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Category / Teeny Tiny Stuff

The Sweet & Forgotten Charm of Vintage Sugar Cube Packaging

So I found this peculiar collection on Flickr by a guy in California called Frank Kelsey. He’s been collecting for 30+ years – he’s also got impressive collections of vintage ashtrays, matchbook covers and baseball cards – but it’s his sugar cube wrappers that had me really enamoured. My guess is there aren’t that many…

A Brief Compendium of the Traveling Salesman’s Vintage Sample Case

Unlike most of the vintage stuff we tend to get nostalgic about on this blog, I’m not sure travelling salesmen of yesteryear rapping their knuckles on our front doors is something we’d necessarily want to bring back. While I do like to touch and feel what I’m buying, briefcase-carrying bowler hat-wearing door to door sellers hawking…

America’s First Planetarium is Hoarding the Ultimate Cabinet of Curiosities

I’ve caught the collector’s bug again. What is it this time? Antique astronomy tools. And I’m blaming it on the Adler Planetarium, the first in America and home to one of the world’s largest collections of historic scientific instruments. It all began when I stumbled upon their online collections, a dangerous rabbit hole for those of us…

Forgotten Object du Jour: The Vinaigrette

Pass the vinaigrette! No, not the salad dressing – we’re talking about the vinaigre de toilette. You’re forgiven for the confusion, being born in the wrong century and all. Let’s rewind about 150 years when a vinaigrette once commonly referred to a small container for smelling salts or aromatic vinegar that were used to cover…

The 27 Inch Dolls that Saved Fashion in Post-War Paris

Even Hitler couldn’t rob Paris of its style. In 1945, the end of the war was in sight, the French capital had already been liberated of the Nazi occupation and it was time for Paris to relaunch its fashion industry. There was just one problem– the industry couldn’t afford enough fabric to actually create new fashion.…

Inside a Secret Paris Atelier of Curiosities

Behind what might be the narrowest door in Paris, at the back of a peaceful courtyard, I could hear the faint sound of a radio crackling as I approached the end of a corridor, hoping I’d found the atelier of Maïssa Toulet. I had found a photograph of her work on Tumblr and tracked her…

Miniature Must-Have Du Jour

It all started when I was looking to source a miniature French to English dictionary (as you do) for Messy Nessy’s Cabinet in Paris (coming soon). It wasn’t long before I found myself obsessing over a 2 x 2.7 cm red leather dictionary from the 1890s contained within a metal case complete with a magnifying…

Digging for Treasure (and Love) in New York City

Their’s is a love of strange and beautiful proportion. The kind measured in porcelain, peanut-sized dolls, and antiqued oysters as big as your face. “It’s hard to imagine a time when we’d stop digging,” says Belle, back-lit by a wall of technicolour glass bottles, “I mean it’s addictive. And when you have someone who gets…

What you can find Mudlarking on the Thames Foreshore in London

A few years ago, a worldly friend who’s always in the know posted something to her Facebook wall that went something like this: Mudlarking on the Thames is the best way to spend a Sunday morning in London. She had me at “mudlarking”—I had no clue what it was. It seemed like something curiously obscure. And…

The French Castles, Literally Fit for a Pigeon

They might easily be mistaken for playhouses fit for a princess, like Marie Antoinette’s little hamlet houses at Versailles, but these pint-sized castles dotted around France were in fact designed for a much smaller tenant– one with wings to be precise… You might vaguely recognise the mini-castle pictured above, which has been cleverly re-imagined by photoshop and…

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