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Leveridge & Shopland. Proprietors, Designers and Publishers I. B. Farrington & Co.’s Ornamental Designs for Scroll Sawing, Office & Salesrooms, 2 Cortland St., N. Y.

[New York or Brooklyn, ca. 1880.] Illustrated broadsheet, 20.75” x 13.5”. CONDITION: Very good, some tears to edges, small holes not affecting text.

A broadsheet advertising ornate designs for scroll saw work as well as scroll saws and related tools, offered by a Brooklyn-based tool dealer.

One side of this broadsheet shows sixty-five numbered fretwork designs, which correspond to a price list on the verso. These include “Wheelbarrow, clover pattern,” “Fruit,” a “Photograph Frame,” a “Wall Pocket,” “Birdcage,” “Perfumery Stand,” and many more. Their latest designs were products numbered 576–581, which included “Matchbox, Pauline and the Matches,” “Stereotype View and Instrument Holder,” and “Alphabet and Numbers.” Since these product numbers begin in the low 500s and end near 600, it is more than likely that these designs were only a fraction of those available from Farrington.

Surrounding the price list on the verso are vignette advertisements for the company’s latest tool offerings, including the “Demas Scroll Saw” which “has frame and table like sewing machines…tilting table, buzz saw emery wheel and lathe,” of a quality “worth double any cheap saw ever in the market”; a “Companion Drill” whose “cut gives exact size of Drill Stock, Drill Points, and Wrench,” all “nicely polished, other parts malleable iron, japanned”; a “Holly Saw,” offered “with 7 Valuable Improvements…it has a Solid Emery Wheel…Improved Clamps…Polished Nickel Plated Tilting Table”; and a “Chilion Scroll Saw” which “is, as its name indicates, a Finished, Complete, and Perfect Machine” and presumably all of the other scroll saws and tools offered by Farrington.

I.B. Farrington & Company, owned by Leveridge and Shopland, was a Brooklyn-based seller of “foot-powered scroll saws and other tools. It is unclear whether…[Farrington] manufactured anything or just dealt in tools,” but the company is listed in Nelson’s Directory of American Toolmakers (Early American Industries Association, 1999). The business operated from the 1870s into the 1880s.

REFERENCES: “I.B. Farrington and Company” at Davistown Museum online.

Item #8791

Price: $375.00

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