Today, alas, I must be brief, with a desultory promise to bore you at length as we get into summer and the responsibilities associated with the final month of my tenure at the Wissenschaftskolleg ebb. As some of you know, the past year I’ve been going through a Trouser Emergency®. I am pleased to report it’s under control, thanks to the acquisition of a lovely pair of used 3sixteens in a 12oz Kuroki Mills left-hand twill, courtesy another of the anonymous kind souls on the far side of the planet who send me things. Alas, my relief was marred by the discovery, when they arrived, that the fly buttons are of horn, which, in view of other things I’ve said, would be off brand.
Naturally I turned to the best trim shop on the planet, only to find that they do not — yet? — stock fasteners. How can this be? Thread, fusing, binding, elastic, even surplus size tags of rPET — but no buttons. This turned out to be another blessing in disguise, else how should I have discovered there’s a thriving trade in vintage tagua nut buttons on Etsy? In the past I’ve used this forum to disparage archive fetishism in fashion, but faced with the choice of purchasing buttons machined last week in Hong Kong and buttons manufactured in Edwardian England, I was quick to see the appeal of wearing pants with fly fasteners from a time of gutta percha–insulated telegraph cables and strategic maneuvering over guano reserves (read Lord Jim). Perhaps it helped that last week, fighting jet lag on a brief trip to New York, I found myself flipping through Mrs Dalloway. This truly was the Golden Age of STUFF, save, as we’ve discussed, when it comes to writing instruments, when the Golden Age of STUFF was the early 1970s.
My frustration was not yet at an end, for it turned out I was unable to purchase the c.1900 tagua nut buttons for delivery to Germany, which has lately implemented a packaging waste reduction law that requires vendors to take responsibility for the final disposition of any packaging used to send stuff through the mail. A good idea in principle, but in practice burdensome to small vendors unprepared to deal with the regulatory overhead, including registration with a bespoke packaging registry, LUCID. From the LUCID Registration Frequently Asked Questions:
Is the registration requirement only triggered by a certain volume of packaging?
100 grams or 100 tonnes? Regarding the question of whether you need to register in the LUCID Packaging Register, the packaging volume does not matter. If you are the party placing packaging filled with goods on the German market on a commercial basis for the first time, you are always required to register with the LUCID Packaging Register.
Ach, Deutschland, manchmal möchte ich lieber tot über ’nen Zaun hängen … (they could at least have an L1 speaker check the translation for idiomaticity).
Still, my fascination with the off-limits buttons lingered. I found myself asking: where did the tagua nut for these tagua nut buttons come from — if in fact it was tagua sensu strictu, that is, the seed of palms of genus Phytelephas, indigenous to the Equatorial Americas, and not that of the palms of the insular Western Pacific, at one point put to similar purposes. But this opens up on a more extensive discussion, which we must defer to a future date.(*)
Public Service Announcement! On Friday, 21 June / 6月21日, Time Kitchen returns with a single-session seminar on the theme What Is Work?, with special guest host J. Johari Palacio. Please come! Tell everyone you know. It’s free.
(*) A quick perusal of the egregiously branded but indispensable Web of Science, using the probe “vegetable ivory”, turns up exactly one relevant source, from Environmental Archaeology (2006).