I have recently put this letter in Hand Papermaking Newsletter:
My father, Rémy John Barcham Green and I sold old hand papermaking moulds for many years. I had not realised how early this had started until I
recently came across the card illustrated, which presumably Rémy sent to a wide range of customers.
In 1961, hardly anyone was making paper as a studio type of activity, so I infer that Rémy initially thought that he would sell to customers as collectors’ items to hang on the wall or incorporated into coffee tables etc. By the time I joined the business in 1968, sales of old moulds were in full swing. Customers included Howard and Katherine Clark at Twinrocker, Greg Knowle at Iowa Center for the Book and Muir Dawson in Los Angeles.
Rémy kept selling moulds after I bought the business back in 1975. After a while this became a bit of an issue between us, as his prices were still ridiculously low and he was selling to some workshops who were trying to compete with us on a small scale. Eventually he stopped selling moulds in about 1976.
When Hayle Mill closed in 1987, I had about 250 pairs of moulds in stock which I decided to offer for sale. I priced them based on what Ron MacDonald at Edwin Amies charged. I classified all the moulds by condition from 1 to 10 and discounted accordingly. Hayle Mill moulds have gone to new owners in Australia, Belgium, Canada, Catalonia, Czechia, Finland, France, Denmark, Germany, Greece, Japan, Korea, Sweden, the UK, and the USA, among others. Most are in collections and some are in use. In early 2019 I sold all but a dozen moulds to the Cropper Paper Foundation in northern England. The few moulds that I am keeping are for my personal collection.
So, after 58 years, the sale of moulds from Hayle Mill has eventually ended. I sometimes wonder where they are now and what they are used for. Some will have changed owners again and hopefully most have survived. However, not everyone values moulds. I recently had an email from someone about a mould that he had rescued from a skip —discarded and on its way to oblivion. If any readers of Hand Papermaking Newsletter have information about them, what they are used for, and their journey from Hayle Mill over the years, I would be very interested to hear from them.
HPM and I invite readers to send the story picture of their Hayle Mill mould(s) to [email protected] and we may publish the story at HPM or on this blog.
Please spread the word on this treasure hunt to anyone you think might be interested.
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