my homepage has more and more the look of a hardware store in the older mold: drawers labeled, mislabeled and unlabeled. Not a very welcoming face, I fear. More about the novel, which is pretty good, here. Rakoff is a Canadian film and television director, described here.
Jude Randal (pseudonym for Jude Wilner). Just One of the Guys. New York: Silhouette Books, 1992
Hardware store manager Dana Morgan was more comfortable with a hammer and nails than with a hairbrush. She was up to the challenge of making home-repair videos with sexy executive Spenser Willis, but one look into his dark, enticing eyes told her she was way out of her league...
Alberta (Canada) author.
F(rederick) J(ohn) Randall. Love and the Ironmonger. London: John Lane, The Bodley Head; New York: John Lane Company, 1908
309pp, plus ads; wholesale/warehouse, rather than retail. entirety here.
BL lists four novels between 1908 and 1914, one of which (Somebody’s Luggage, unless a Dickens story of the same title) was performed on the (New York) stage. Also, author of "People I’ve Met at the Play", Playgoer 9:49 (Oct-Nov 1913)
May have died in war? A John Frederick Randall is associated with patent specification 20,450 for A New Game 1901. His address is 12, Elmhurst Mansions, Vernon Road, Clapham, S.W. and his occupation is editor, which might help explain the good press notice his 1908 novel received :
A novel-reading public, possibly a little surfeited with the melodramatic novel, the problem story and tales of frenzied finance, has welcomed with no little enthusiasm the humorous conceits of Mr. F. J. Randall, a new author, who places the chief scenes of his story Love and the Ironmonger in — of all places in the world — Upper Thames Street, in the City of London. Upper Thames Street! Dingy conglomeration of ugly warehouses, converted abodes of old-time City merchants whose elaborately corniced drawing-rooms and dining-rooms now resound to the busy scratching of pens or the clang of metal. Upper Thames Street, where dim passages lead down to slimy wharves andthe ripple of brown tides as they flow up and down against the wooden piles. Upper Thames Street, narrow, gloomy, usually muddy, and even less suggestive of the sweet romance of love than the purlieus of the Stock Exchange or the gold-filled vaults of Lombard Street.
And then there is a humorous suggestion of incongruity in the combination of love and the ironmonger. Why — I do not know. An ironmonger may be as susceptible a worshipper at the rose- decked shrine of the love-god as a poet or a curate, and still the juxtaposition causes a pleasant titillation of surprise and expectancy. It prepares us for the genial conceit with which the author engages us when he lifts the curtain on the interior of Fairbrother & Co.’s offices in Upper Thames Street. Old Joe Fair — brother, sole surviving partner, with the reputation of being good to his employees, is failing fast. But he has a duty to perform. His head clerk, his cashier and his accountant have certain annoying faults of character which he desires to eliminate. The first is mean, the second has a habit of lying, the third of drinking.
One by one he calls them into his private office, tells each that he has left him a legacy of £500 a year on the express condition that he does not yield to his besetting temptation. Naturally, each is jubilant, but the interviews have been overheard by accident by a pushing young employee, George Early, who keeps his knowledge to himself and bides his time. And that time comes when old Joe dies, when the three legatees begin to enjoy their windfalls and in the belief that no one knows of the conditions, grow reckless and indifferent to an observance of them. Thereupon George reveals subtly to each of them that they are no longer masters of their own lives — that he is in possession of their secret and means that they shall either deserve or forego old Joe Fairbrother’s legacy. He becomes their ever-dangling sword of Damocles, always genially reluctant to remind them of their servitude, but never hesitating and always reaping a nice little dividend for himself out of his interference. Yes, said George to himself, it’s the luckiest thing I’ve struck for many a day. This is going to be a picnic.
When the deceased ironmonger is succeeded by his very pretty daughter as head of the firm, George Early’s picnic reaches its most interesting stage. The chief clerk, cashier and accountant, completely cowed, can put no obstacles in the path of his vaulting ambition, and he becomes in rapid succession Miss Fairbrother’s secretary, representative, accepted suitor and husband. And still the merry game goes on, with three depressed and losing players and only one jubilant winner. This, however, is as far as I ought to go in disclosing the plot, which is ingeniously turned to satisfactory ends. Enough has been said to show that Love and the Ironmonger follows no conventional structure. It is farce, but quite possible farce, if we grant the eccentric conditions of the old ironmonger’s will, and there have been far more eccentric wills in real life than this invention of Mr. Randall.
I do not know what experience of the metal trades has fallen in Mr. Randall’s way, but he writes of Upper Thames Street as though he knew more of it than could be absorbed from an occasional saunter along its irregular footpaths. He is thirty-five years of age and has, I believe, had a varied and rather strenuous career, but hard work has not dulled his sense of fun. Latterly he has been engaged in journalism, until recently editing a ladies’ magazine. Love and the Ironmonger is by no means without defects. Occasionally we come upon faults of taste, which betray hurried workmanship and a lack of careful revision rather than an inability to distinguish and avoid them. I imagine that, if he had foreseen that his book would be received so favourably as it has been (one critic avowing that if he is able to sustain such a level of high spirits he will soon be amongst the most widely read of contemporary humourists), he would have written with a little more restraint at times. But he has invention — humorous invention — the ability to keep the ball rolling briskly and the reader’s attention alert.

ex The Book and Its Author, The English Illustrated Magazine (New Series, 39; April 1908) : 87-88
Charles Raymond. Enoch. Illustrated by Marvin Friedman. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1969

Enoch Parnell is 12 and white. His father operates a hardware store in a ghetto area. Lots of trouble and education for Enoch, helped by Skullcap, a black handyman who works in the store. Good story.
From the author’s bio, on back flap — Charles Raymond grew up on an Oregon farm whose main products were spuds, timber, and callouses. While still single he combined work with travel by thumb and freight to see all the states. After his years abroad in the armed forces during the Second World War, he and his wife settled in the Midwest where he works as a carpenter. ¶ Years of repairing old buildings in Chicago gave him intimate knowledge of life in the slums. He uses his background and experience in his books. He says, I want young people to know what I have seen and felt, and what I have learned from them. He calls this bringing the generation into focus, as he did in his book JUD, which was awarded Best Juvenile of 1968 by the Friends of American Writers.
James Robinette. The Naturalist. Baltimore: AmErica House, 2002.

from publisher’s description — ...Small town folk are often ignored by the mainstream. Small towns are used to being in a place where facts are never what they seem to be. Inside a hushed world of muffled dialogue while waiting for that certain word of recognition, the silent clamor of the mind lingers as facts and fiction are sorted out on a quiet summer’s evening. Harold Fitch and Susan Dow, only a year apart in age, introduce us to some of that world as they finish high school and step out on the larger stage, convinced that they are prepared for the future. Harold is off to college, his mind cluttered with debris. Susan takes a job at the town’s hardware store. At this she is thinking that she wouldn’t mind meeting a nice young man for a change that is if she could find one she could trust.
Sam Savage. The Cry of the Sloth. Minneapolis: Coffee House Press, 2009.

A mostly epistolary fiction detailing the disintegration of Andy Whittacker, literary journal editor, negligent landlord, and aspiring novelist. Included here for the character of Dahlberg Flint, a hardware store clerk, writer and sometime contributor to Whitaker’s Soap magazine. From which this extract —
What happened to the tough little guy who told those tough little stories about his life as a hardware store clerk? Good Luck at Smart Value got more favorable coments than just about anything we've published in years... Believe me, your description of the owner’s wife heaving those fifty-pound sacks of Quikrete into the bed of a pickup was flat-out amazing. I mean, that was real writing... It had the brutal honesty we usually associate with instruction manuals...
Maura Stanton. Traps, in Cities in the Sea. University of Michigan Press, 2003. pp 119-131

Coco’s life goes into a holding pattern at eighteen, when her mother leaves, father loses job, then suffers stroke. The hardware store where she worked sold three kinds of mousetraps, it begins. However, she keeps hopes up, reads literature thoughtfully, and exits the story with a laugh : She refuses, absolutely refuses, to let herself be trapped in a depressing short story.
William O. Stoddard, Jr. Making Good in the Village. D. Appleton and Company, 1916

Young man makes good in hardware retailing. Comments here, for the time being.
Helen Tucker. No Need of Glory. Stein and Day, 1972.

Political novel, in which Malvin Leak, proprietor of a hardware store, is selected to be Republican Party candidate for governor. Malvin Leak, age forty-five, graduate of the state university, major in business, served two years in the Army in World War II but never left this country, returned to Laurelton and opened Leak’s Hardware Store, which he still owns and operates. Baptist, married to Janetta Stiles, a Laurelton girl, and they have one son, Vic, age sixteen.
Leak is a decent guy, who knows that there-but-for-the-grace-of-god he might have gotten into something like the same moral troubles as his Democratic opponent. He’s saved from winning the election when his opponent steps down, and is replaced by another. Hardware store owner as normal, non-extremist fellow — after all, in business, one deals with all types. Nice passage about his Philosophy of the Absurd at p129 : You see, I think everybody in the whole world takes himself and everybody else too seriously. And this is not a serious world, because the people in it are not sane, rational beings. Everybody has some kind of quirk. If they didn’t, we’d be all alike. It’s our quirks, our eccentricities, that give us individuality.. (A nice read; Tucker appears to have written several romance novels, from the mid-1970s and on through the 1980s.)
Ann Tyler. Morgan’s Passing. Alfred A. Knopf, 1980.

blurb to Fawcett Columbine edition, 1996 — A tinkering, puttering sort of man, Morgan Gower works at Cullen’s hardware store in north Baltimore. He has seven daughters and a warmhearted wife, but, as he journeys into the gray area of middle age, he finds his household has become confusing, often tedious. ¶ Then Morgan meets two lovely young newlyweds under some rather extreme circumstances — and all three discover that no one’s heart is safe...
Kurt Vonnegut. Who Am I This Time?, collected in Welcome to the Monkey House (1998 — originally appeared in The Saturday Evening Post 244:1 (Spring 1972) : pp 82-83, 116-117 (I have yet to confirm this, however))

He didn’t stay away from meetings because he had something else to do... He stayed away from all kinds of gatherings because he never could think of anything to say or do without a script. So I had to go down to Miller’s Hardware Store, where Harry was a clerk, the next day and ask him if he’d take the part... Somebody said one time that Harry ought to go to a psychiatrist so that he could be something important and colorful in real life, too—so he could get married anyway, and maybe get a better job than just clerking in Miller’s Hardware Store for fifty dollars a week. But I don’t know what a psychiatrist could have turned up about him that the town didn’t already know... (pp16, 17)

The story was the basis of a 1982 American Playhouse presentation directed by Jonathan Demme and starring Susan Sarandon and Christopher Walken, which I have not seen but that is remarked on by many.
Vonnegut’s great grandfather Clemens Vonnegut Sr. founded a hardware store and wholesale operation in the 1850s. His own grandfather and father had become architects instead, but Vonnegut apparently worked in the family hardware business in the 1930s, when it was still going strong. The Indiana Historical Society has a thorough — and very good — piece on Vonnegut here.
Harold Whitehead. Dawson Black : Retail Merchant. Illustrated by John Goss. Boston: The Page Company, 1918
Google scan here.
Young man makes good in hardware retailing, through trials and tribulations. Concludes with an expansion of the business into auto parts. From the introduction —
Unfortunately, many books, excellent in their presentation of principles, ignore the human side, as it were, of business. I believe — nay, I am sure — that the influence of our home life is an important factor in the development of our business career. Our loves, our dislikes, our jealousies, our unfortunate, yet often lovable, unreasonablenesses are reflected in our business life. Our impetuous business decisions are often made through the subconscious influence of some dear one at home... ¶ I have tried to make Dawson Black a human being, not an automaton to go through a series of jerky motions to illustrate principles. I wanted him to do some things wrong and suffer for it, and some things right, and perhaps still suffer a little; but I wanted to make his business life REAL. I wanted the reader to say to himself, By Jove! I did just that same fool thing myself! ¶ And, underneath all this, I wanted to present a few of the principles of retail merchandising. I wanted to show that the result of the correct application of a principle was sure, and that a principle of retail merchandising is applicable to every kind of retail store — be it the little corner Italian fruit stand, or be it the largest department store in the country; be it hardware, drygoods, drugs, shoes, plumbing, or what not.
Jane Roberts Wood. A Place Called Shrub. New York: Delacorte Press, 1990 (and since reprinted by University of North Texas, 2000)
summary — ...Lucy Richards (first met in The Train to Estelline) has returned home from a year of teaching. Trying to save the family hardware store and tend a tubercular aunt, Lucy contemplates the fate of old maids and maintains an inventory of available local suitors. There is no need for her concern, however, as Josh Arnold finds her after a three-year absence and sweeps away all objections. The newlyweds travel to Sweet Shrub, Ark., where Josh has a position as a school principal. Becoming acquainted with the various residents of their boarding house, they discover an incipient vein of bigotry against the black population, which is beginning to seek fairer wages and civil rights. Another concern is the fate of a foundling raised by a black woman, whose identity becomes confused as adolescent growth suggests that he may actually be white. Lucy is at her most appealing when she is still living with her family in Texas, and the reader is privy to her changing views of life and marriage. After she weds, there is more focus on Josh’s qualities and more straight narrative. (From Publisher’s Weekly, and Amazon production description.)

Not much about hardware stores, save for letting one decline by letting things go... (pp 39-41).
Second volume in a trilogy that also includes The Train to Estelline (Ellen C. Temple, Austin, 1987) and Dance a Little Longer (Delacorte, 1993)

film & music

I’m no longer much of a film-watcher, we’ll see where it leads... Films listed in chronological order. Above, in situ detail of Michael Snow’s Wavelength. And today (4 February 2010) add a song, suggested by a philosophical stationer with an interest in evolving retail genres.

Psycho. Director: Alfred Hitchcock. 1960

from one description, this — Marion Crane (Janet Leigh) is unhappy in her job at a Phoenix, Arizona real estate office and frustrated in her romance with hardware store manager Sam Loomis (John Gavin). One afternoon, Marion is given $40,000 in cash to be deposited in the bank... I'd forgotten this, but remember the rest.
Wavelength. Director: Michael Snow. 1967

Hardware Store out the window, at about 27:35. Thanks to victoreremita.
Some more about the film (and its hardware store) in Brandon Harris’s Hammer to Nail essay One Day You'll Get There.
Mama and Eunice visit Ed at the hardware store. Carol Burnett Show. April 5, 1975 (?)

I knew I just knew I should never have invaded this precious domain of yours. And I wouldn’t be here right now if Mama hadn’t started whining about... You just shut up or I’ll take that little rubber stopper out of your purse and ram it down your throat.
Mickey (Tim Conway) is a dim-witted clerk at the store. Ed’s Acme Hardware appeared in other episodes too. A pretty sketchy set, saws, maybe cans of paint, some shovels. Here (as of 24 July 2010).
Saturday Night Fever. Director: John Badham; written by Nik Cohn and Norman Wexler. 1977

Have never seen, but know that Tony Manero (John Travolta) has a dead-end job in a hardware store.

The film was derived from Nik Cohn his Inside the Tribal Rites of the New Saturday Night, in New York Magazine (June 7, 1976), here. Housewares, not hardware, though : During the week Vincent sold paint in a housewares store. All day, every day he stood behind a counter and grinned. He climbed up and down ladders, he made the coffee, he obeyed. Then came the weekend and he was cut loose. People complain that Cohn made it all up, etc., but I don’t see that it matters.
East Asheville Hardware. A song written and performed by David Wilcox, first released in 1996.
...Go to East Asheville Hardware
Before it disappears.
Read lyrics and listen here. (The store did eventually close.)
Deadwood. Created by David Milch. HBO, 2004-2007
July, 1876 — Seth Bullock abandons his position as Marshall in the Montana Territory to begin a career as a hardware merchant in Deadwood, Dakota Territory, a burgeoning, lawless gold-rush town set in the heart of Native land. Joining Bullock in the endeavor is his friend Sol Star. Episode 1 described here.

Boys of Summer. The Wire. Season four, episode 38, aired September 10, 2006.
Teleplay by David Simon, story by David Simon and Ed Burns, directed by Joe Chappelle. More details at wikipedia.

This episode opens (pre-credit) with scene in a Home Depot-like hardware store, Snoop walking in with a nail gun, evidently looking for a replacement. There ensues a lovely exchange between Snoop, played by Felicia Snoop Pearson, and the hardware store salesman played by Paul L. Nolan — two professionals in an informed and critical discussion of tools, albeit at two linguistic registers. Transcription below.

Snoop	God damn!
Salesman	Ah, I see you got the Dewalt cordless. Your nail gun, Dewalt Four-ten.
Snoop	Trouble is, you leave it in the truck for a while, you need to step up and use the bitch, the battery don’t hold up, you know?
Salesman	Yeah, cordless’ll do that. You might want to consider the powder actuated tool. The Hilti DX 460 or Simpson PTP, these two are my Cadillacs, everything else on this board is second best, sorry to say. Are you contracting, or just doing some work around the house?
Snoop	No we work all over.
Salesman	Full time?
Snoop	No, we had about five jobs last month.
Salesman	At that rate the cost of the powder actuated gun justifies itself.
Snoop	You say power?
Salesman	Powder.
Snoop	Like gun powder?
Salesman	Yeah. The DX 460’s fully automatic with a 27 caliber charge. Wood, concrete, steel-to-steel... she’ll throw a fastener into anything and for my money she handles recoil better than the Simpson or the P3500. Now, you understand what I mean by recoil?
Snoop	Yeah, kickback. I’m with you.
Salesman	That’s right.
Snoop	27 caliber huh?
Salesman	Yeah, not large ballistically, but for driving nails it’s enough, any more than that you’d add to the recoil.
Snoop	Nah shit, I see those tiny-ass 22 round-nose drop-a-nigga plenty of days man. Motherfuckas get up there and you’re like a pinball, rip yo ass up... Big joints though, big joints man, just break the bones and you say fuck it.
Salesman	speechless, eyes wide.
Snoop	(laughs) Heh heh heh, I’m gon go with this right here, man. How much I owe you? (indicating the nail gun)
Salesman	$669, plus tax.
	Snoop counts out eight one-hundred dollar bills, hands them to the salesman.
Salesman	Nah nah you just pay at the register.
Snoop	Nah, you go ahead and handle that for me, man. And keep the rest for your time.
Salesman	This is eight hundred dollars.
Snoop	So what man, you earned that bump like a mutha fucka, man, keep that shit.
	Out in the car —
Chris	You good?
Snoop	Man says if you wanna shoot nails this here’s the Cadillac man. He meant Lexus, but he ain’t know it.
Chris	Hold a charge better?
Snoop	Fuck the charge. This here’s a gunpowder activated, 27 caliber, full-auto, no kickback, nail-dom mayhem, man. Shit right here’s tight.
Chris	Laughs.
Snoop	Fuck this nail’n up boards. We can kill a couple of motherfuckas with this right here.
Snoop	You laughing, I’m in school dog, trying to tell you... fo real.

The transcription misses the nuances of the exchange, the fine timing. She doesn’t buy a supply of nails, though.

Transsiberian. Director: Brad Anderson. 2008

this, from Silliman’s blog (of September 8, 2008), on this film — No one, not even the police, are quite what they seem. This is true even for Roy, whose knowledge of hardware stores & love of choo choo trains proves to be a lifesaver, and whose love of Jessie is unconditional enough to accept any secrets she might harbor.
I’ve not seen this; more at imdb.
The Last Hardware Store. The story of Nichols Hardware in Purcellville, Virginia. A documentary film under way by The Lincoln Studios (Lincoln, Virginia).
credit : Sarah Huntington/The Lincoln Studios
From website here, this description —
Nichols Hardware, a mercantile establishment in the same family’s hands despite three devastating fires and the passage of more than eight decades, is the subject of a film just starting shooting in July in Western Loudoun County.
Tentatively called The Last Hardware Store, the documentary will feature footage of the store’s daily operations, interviews with owners and staff (average tenure in the 30 year range), memories of long-time customers and historical footage and photographs.
Nichols Hardware opened its doors as the E.E. Nichols & Company in 1915. After last year’s death of Ed Nichols, the store is now owned and managed by Ed’s brother Ken Nichols and his son Ted Nichols.

accessed 10 January 2010.

high theory, homely metaphor

The vast philosophical literature on tools, equipment and technology generally is beyond the scope of this survey, which would have to include Heidegger. See Peter-Paul Verbeek, his What Things Do: Philosophical Reflections on Technology, Agency, and Design (Penn State Press, 2005). Fabio Morabito, Toolbox (1999) contains philosophical essays on topics like the file, sandpaper, screws, and the hammer. It is written somewhat in the style of Vilem Flusser’s The Shape of Things: A Philosophy of Design (1993/99).

Two examples of hardware store as metaphor are found in the realms of high school English teaching and hydrologic engineering :

David T. Ford and Darryl W. Davis. Hardware-store rules for system-analysis applications. In Closing the Gap Between Theory and Practice (Proceedings of the Baltimore Symposium, May 1989), IAHS (International Association of Hydrological Sciences) Publ. no. 180, 1989. (find here.) From their abstract —
We have used system-analysis tools successfully to aid water planning in the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE). Our success is due to adoption of hardware-store rules. The rules include: (1) understand the planning problem, (2) seek application rather than publication, (3) fit the tools to the problem, (4) address solvable problems, and (5) support continued use.

The paper begins with a discussion of How a Good Hardware Store Functions.
Seymour G. Martin. His discussion of Theory of Ideas in chapter 2 (Plato), in a consolidation of his writing/lectures effected by Gordon H. Clark, Francis P Clarke and Chester T. Ruddick, A History of Philosophy (1947) : 100-22
In the first point we have a more elaborate explanation of what an Idea really is. It is something which to be known must be understood in its relation to the Good. A common illustration will serve to clarify the matter. Suppose that a person as impractical as a philosopher is generally considered to be should enter a hardware store and ask the proprietor what that thing lying on the counter was. If the storekeeper replied that it was a piece of steel fourteen inches long, tapering from four inches wide at one end to one inch at the other, and so on—that is, if the storekeeper should give a purely mechanical description of the instrument—the poor philosopher would remain in his academic ignorance. But if, on the other hand, the hardware dealer should tell him it was a wrench designed for such and such a purpose, the philosopher would have a much better chance of understanding the tool. His understanding is thus based on a knowledge of the purpose of the tool, on a knowledge of what the tool is good for, or simply on a knowledge of the Good. This means, therefore, that the Ideas are really purposes, and knowledge turns out to be teleological...
but
However, not only does knowledge depend on the Good; existence does too. The wrench in the previous illustration exists only because it is good for something. No one would have made it had it been good for nothing. This is more clearly understood when we see that this type of tool is not found in Tibet, where people cannot make use of it. And, to continue the illustration, the wrench ceases to exist when it is no longer good for anything. A part of it breaks; it can no longer perform its function. True, the hardware dealer may in words call it a wrench, a broken wrench. But more likely and more accurately he would say, in disgust, it was a wrench. If one reply that at any rate it still exists, the answer is: the it which still exists is a piece of steel because it is still good for whatever irregular pieces of steel are good for; the wrench, however, has perished.
Heidegger seems to be lurking in this discussion.
Margaret Treece Metzger. Tools in the Hardware Store: Students’ Advice to Readers. The English Journal 77:6 (October 1988) : 50-52 (jstor 818614)
...Your class was like a hardware store. All the tools were there. Years later I’m still using that hardware store that’s up there in my head...
Cathy Smith. (A)RCHITECTURE AT THE HARDWARE STORE. (2007) Available via the institutional repository of the University of Technology Sydney, here.
The author’s abstract — Although DIY products and systems were developed to help non-professionals, they can also enable professionals to experiment with different methods of creating buildings and spaces. DIY approaches allow people to change spaces while they occupy them, because do not require specialized construction tools, knowledge and insurance. This has practical implications for design and its practice. I show how DIY approaches create evolving, germinant spaces by looking at examples of site-specific installations and experimental residential projects. The blurring of designing, making and occupation in these projects reveals how everyday materials can act upon and transform design practice.

The clerk has a teaching role — helping others define their problem, then devise its solution. More studio-based consultation than ex cathedra lecture, the presentation is improvisatory, provisional, contingent on what and who’s at hand, wherewithals and experience. It’s how I teach still.
Yet the clerk in the hardware store is always an amateur, and knows it. His/her advantage over the customer — never a certainty, to begin with — is his/her own personal experience, tempered by iteration after iteration of the same problem, expressed by and solved for one customer after another. Again, sounds like studio teaching.
James Wallen. Emotion in Advertising. The Boot and Shoe Recorder: The Magazine of Fashion Footwear 79 (27 August 1921) : 76-81 (here)
Wallen text is From an address delivered before the New York Shoe Retailers’ Association. It examples the literary (and even oratorical), pompous (to our ears) advertising style of that time.
I was asked, last year, to write the 100th Birthday Book of a Buffalo hardware house. I novelized the history of the house, entitling it, From Ox-Cart to Aeroplane, and preluding the story with a forward on The Drama of Hardware. I will read you this introduction:
This is a the story of one hundred years of one house in the hardware business. A record of achievement in the hardware field is, of its very nature, a chronicle of the progress of mankind.
One might not look for romance in the sombre aisles of the hardware storehouse. Reflect that the flinty word hardware symbols the heroic in man. Hardware comprises the ax, the saw, the millstone and the ammunition with which our fathers braved the unknown wilds, wresting from the soil and the forest the means of life and civilization.
The sturdy early American hardware merchants naturally conducted their businesses after the English fashion. It was the Romans, who developed English iron-working. In the Forest of Dean, forgest and tools, along with Roman coin, were unearthed.
"The ironmongers of England were regarded with great respect. They formed their guild in 1462. It was with this wealth of accumulated knowledge that the American hardware merchant commenced business in the days of colonization. American hardware stores, therefore, were never rudely primitive. Today they are the finest in the world. By 1800 the Atlantic seaport towns were well supplied with dependable but simple hardware. Seth Thomas was producing the early examples of his celebrated clocks. John Jacob Astor was buying tools and other hardware in great quantities. A few years later Jonas Chickering made his first piano.
In 1818 the farthest west hardware store was established in Buffalo by George and Thaddeus Weed. In a wilderness village they courageously planted a well-stocked store. Their contribution to the cornerstone of the future metropolis on the Niagara frontier cannot be measured in words. They heartened the early settler, lightened his labors and protected his very life against the treachery of the savage.
It is of such stuff as gunpowder, plowshares, two-men saws and logging chains that the refinements of life are born. Before silks and silver was stone and iron. The Weeds, then and now, bore the title of hardware men proudly, for it implies civilization-builder. Now, then, for their story.
Lin Yutang (1895-1976). On Shopping. Translated by King-fai Tam. In Joseph S. M. Lau and Howard Goldblatt, eds., The Columbia Anthology of Modern Chinese Literature (1996) : pp 653-656
Whenever I pass a stationery or hardware store, it’s all I can do to keep from going in....
Donald Norman. Things that Make Us Smart : Defending Human Attributes in the Age of the Machine (Basic Books, 1994)
Can you imagine a hardware store where all the items were arranged in alphabetical order?... It just wouldn’t work... ¶ A superb example of how well functional organization works is provided by McGuckin’s Hardware Store, in Boulder, Colorado... Google Books extract

Norman refers to research by Brent Reeves and Gerhard Fischer, and cites Brent Reeves, Finding and Choosing the Right Object in a Large Hardware Store : An Empirical Study of Cooperative Problem Solving among Humans. (Technical report.) Department of Computer Science, University of Colorado, Boulder, 1990. I’ve not been able to access this paper.
McGuckin Hardware describes itself here.
A predecessor of Alpha Beta supermarkets, in Southern California, did at one time organize its offerings by alphabetical order, hence the name of the chain. See the groceteria page on Alpha-Beta, which cites Esther R. Cramer, The Alpha Beta Story (Alpha Beta Acme Markets, 1973).
Mary L. Joyce and David R. Lambert. Memories of the way stores were and retail store image. International Journal of Retail & Distribution Management 24:1 (1996)
abstract — Research shows that store image is an important component of a consumer’s store choice and use of a store environment. The impact of age on consumers’ perceptions of a retail store image is examined.

Some of the material presented on this very web page might serve as evidence for an update or expansion of this fascinating and nuanced paper. Sadly, Dr. Joyce died in 2007. See sad news.
Operating Expenses in Retail Hardware Stores. Bulletin No. 12, Bureau of Business Research, Harvard University (April 1919). See here.

This brief study hints that large inventories — of angle iron, lead wool, lug nuts, &c., that encourage emotional and even nostalgic associations with hardware stores — slowly undermine the business. They mean slow turnover and high interest and other carrying expenses.

A lack of reliable accounting methods is common in the retail hardware trade, as elsewhere. The Bureau has found through its correspondence that in numerous retail hardware stores no inventory is ever taken. In numerous cases also, a merchant’s accounts are so incomplete as to give him little information that can be relied upon. (p3)

Here’s more about inventory —
The common figure for stock-turn in the retail hardware trade is 1.8 times a year. This common figure apparently holds good for stores with small, medium, and large volume of sales. The lowest figure for the number of stock-turns is 0.85 times a year... In ordinary times this would almost inevitably lead to disaster because of the extra expense of carrying such an excess stock and because of losses eventually through depreciation and obsolescence... (p10)

The imagined hardware store owner is content to sit atop the stock and swap stories with customers. But his business can’t last.

history & other

history of hardware retailing (also ironmongers, eisenwaren, &c.), and a few resources

Thomas D. Clark. The Country Store in American Social History. Ohio History 60:2 (April 1951) : 126-144
Elegiac in tone, but interesting. I ruminate about E. H. McVey, whose backbround in Indiana must have informed what he did with his hardware store in Annandale (Los Angeles), ca 1910. Eagle Rock at that time may have looked bucolic, but would soon be filled with houses. The hardware/country store genres were subject to constant revision. Restless, he closed the business, started a succession of others (a gas station, lunch counter).
The Ohio Historical Society provides access to this article here.
Regina Lee Blaszczyk. Imagining Consumers: Design and Innovation from Wedgewood to Corning (2000). Blaszczyk’s discussion of the growing expansion of hardware store offerings to compete with chain variety stores, leading to a mimicing, albeit at miniature scale, of department stores, does accurately capture the McVey merchandising trajectory into the 1960s, although it was later abandoned as the store got out of most housewares.
Gerald Carson. The Old Country Store. New York: Oxford University Press, 1954. xvi+330p.; illustrations, appendix, chapter references, and index.
Book is divided into two parts, treating 1791-1861 and 1861-1921, respectively. Enormously enjoyable, instructive. Stationers printed and bound-up memorandum books for country dealers listing the articles that a general store handled, with room at the left margin for the owner to put down the quantity he wanted before he visited the markets, a wise protection against the blandishments of the Pearl Street drummer with his smooth tongue and tempting loss leaders. At the right side of the page there was space for jotting down the prices paid. Being made of all-rag paper which would stand repeated erasures, the book could be kept and used for years. ¶ One such memorandum book, bound in scuffed old leather and marbled boards, has the title The Merchant’s Memorandum and Price Book... A general remembrancer for Mercantile Gentlemen... embracing the leading articles of merchandize in common use for the country trade...

Confirms (p154) my sense that daily newspapers devoted considerable coverage to patents issued by the U.S. Patent Office.
Carolyn M. Goldstein. Do It Yourself: Home Improvement in 20th-Century America (Princeton Architectural Press, 1998). Includes a photograph of Fred P. Johnson’s store in 1924, but no mention that Mr. Johnson was the inspiration for the Mr. Oswald series, drawn by Johnson’s son Russ. Excellent study.
Fred C(harters). Kelly (1882-1959).A Soft Spot for Hardware, in The Rotarian 93:6 (December 1958): 28-30. Google scan here.
Looks at changing merchandise mixes in hardware catalogues of the late 19th century — evidently the catalogues of Hibbard, Spencer, Bartlett & Co. of Chicago, founded by William Gold Hibbard, that recently celebrated its centennial. Kelly was the author of that firm’s history — Seventy-five years of Hibbard Hardware (1930).
Cecil A. Meadows. The Victorian Ironmonger. (Shire Album No. 32.) Alesbury (Bucks.): Shire Publications, 1978 (2nd edition 1984).
A brief illustrated study, quite good. Author apprenticed in the late 1920s, to one of the last of such ironmongers trading in Norwich. Contents: Origins of the name and trade; Trade signs; The growth and decline of the furnishing ironmonger; Supplies and inventions; Purchasing methods; Trading and delivery; Price codes and stock marking; The office; Manufacturing; The stocks; Bygones.
An Omnibus Store, in Mercantile Miscellanies, taken from The Philadelphia Merchant, in Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine and Commercial Review, Conducted by Freeman Hunt, A.M. 32 (January – June 1855). Google scan here.

Division of trade into distinct branches appears to be in the natural order of things. Even where two or more branches are yet united in the same establishment, there is an avoidance of incongruity—as when fur robes are kept for sale in a hat store—or where extremes meet, as in straw bonnets and boots and shoes. The tendency, in all great commercial marts, is to simplification... ¶ One who is familiar with this subdivision of trade, and who knows little even by hearsay of the rough and tumble of mercantile life in newly or sparsely settled country districts, would be greatly amused by spending a day in a specimen omnibus store of some regions in the West... His store is indeed an aggregation of stores.

The passage goes on to list, in an adumbrative literary style, all of the stores contained within this single enterprise —
It is a grocery store, with tea, sugar, rice, coffee, spices, molasses, dried fruits, &c. ¶ It is a hardware store, with cutlery in variety, axes, rifles, divers mechanics’ tools, kitchen utensils, agricultural implements, bar-iron, nails, &c... It is a book and stationery store, equal to the ordinary requirements of the vicinity...

Hunt’s Merchant’s Magazine offers reports, analysis and statistical tables representing so-called difficult typography.
Some beautiful photographs of eisenwaren — German for ironware — interiors are included in Max Galli, Vom Charme der alten Warenwelt (1992).

A recent trip to Turkey reminds me that the concept of hardware retailing is not universal, but falls within different genres in different countries, different times. I imagine a book that would give a sense of those different genres, inspired in part by the Galli book.
William G. Smythe. The Hardware Trade in the United States, in The Chatauquan 29:2 (May 1899) : 114-119.

More about manufacturing the retailing, a belles-lettristic account, e.g., Perhaps when all is said no hardware device adds more to the comfort and security of every-day life than the various contrivances for keeping the wrong person out.... Find here.
Vince Staten. Did Monkeys Invent the Monkey Wrench?: Hardware Stores and Hardware Stories (1996).
too cute.
Marti Attoun. The Nuts and Bolts of Gift Giving. Ford Times 81:12 (December 1988): 18-19
Nice pen and ink illustration of store interior by John Schmelzer.
Paul E. Teague. My Alma Mater: The Hardware Store. Design News 59:8 (2 June 2003): 14
Robert Klose. Hardware the Old-Fashioned Way, in collection of author’s essays Small Worlds: Adopted Sons, Pet Piranhas, and Other Mortal Concerns (University of Missouri Press, 2006): 129-30. And in its original setting, Christian Science Monitor (28 June 2000) here. (Search the CS Monitor for hardware store + klose — hardware stores turn up a lot in his essays.)
Work, life, tools : The things we use to do the things we do / based on an exhibition created by Milton Glaser and the Steelcase Design Partnership (1997), features a ruminative essay by Stanley Abercrombie in addition to mini-essays by 50 people about a tool in their lives.
The National Building Museum in Washington D.C. has a more general architectural scope, but has hosted exhibits on corner stores, tools as art, and home improvement. The Museum also publishes the journal Blueprints, whose backlist articles are fully indexed here.
The National Retail Hardware Association site used to offer links to retailer sites, some of which feature historical material. Always looking forward, NRHA has purged that resource. One of those sites is that of
Cornell’s Hardware in New York,
which fortunately still exists.

lexicon, metaphor

Tricky, this. Because lexicon and metaphor are woven richly in much even all of the material indexed here; indeed, it is probably their metaphoric valence that attracts my attention.

Guy Martin.
Nails. Nuts.
Bits. Bolts.
Tacks. Tape.
Putty. Paint.
Hammers.
Spackle.
Pliers.
Hallelujah!.
All hail the hardware store!. Esquire (June 1987) : 120-122
Fine essay, once it gets beyond the anti-mall rant.
Words are important here, the names of things. Real hardware stores are like old dictionaries for the names of things, and in the names there is often literature and occasionally even magic. A spokeshave... A riffler... A bastard cut... A rabbet plane... A grinding jig... A slick... A buck...
I like this too — There were no display cases as such, and thus, my father remarks in passing, no such thing as impulse buying. That meant everybody who came to buy something knew what they wanted, and knew what to do with it once they got it. Imagine a town of people with knowledge in their hands!..
It is the supply-house character of the traditional hardware store, all goods in drawers and boxes, behind the counter, that must have been intimidating to many, men and women, who were not specialists and had no mastery of arcane hardware vocabulary. One finds this less in hardware stores now — where drawers are a thing of the past — but it’s not vanished, and can be found also in electrical and plumbing supply outlets, masonry yards, and other venues.
Might have filed this essay several which ways. Language will do. The essay is accompanied by Neal Slavin’s photographs of Harrison Brothers hardware store, established in 1879 and operating on these premises in Huntsville, Alabama, for ninety years. The images offer the natural — not artificial — semi-sepia wash that hardware stores sported, thanks to unpainted wooden shelves, old boxes and labels, rust and dust, shadow, punctuated here and there by glint of new metal, new label.
Ironically, twenty years later... Harrison Brothers’ website explains that the store ...is more than a glimpse of old Huntsville. It is a shopper’s delight. On the west side of the store, a stack of antique biscuit jars brimming with old-fashioned candies tempts youngsters of all ages. Cotton throws, colorful tins, marbles by the scoop, cast iron cookware, and oak rocking chairs share space with garden gadgets, bird feeders, and whirly-gigs. We stock books, cookbooks, prints, postcards, and other items relating to Huntsville and Madison County’s history..
Indeed, it has become something of a museum; the same website solicits help : Harrison Brothers is staffed by unpaid volunteers....
John Vorhaus. The Big Book of Poker Slang (1996) defines hardware store thus —
a poker game in which players generally bet based on the value of their hands and do not bluff. An allusion to the True Value chain of hardware stores in the US."
via Tom Dalzell. The Routledge Dictionary of Modern American Slang and Unconventional English (2008).
The Hardware Store.
Lesson 25 in Ruth Austin, Lessons in English for Foreign Women, For Use in Settlements and Evening Schools. New York: American Book Company, 1913

1. Mr. Greggor keeps a hardware store. 2. I went there to buy a kettle one day last week. 3. When I went into the store Mr. Greggor was busy waiting on other people. 4. I was not in a hurry, so I looked around the store to see the things that were for sale...
At a Hardware Store.
Lesson 22 in T. L. Stedman and K. P. Lee, A Chinese and English Phrase Book in the Canton Dialect; or Dialogues on Ordinary and Familiar Subjects for the use of the Chinese resident in America, and of Americans desirous of learning the Chinese Language ; with the Pronunciation of each word indicated in Chinese and Roman Characters. New York: William R. Jenkins, 1888

5. The price is just the same all over the city. 6. How do you sell your hand-saws? 7. I can give you this saw for one dollar. 8. Can’t you let me have it for seventy-five cents. 9. Well, you can have it for that...
R. A. Salaman. Dictionary of Woodworking Tools c. 1700-1970 and tools of allied trades (1975).
Philip Barker. Using Metaphors in Psychotherapy. Psychology Pres, 1992 (an earlier edition New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1985)
where we find this — I knew a man went into a hardware store and asked the storekeeper whether he should buy something.
full extract here
George Weinberg. Unfinished Symphony, in The Taboo Scarf, and Other Tales. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990
My patient had braved bad times too, in his hardware store, reading the classics and listening to music when no customers were there... The big question in his life now was whether he should sell the hardware store and retire.

A good story, about a fellow whose intensity gets in the way of his enjoying music at the symphony, and the notch in the tumbler whose turning returned that ability to enjoy that music, his store, his life.
Hardware stores appear here and there in the psychotherapeutic literature; watch this space for more.

memoirs & store histories

Bernard W. Aubuchon Jr. Aubuchon Hardware. A volume in the Images of America series, Arcadia Publishing, 2008
Aubuchon is a Massachusetts based chain operating throughout New England. Mainly photographs and captions — of store interiors and fronts, store openings, managers and employees. A marketing chapter treats signs, advertisements, delivery trucks (including toys), even sponsorship of NADSCAR racing.

A great photograph of Lester J. Archambeault on his lunch break, in a basement warehouse in late 1940s, surrounded by stock. Lester was in charge of merchandising, planograms, and inventory.
H. Kellogg Day. About Ninety-Seven Years and a Day. New York: Vantage Press, 1980
204 pages are followed by 22 pages of photographs. Focus mostly on people, family, interests (collections — 1000 lead pencils, 800 key chains — field sports etc).
Store was known for a time as Day’s Hardware and Music Store. See mostly chapter 2. Interesting section on patent and right to manufacture Allen’s AI Compound Babbit Metal —
It gave us a thrill to see the home product listed in the catalogs. It was a hard day for all but a change from the routine of selling and added a bit to the income.
David R. Harder. Echoes of a Country Fire Chief. Duvall (Washington): David R. Harder Co., Publisher, 1994
An interesting, energetic autobiography, going back beyond author’s birth in 1932 : My family has been in the Snoqualmie Valley since the late 1800s. Not too much mundane detail about the hardware business, which must pale compared to author’s work as Fire Chief. For years, we didn’t do much socializing except for the fire department. The hardware store, private life, and fire department all evolved around one another.
The Motto of Duvall Hardware, printed on the trucks, was If We Can’t Get It — They Don’t Make it!
Tom Howlett. A History of Century Old Howlett Hardware Store. Xeroxed, 128 pages (Gregory, Michigan, 1990)

Title/cover page offers these clues about content: Those that founded it and those that continued to tend it; View of its customers and the area it served; The tragic radio bulletin in 1934 that brought change to it; Portions of autobiography by the author who grew up in it.
The business was purchased in 2006 by Mike and Rita Bramlett, and renamed Bramlett Hardware & Heating Co., according to an article in the Livingston Community News (December 21, 2007)
Saunders Norvell (1864-1949). Forty Years of Hardware. Illustrations by Serena Summerfield. New York: Hardware age, [c1924]

Saunders played many roles in the hardware business — shop clerk, traveling salesman, sales manager, head of a hardware concern, and later writer. He is described in —
Walter A. Friedman. Birth of a salesman : the transformation of selling in America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004
Early B. Pryor. Fifty Years in a Hardware Store. n.p., 1957
The book features several photographs: a fronticepiece halftone photo of a typical hardware store in the Ohio Valley Country — years 1913-14; and several tipped-in four-color photos, of displays for women (p53), Christmas displays (79), color-coordinated display of appliances (111), and display of fireplace appliances yielding larger profit margins than nails and wash tubs (129).
I like this passage, that alas I can’t use to explain my own trouble with writing and communication generally — In attempting to write this story we believe we discovered a weakness in the hardware field that too many of us possess. Too often we are sharp, abrupt, cutting, plain profit minded, with too little thought of the other fellow on the other side of the counter. When we try to write in story form it just isn’t natural for a hardware man. Our usual writing is abrupt, as abrupt as this: When will you ship? When can we expect settlement? Cancel our order No. 1351. May we hear from you by return mail? Our story sounds just like that. So many years doing it the abrupt way isn’t easily changed with pen and ink... (140)
Phil Schlemmer. Hoosier Crossroads, in Tom Watson and Jim McGarrah, eds., Home Again : Essays and Memoirs from Indiana. Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society Press, 2006 : 155-65
Memoir of youth in Lagrange, Indiana, ending at Purdue University. Includes a passage about Schlemmer Hardware, which the author’s father and uncle had opened following World War 2, and at which the author works between the ages of eight and fourteen. But I never worked on Wednesday afternoons. Nobody did. For years the town’s retailers followed a strange custom of shutting down at noon on Wednesdays. All of the stores closed... Many would repair to a business meeting at Dave’s Corner Bar. Strange: Masse’s Hardware here in Cambridge closes Wednesday afternoons, and my own father’s day off was Wednesday (which he spent working at home, or perhaps maintaining his rental properties, one in Pasadena for a time, and the other in Eagle Rock).
Same collection closes with an essay by Kurt Vonnegut, though it includes nothing about his hardware background.
Lester H. Wand. Fifty Years on the Road : Recollections of a Hardware Salesman. Austin (Texas): Nortex Press, 1986
...I dislike writing even a personal letter, much less an article and much, much less a book. I do enjoy recalling my early experiences in traveling in Missouri, Illinois, New Mexico and, particularly, in Texas. This book will be of interest, mostly, to men and is, essentially, about the hardware business and hardware salesmen. It bridges a span, roughly, from 1900 to 1960...

A lovely book, completed by the author’s wife, Jessie Wand. Its 96 pages are supported by a nine-page, two-column index.

nails

Giuseppe Bellucci (1844-1921). I chiodi nell’etnografia antica e contemporanea. Perugia: Unione tipografica cooperativa, 1919
The above (rather emblematic) image — dried pig heart, pierced by pins — is taken from this fascinating volume that frames nails more broadly and in greater relief than I’d previously understood. It is here that I learned of the tradition of monumental sculptures, made of wood, that are completed when their entire surface has been enclosed by nails. The locus classicus of this may be the Iron Hindenburg, described by the New York Times (5 September 1915) as a thirty-foot wooden statue which will be sheathed with gold, silver, and iron nails purchased in the interest of a fund for the rehabilitation of East Prussia.

paeans

Stuart McLean. Hardware Stores Have All the Answers, in his collection of essays from the CBC radio program Morningside, in The Morningside World of Stuart McLean, (Viking Canada, 1989): pp 149-153.
Nice essay, and the store seems to be thriving today. Among the reasons that hardware stores are quiet little corners of perfection in an imperfect world : hardware stores reflect the seasons, resist encroachments of shrink-wrap, are overstaffed and overstocked, tend to keep the cash register in back, gather hardware store humor, and house a symphony of sounds.
McLean describes Wiener's Hardware as my hardware store. The store is in Toronto, and here. A 1948 view of the same store here.
The New Hippodrome Hardware
Hardware Store, a Talk of the Town piece in The New Yorker (December 23, 1972) : 21-22 (by Susan Sheehan?)
The New Yorker’s own summary :
Talk story about the New Hippodrome Hardware Store, located at 70 West 45 St. The New Hippodrome doesn’t sell household appliances, pots and pans, glassware, or any of the other department store items that most hardware stores go in for these days. It specializes in maintenance equipment and its assortment of nails, bolts, plumbing fittings, light bulbs, tools, electrical fixtures, locks, cleansers, brooms, ladders, valves, cements, paints, and solvents suggest the possibility of constructing, repairing and cleaning absolutely anything. Names several stores that elephone in orders, like Abercrombie & Fitch. Describes two types of customers: the construction workers and maintenance men and the office workers who come in on their lunch hours. Tells about the trends and concerns represented in the purchases seen. They are: Fear of Crime, Mobility, Untoward Teenagers, and Do-It-Yourselfism. Tells about the owner of the store, Aaron Landsman, 51. He says that because more and more people are buying their own homes and doing things themselves to beat the rising cost of labor, his business gets better every year.
Good list of what clutter[s] the floor, ceiling, shelves, bins and pegboards of the store.
New Hippodrome has since moved, but remains healthy.
See also a brief article by Harry Sawyers at The Hardware Aisle
Garber Hardware
Alexandra Bandon, in The Shelter Life column in This Old House. My Toy Store (May 17, 2006)
Altadena Hardware
Don Thomas, sister sell Altadena Hardware (Pasadena Star News, 22 October 2008)
Fells True Value Hardware (Winchester, Massachusetts)
"As Main Street changed, Fells refused: One Winchester shop has defied the odds in a long battle against the big boys," article by Lydia Crafts, Winchester Star, 3 July 2007, here.
Leopoldi Hardware (Park Slope)
Dennis Hamill, Hardware store’s a time machine (New York Daily News, Brooklyn, 2 October 2007): "...the nuts and bolts of a vanishing America..."
Main Street Hardware (Eufaula, Oklahoma)
Barbara Palmer. Main Street Hardware : A hardware store that blends nostalgia and funk with the everyday thrill of paint and rope and heavy metal. Here, even the carriage bolts have soul. (Oklahoma Today 41:4 (July-August 1991) : 18-19)
pdf accessible via index of volume 24, here

poetry

tools & hardware stores in poetry; poetry in hardware stores

Anonymous.
I like the man-smell of a hardware store :
odors of old leather,
fresh-cut lumber, oiled machines,
limey smell of plaster and new paint.
This poem hangs on a back wall at the Moody’s Hardware Store on South Decatur Street, Montgomery, Alabama. The author is a woman, for whom the old familiar smells bring the memory of someone back powerfully.
The poem commences a paean to Moody’s, by Kate and Stephen, in the Midtown Mongomery Living blog, posted 21 May 2010. The whole can be found here, and Moody’s own website here.
Edward Anthony. A Hardware Romance. (illustrated by R. M. Brinkerhoff, in Harper’s Magazine, May 1921).
illustration by R. M. Brinkerhoff
Luella Loranna O’Shaughnessy Firth
Is a clerk in a hardware store,
Where she sells pots and dishes and bowls for goldfishes,
And dozens of articles more,
Like mouse traps and razors and skillets and bolts,
Shovels and wrenches and forks,
Harrows and hillers, potato-bug killers,
Pump handles and beer-bottle corks.
(The enumeration of which you may think
Decidedly needless and queer,
But I don’t agree, for it seems to me
That a poem needs Atmosphere.)
Ricardo Persimmons O’Callaghan Wright
Is the utterly sprucest of males.
He enters the place for to purchase a case
Of unbendable handmade nails.
(Either that or a ball of unknotable twine,
Or a saw or a barrel of pitch —
Or was it an ax or a package of tacks?
I've completely forgotten which.)
Be that as it may, he enters the store
Of that I am perfectly sure),
And his heart is gone when he gazes upon
That sweetest of maids, the demure
Luella Loranna O’Shaughnessy Firth,
The most beautiful hardware clerk
He ever has met, an engaging brunette
With a smile (or is it a smirk?)
That has the effect, as I’ve hinted before,
Of setting Ricardo awhirl
(As sometimes occurs when a maiden purrs),
And soon he is telling the girl
Of his Prospects in Life, and his Favorite Book,
And his Love for Beautiful Things,
While Luella smiles and the time beguiles
With dreaming of solitaire rings.
— followed by eight more quatrains, in which love, helped by money, prevails over Orlando Themistocles Perkins O’Day, the vexatious boss of the hardware store. Here is a first (alphabetically, by author) of many instances in which hardware stores satisfy the poetic need for lists !
An Edward Anthony (1895-1971) is treated by wikipedia here. R(obert). M(oore). Brinkerhoff (1880-1958) is treated here; see also these examples provided by the University of Toledo in its Digital Resource Commons.
Catherine Barnett. A Brief Poetics of the Hinge. (enewsletter, The University of Arizona Poetry Center, September 2008. Not poetry, but close —
A few summers ago I got it into my head that I to build a physical model of a poem that would show the way a poem can move, can resist closure. The image of a hinge kept coming to mind. I found myself in various hardware stores, trying to locate in the physical world an example of the kind of hinge I think of when I write, revise and read poems...

Author of Into Perfect Spheres Such Holes Are Pierced, Alice James Books, 2004 (described here)
Elizabeth Kirkley Best. Hardware Store at Christmas. (2005, accessed 20 April 2010) —
Do the hinges, bolts, nails sing
Of days when Christmas was new?
Pat Borthwick.
In Praise of Hardware Stores
I love the way they step outside to greet you
waving their long-handled bristle brooms
and yellow plastic dustpans, their sack barrows
and lightweight extending ladders.
They occupy the pavement,
edge towards the butcher’s next door
as if eager to count his chops
or pluck his hung capons.
I swear the clothes props and guttering,
the companion sets and mops
are trying to cross the road.

Strung around the doorframe
are clusters of gleaming pans
like droops of fruit on a vine
and if they let you through
you’re in a grotto with stalactites
and stalagmites, towers of stacking bowls
and buckets, linoleum rolls, stainless steel,
crystal glass, Pyrex, chrome and brass,
galvanized iron and Teflon.

And oh, the sweetness of their breath —
a mingle of beeswax and paint,
Nitromors and paraffin, creosote and rope.

There’s rows of tiny cup-handled drawers
filled with every type and size of screw and nail,
hook and hinge and curtain track end,
oddments you can buy one of, or two gross
and, camouflaged among it all,
is the man who knows where everything is kept
because he loves each single item
as if it were part of his own bloodline.

What more is there to do in life
but help solve each other’s problems,
to put into someone else’s hand
across the polished counter top
something to make their life
glide by more smoothly? Or in one breath
raise the subject of the price of bread,
the race to reach beyond the Universe?

Presented above with the kind permission of the author, in the north of England, who loves hardware stores and chandlers, school art stock cupboards, and allotment sheds. The poem won Third Prize in the Troubador Poetry Prize, 2008. Details here, and poet’s website here
Joe Clark. A Few Grains of Corn from the General Store. Lynchburg (Tennessee): Lynchburg Hardware and General Store, 1972
Doggerel verse, Tennessee poems and pictures by the Hillbilly Snap Shooter. 28 unnumbered pages. some nice photographs, probably sepia duotones.
Tool photos: shoeing a horse, sharpening what seems to be a saw.
James Dickey (1923-1997). Two Poems of Going Home, (1) Living There and (2) Looking for the Buckhead Boys,. The poem appeared in The Eye-Beaters, Blood, Victory, Madness, Buckhead and Mercy (1970, and can be found in The Whole Motion: Collected Poems here.
It’s in Looking for the Buckhead Boys that the narrator bethinks himself to inquire among some merchants, after all, Hardware and Hardware Merchants / Never die, and they have everything on hand / There is to know. Somewhere in the wood-screws Mr. Hamby may have / My Prodigal’s Crown on sale.
The boys the narrator knew have gone every which way, some away most not, some dead of heart attack or war, and Charlie Gates at the Gulf station.
Wikipedia offers concise account, and good links, here. I’d never read anything by or about Dickey, until now (1 June 2010). Whew.
Lynn Doiron. O! Hardware Store!. At Poetry Circle (March 21, 2009)
...I want to open all the fifty-pound bags of peat moss
to build a ski jump from cinder blocks and pink insulation
that Olympians will carry a torch just to see.

I may not do this. I may leave the store
with a braided cable of cement dust and paint
vermiculite beads...

Poet’s website, blog and book (Hand Wording, 2006) at/via lynndoiron.com.
Marie Etienne (1942- ). King of a Hundred Horsemen. Translated from the French by Marilyn Hacker. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002
In the section Journal de guerre (War Diary), part 30 January, this — No one writes poetry any longer, bric-a-brac in an old hardware store. / What credence can be granted to words following each other, how can they still be thought possible?
The translator’s decision to render vieux droguiste as an old hardware store strikes me as right. An old hardware store, of old disconnected things, that need assemblage into an utterance to breathe life into them. Aphoristic moments punctuate these 99 sonnets in 9 sections. In part 33 — Precision which turns, which ponders and which sings. / No rumination. Inflections and refrains. / The sentence rather than the line.

Journal de guerre can be found, in English and French, here in Babel, the online journal of ICORN International Cities of Refuge Network, Spring 2007. The passage is cited by at least two reviews : here and here.
Jean Follain (1903-1971). Hardware Store.
Marilyn Hacker’s translation of this poem — Quincaillerie — is included in Mary Ann Caws, ed., The Yale Anthology of Twentieth-Century French Poetry (2004) here (translation at page 183, continues at 185).

Concludes :
So the hardware store floats toward eternity
and sells, till everyone has got enough,
great nails, in flames.
Edward A Guest (1881-1959). Hardware Store Fascination. This 24-line poem encountered in the website of the Michigan Retail Hardware Association, here, with the note that the poem was delivered by Guest as key speaker at a hardware convention in Detroit.

excerpt —
There is something about a hardware store
Which, strangely, I can’t resist,
And I think it’s the joys I have hungered for
Which somehow my life has missed.
Barbara Hamby. Ode to Hardware Stores. In Babel (described here : University of Pittsburgh Press, 2004)
Where have all the hardware stores gone — dusty, sixty-watt
warrens with the wood floors, cracked linoleum,
poured concrete painted blood red?

or this, closer to home —
flat-headed as Floyd Crawford,
who lived next door to you for years but would never say hi
or make eye contact. What a career in hardware
he could have had...

Full text at Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac (as of 27 February 09); see also barbarahamby.com.
Lyn Hejinian. The Guard. Berkeley: Tuumba Press, 1984. —
It’s true, I like to go to the hardware store
and browse on detail. So sociable the influence
of Vuillard, so undying in disorder is order...

this passage; or entire book
Adam Houle. If There’s Nothing You Need, published July 7, 2009 at Linebreak, which publishes one poem a week, each Tuesday, and also publishes audio recordings of all poems. Click on lower-case i to load brief bio of author.

I need the industry of things, flat heads
heavy in a breast pocket, their points cut
the bag...
Vivien Jones. Hardware Shop. The poem is presented below, immediately following the photograph of the shopowner, both with the kind permission of the author, who owns the copyright and who writes — I was on an arts exchange to Kiltimagh, County Mayo last Spring and came across this gem of a shop...

He’s playing the crowd, he’s charming, he knows it.
The cameras flash on him,
his cat in the window,
curved in sleep on a box,
is well practiced too.
So many small drawers
with small things
in many sizes,
as few as you want
in a newspaper twist.
Rat-traps on a string
spiralling to the roof,
beside the wooden stair
that led to the upstairs bar,
one of many in the street.

So we gaze but do not buy,
We have no skill that
needs his precise stock,
measured in imperial.
Today he has sold a mousetrap
and a bottle of white spirit,
to a local woman who stood
aside while we took his picture.

Next year, like as not,
his door, too, will be shut,
soon to be a branch
of something from Dublin,
People will say Shame,
and tell their grandchildren
about the Hardware shop
that used to sell nails
in ones and twos,
and had a cat that dozed
in a curl on a cardboard box
in the window.

Hardware Shop is about to be published as a Kiltimagh set in the literary magazine The Eildon Tree (a Borders Council publication), and was shortlisted for the Virginia Wareby Award in July 2008. Information on Vivien Jones can be found here.
Laura Kasischke. Hardware Store in a Town Without Men
from Gardening in the Dark (Ausable Press, 2004)
Weldon Kees (1914-1955?). Poet, whose father John Kees headed the F. D. Kees Manufacturing Company, makers of hooks, handles, cornhuskers, and other items of hardware. See Anthony Lane his The Disappearing Poet : What ever happened to Weldon Kees? in the 4 July 2005 number of The New Yorker, here.
Nancy Keesing (1923-93). Old Hardware Store, Melbourne. 1977
Being un-organic, non-macrobiotic, lazy
I do not wish to return to the honest names
Or the slow, outmoded, heavy, intractable objects
As: mincers, mangles, mowers, mattocks, hames;
Collars and saddles of horsehair-padded leather;
Pots of cast and enamelled iron; hones
For sharpening blades of shares, shears, scythes and sickles;
Hafted axes; burrs and grinding stones.
But I value verbs: to mill, till, harrow, harvest, burnish,
Hew, strip, beat, toss, tether, render, comb,
Roast, brew, knead, prove dough — one returns to bread,
To meat, to bellies and bowels, to prick and womb —
To bear, be born, to suck, piss, shit, to cry,
To work, sweat, live, sing, love, pray, die.

By arrangement with the licensor, The Estate of Nancy Keesing c/- Curtis Brown (Aust) Pty Ltd.
The poem appeared in Keesing’s Hails and Farewells and other poems (Edwards & Shaw, Sydney, 1977), and is included in John Leonard, ed., Australian Verse: An Oxford Anthology (Oxford University Press, 1998). Archival material can be found via a finding aid of the Archive of Australian Judaica : scroll down to Nancy Keesing. Something too at wikipedia.
Alice Kociemba. Death of Teaticket Hardware.
I never knew his name,
nor he mine.
He was always there.
Patient. Polite. Shy.

I never knew the name of what I needed, either.
But he did. After listening.
You know that thingamajig
that connects the hose to the washer.
I need the innards of a lamp.

He’d find it in a flash —
through overcrowded aisles,
so narrow only a munchkin could maneuver.
In the back of the store, on the dusty top shelf
where whatsits live.

He’d tell me how to use it.
And he’d tell me again,
drawing it on the little scratch pad
he kept at the register (not the electric kind)
next to the dish of pennies
and the bowl of lollipops.
I would always leave with a red one,
and confidence.

He was the kindest man in town.

I imagined he went home at 5:30 every night
to the apartment above the store,
and told his wife over meatloaf and mashed potatoes
green beans and pecan pie:
That lady came in again today, seems bright enough
but doesn’t even know a lamp has a socket.
And he’d smile, when she would say, Oh, Mrs. Dimwit.
And they would turn on the News at Six.

The drive to town is eerie now
that Teaticket Hardware is gone.
Boarded up windows stare like a zombie
whose soul’s been stolen by Wal-Mart.

Peter Cabral, son of John, son of Peter, son of John,
I never said hello, or goodbye, or thank you.

Death of Teaticket Hardware received an International Merit Award from the Atlanta Review in 2008. The author, with whose gracious permission the poem is presented here, writes: I am putting together a chapbook with this as the title poem, and have a picture (from Falmouth Historical Society) on the cover. Teaticket Hardware opened in 1925, and closed in 2005 (after Wal-Mart came to Falmouth). Alice Kociemba can be reached via alicekociemba@verizon.net.

The book can be obtained from Jamaica Pond Poets, here.
Valerie Lawson. Hardware Store. Dog Watch, Ragged Sky Press, 2007
Read the poem here, where it was found today 27 February 09.
On my last trip to that hardware store, I bought an electric saw,
some drill bits, saw horse brackets, and a two ton floor jack.
I don’t need these things every day, but I might.
Ada Limón.
Two (funny) poems : After her Husband Left Her, She Went to Work at the Hardware Store, and Our Hero Watches the Lady at the Hardware Store Again and She Notices.
Find them here (in coconut five (July 2006)), and in her collection This Big Fake World : A Story in Verse (Pearl Editions, 2006), which is good, puts me in mind of Berryman and Bukowski, for some reason. From the Amazon product description, this —
a story that revolves around the book’s unlikely Hero, a man in a gray suit; the object of his affection, known only as The Hardware Store Lady; and his friend Lewis, the town drunk, who compulsively writes letters to Ronald Reagan.

More here, including access to her blog.
Elline Lipkin. Conversation with my Father (after Grimm's The Maiden Without Hands) here (archived poetry of The Journal of Mythic Arts).
After we speak I go to the hardware store
to decide on a drill, feel each black-packaged tool
bristle with its will to do harm.

Poem included in the author’s The Errant Thread (Kore Press, 2006), described here.
Amy Lowell. The Landlady of the Whinton Inn Tells a Story. Poetry, A Magazine of Verse 11:4 (January 1918)
Name of Steele
George and Clif Steele.
Between ’em, they owned that farm you seen,
And a hardware store to Main Street.
My father used ter say
Nobody hereabouts thought they could cut a rakeful o’ hay
Or split a log,
Onless they’d bought the scythe, or the saw, or the sickle,
To Steele’s.
Funny name for a hardware store, warn’t it,
But them things does happen...

Click here to come directly to this passage, in this poem several pages long.
Jane Mason. Nichols Hardware Sells..., written by author in January 1970, when in Third Grade. Nichols Hardware in Lyme, New Hampshire, closed in 2005, see the article (and poem) here.
Dan Masterson. The Man Who Steals Thumbs, in On Earth as it Is : Poems. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978
From the bus stop he goes straight
to the closest hardware store;
he likes hardware stores, always has;
something to do with the iron and wood
of the place: hinges, bolts, axe handles;
nice to touch, to rub.
Something about thumbs (see other poems in the sequence), mortality. Urgent.
The poem (and the entire volume) can be found in the Contemporary American Poetry Archive here. Something about Masterson, who is/has been among other things a swimmer, here (being the finding aid for Masterson’s papers at Syracuse University). A Closer Look at Dan Masterson here.
Phyllis McGinley. Please Lock the Hardware Store, or The Temptations of Oliver James. In A Pocketful of Wry. New York: Duell, Sloan and Pearce, 1940.
Oliver doesn’t guess the market or fling the dice, or drink or womanize, but he does buy hardware store gadgets that prove useless —
...the sliding rule or the gardener’s tool
Or the guaranteed bottle stopper.
A semi-revisionist assessment of McGinley by Ginia Bellafante appeared in the The New York Times Book Review here (28 December 2008).
Pablo Neruda (1904-1973). Prologues: The House of Odes. In Neruda, Fifty Odes (translated by George D. Schade), Ponciá Vicencio, 1997
...I want everthing
to have
a handle,
that all be
a cup or tool,
I want people to enter the hardware store
through the doorway of my odes.
Kenn Nesbitt. Andy Handy’s Hardware Store, in My Hippo has the Hiccups: And Other Poems I Totally Made Up. Illustrations by Ethan Long. Naperville (Illinois): Sourcebooks Jabberwocky, 2009
Andy Handy’s hardware store
sells things that no one needs;
a doorknob for a doghouse door,
a kit for growing weeds...
Here (only one of two pages previewed).
bpNichol
PLAGIARIZED TEXT #1 (pataphysical hardware company)
part of the bpNichol online archive.
Sanford Pinsker. Note, Left on My Office Door.

Like the small-town hardware store,
This note on my door is just to say
I have gone fishing
For the summer...
A sonnet to students, at the end of term. College English 40:8 (April 1979): 929, and here.
Robert Pinsky seems to like, and know about, hardware stores.
Intimations of mortality in The Cold, where work — maybe — is protection against the draft, and a hardware store where, perhaps because of the time of day, it seemed all of the other customers were old... I think that someone talked about the weather.... The poem is in The Figured Wheel : New and Collected Poems, 1966-1996 (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1996).
And this, from Grace Cavalieri’s interiew with Pinsky in 1995-97 —
I mean, Long Branch is the birthplace of many interesting people. There was a bunch of Jewish storekeepers in downtown Long Branch on Broadway and I think the grocery store was the Grocel’s, and they had a son who grew up to be Jeff Chandler and I think it was the hardware store where the son became Myer Abrahams, M. H. Abrams, the literary critic.

And here he is, checking out light bulbs at Inman Square Hardware. (article by Kathleen Pierce in Boston Globe (10 October 2008).
Jack Prelutsky. A Witch in a Hardware Store. In Prelutsky's My Dog May Be A Genius. HarperCollins Publishers, 2008
Light verse, about a broom in a hardware store. Someone has posted it here.
Tita Reut. Vis cachées (hidden screws). Avec deux gravures d’Arman et deux sérigraphies de César. Paris: La Différence, 1993
Forty-four poems, each describing a different tool: Les Fourches de César ( ? ); Serpe (sickle); Niveau (level); Maillet (mallet); Perceuse (drill); Étau (vice); Pied de Biche (crowbar); Corde (rope); Tenaille (blacksmith's tongs); Ciseau (chisel); Crochet (hook); Râteau (rake); Compas (compass); Équerre (bracket); Dame (rammer, reamer ? ); Pioche (pickaxe); Coutre (wedge that precedes plow, cuts vertically into soil); Chevalet (easel); Échelle (ladder); Plume (feather); Règle (rule); Aigulle (needle); Enclume (anvil); Soufflet (bellows); Tamis (sieve); Crayon (pencil); Queue-de-rat (rat-tailed file); Dégauchisseuse (surface plane); Égoine (saw); Pointeau (center punch); Toupie (shaper); Vrille (corkscrew); Les Haches d’arman (hatchet); Tarabiscot (moulding plane); Diapason (tuning fork); Remington (typewriter); Treuil (winch); Téléphone (telephone); Traitement de Texte ( ? ); Pinceau (paint brush); Gomme (eraser); Pompe (pump); Couteau (knife); Presse (press) — all of these my poor and/or failed translations.

Her method of describing these tools combines a careful scrutiny of their function and outward appearance... with a fanciful, clever metaphorization of each tool. ex John C. Stout his delightful The Revival of Still Life in Contemporary French Poetry: Paul Louis Rossi’s Cose naturali and Tita Reut’s Vis cachées. Sites: Journal of the Twentieth-Century/Contemporary French Studies 7:1 (Spring 2003) : 98-118

More on Tita Reut here : artists books, collaborations, interviews.
Kim Roe. After Being Called Girlie at the Hardware Store.
A Merit Award Winner in the Boynton Poetry Contest, Bellingham, Washington, in Spring 2010. Here (scroll down, or search for hardware).
Madelyn Rosenberg. Ayers.
The man says, I am convinced I can find the holy grail in here
if I look hard enough....
Pretty good, about faith, somehow. The poem is located here (scroll down). Ayers Hardware is located in Arlington, Virginia, and is described here.
Cynthia Rylant. Wax Lips.
Chosen by Ted Kooser for American Life in Poetry, Column 101 here. The poem appared in Rylant’s collection Waiting to Waltz (2001).
Larry Schug. Nail Poems. In Snakeskin 109 (December 2004) here and Snakeskin 124 (June 2006) here. More on Schug here.
Nail Poem #92 starts thus —
The hammer’s been to management school, where they teach the theory
of keeping separate the job
from the nail...
Max Schwartz. In the afternon ov the fawn, being first line of untitled poem, typed on a sales slip/invoice of H. Schwartz Hardware. See at Poems-For-All, a great project of Richard Hansen in Sacramento California.
The poem is not in any (obvious) way about or of hardware, but the presentation is great!
Julia Story. Pretend Hardware Store, in Octopus Magazine 03. Magazine’s navigation doesn’t work well, but this link will land you directly to this poem, and three others below it, odd each, and good.
Somewhere in the darkness
is someone sorting. Sort of piling
or maybe sort of stacking.

More Story poems in Octopus Magazine 11, here.
Patti Tana. The Hardware Store, in Poetrybay an on-line poetry magazine for the 21st century (Fall 2007), here.
...Presiding over this male domain, like a librarian who knows where to find your book among the myriad stacks, a man with white hair and plaid shirt...

Takes an interesting turn. Author's website here.
Ronald Wallace. Scroll or search down to Hardware.

My Father always knew the secret name
of everything
stove bolt and wing nut...

The poem is linked to the author’s own explication. His biography and other information can be found here.
Susan Wheeler. Overtaxed Lament. in Wheeler, Ledger (University of Iowa Press, 2005)
Won’t extract here, a poem that's interesting in the context of its book. Poet’s website here; good interview (by Robert Polito) here (Bomb 92 / Summer 2005).
Nancy Willard. A Hardware Store as Proof of the Existence of God. Found in Willard, Swimming Lessons: New and Selected Poems (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 1996)
Widely available on the Internet.
and this —
The Intuflo hardware store at 186 Columbus Avenue near 68th Street holds poetry readings among the tools and vacuum cleaner bags because its owner is said to like poetry and wants to increase patronage. Attendance entitles an audience member to a 5 percent discount on a purchase.
Joseph Berger, Thirst for Verse: Poetry Readings Multiply The New York Times (24 October 1987)
Same store apparently also treated in Holly Brubach, The Talk of the Town, Intuflo, The New Yorker (8 February 1988) : 26

The New Yorker’s own summary — The name Intuflo is a contraction of "intuition flow" & it & the store are twin brain-children of Richard Savitsky, the store’s head, who is a former entertainment & real-estate lawyer & a recent co-founder of a firm specializing in malpractice suits against lawyers & banks...
finally, on books in hardware stores —
What began as a trickle of cookbooks in kitchen shops and do-it-yourself titles in hardware stores has become, in recent months, the fastest growing component in many major publishers’ retail strategies...

Julie Bosman, Selling Literature to Go With Your Lifestyle, The New York Times, 2 November 2006

tools

from John Todd: the story of his life told mainly by himself (1876); more on Todd here

Below are authors and titles of all the tool pieces that have run in The Believer, mostly in 2003-04, and a couple since then. Some of these bring up full text, others only excerpts. Thanks to Elline Lipkin for this.
more to come?

other

trade journals, handbooks, &c.

Hardware Dealer’s Magazine (1910)
Listen in on this question box discussion about merchandising (1) second-rate goods as a response to racket store competition and (2) selling clocks and watches, if jewelers oughtn’t to be selling cutlery, in March 1910. The evolution of retail genres and merchandising proprieties, and the debates that accompany them, goes way back. Page 611 includes a discussion of getting into sporting goods, and catering to the ladies’ trade.
Mutability of the hardware store genre happens gradually. Week after week, the buyer goes through his want book with the visiting salesmen from his jobbers. Micro decisions are made about whether to replenish, increase or reduce supply of one product or line, or drop it entirely, and/or add another. Over and over, week after week, year after year. The store will go from castiron cookware to all manner of pots and pans and housewares generally, and then decades later get out of them entirely. Some dealers took on radios when they were new, later televisions. Some probably got out of hardware entirely for these new lines, that performed well for them.
Hardware Dealer’s Magazine (1908)
Cover page, January issue. But editorial copy starts here.
Try A trip through a thoroughly modern jobbing house : systematized business, here (regards the Norvell-Shapleigh Hardware Company, in Chicago). Jobbers versus retailers here.
Good Hardware
Styled The National Magazine of the Hardware Trade, this retail-trade journal was published by Butterick, also publisher of the Delineator fashion magazine.

The cartoon above appeared in the same May 1931 issue that carried a long essay entitled Just Imagine, in which O. L. Davis asks and answers, If this is the city of 1980, What will the hardware store of the future be like?. In the story, Harry is somehow transported from 1931 to 1980, where he is amazed by the hardware store of tomorrow. For example —
I used to have more paint in my store than you have here, said Harry.
Yes, I’m sure you did, but remember that was in the lead and oil era when it was necessary to stock a complete run of sizes and colors in several kinds of paint, such as house paint, interior paint, floor paint, cement paint, enamels, etc., all different and made for specific uses.
You are correct, we did, said Harry.
One line of this ’Super-Synthetic’ is all we need to carry today. One paint serves all purposes, exterior, interior, under water or on cement floors. It adheres to all paintable surfaces and lasts more than three times as long as the old-time paints...
Time-traveling Harry is also amazed by television, which is used to demonstrate articles the customer had asked for but was not carried in stock by the store.
But the story shifts from merchandising and the larger, cleaner, quieter, brighter store interior, to the nature of competition in 1980. The solution was a binding of manufacturer, jobber and dealer, all in a battle to defeat the mail-order houses and the chains. Indeed, at least half of the article is devoted to this topic, and may presage the cooperative initiatives of John Cotter and others, in the 1950s and 1960s.
On John Cotter and the TrueValue chain, see
Hoover’s Profile: True Value Company, an extremely good article by Ellen D. Wernick, updated by Christina M. Stansell. Its extensive bibliography includes —
Edward R. Kantowicz. John Cotter: 70 Years of Hardware (Chicago: Cotter & Company, 1987).

Some hardware retailers resisted the Cotter organization, sensing that it would threaten their independence. For some, Cotter was akin to socialism; they may also have enjoyed their years-long weekly conversations with favorite salesmen. The bias was certainly held within the McVey family; I put it aside as I read Kantowicz’s excellent book.
R(ichard) R(ichardson) Williams, compiler and editor. Hardware Store Business Methods (New and Enlarged Edition). New York, David Williams Company, 1901
Among Rules and Regulations for the Hardware Store (pages 1-6) are these: 1. Keep your eyes on the front door. Customers should be waited on promptly and pleasantly. 46. Conversation with the bookkeeper, or the cashier, except on business, interferes materially with the work. Do not forget this.
Cost Marks (pages 153-156) includes these illustrations of same.

The cipher systems shown below are not related to the above; they are reminiscent of the (pre-Braille) blind alphabet submitted by Robert Milne, himself blind, in a competition sponsored by the Society of Arts for Scotland, in 1836, a section of which is shown here :

They also relate to some of the telegraphic alphabets, such as the Dean alphabets described here.

"The principle upon which the cost mark is constructed is that the dashes at the top of the perpendicular lines, on either side, count for one; those at the middle, on either side, count for two, while those at the bottom of the perpendicular lines, on either side, count for three. A perpendicular line alone represents 0. The mark at the bottom of the cut is given as an example showing how a cost mark may be written, in which the same figures are repeated while using different signs. The example, it will be seen, reads $55.66... ¶ From the examples given it will be readily seen that a large variety of diagrams can be made the basis or key from which a cost mark can be evolved.

Fully indexed (pp 221-227). Advertisements for other Iron Age publications include Multiple Index Price Books, with their index rerum-style classification format.

Apologies for this long digression on a minor part of this textbook.
Carl W. Dipman. The Modern Hardware Store. New York : Good Hardware / The National Magazine of the Hardware Trade / The Butterick Publishing Company, 1929.
The old-fashioned hardware store was to a large extent a store room. The dealer was a storekeeper. But the modern hardware store must be a scientific salesroom. The dealer must be a modern sales engineer. ¶ In this evolution there has come into use a new type of salesmanship. For the want of a better term let us call it silent salesmanship. ¶ While personal salesmanship still has and always will have its place in the hardware business yet it must be supplemented with this new silent salesmanship.

There is an emphasis on open display of merchandise, design of table and wall displays; store layouts. Many photographs. I gather that much or all of the contents are taken from the Good Hardware trade magazine.

An ambition of mine is to create a wunderkamern/philosophical garden. McVey Hardware and Arboretum, perhaps, or Mechanick’s Institute.

art
tools in art; art in hardware stores
fiction
tools & hardware stores, in
film & music
high theory, homely metaphor
history & other
lexicon, metaphor
memoirs & store histories
nails
paeans ubi sunt &c.
poetry
tools (pending)
other
trade journals, handbooks, &c.

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