Hi, today I'd like to talk about a white catalog that we just got. So a friend of mine, Peter Cassai, was in the silver business for many years. Closed the shop about a year and a half or two years ago. And now he's sorting through the things from the shop and he gave me a whole host of things from his library. Books and catalogs that he had accumulated over the years. And I got quite a large box that had a Blackington catalog, quite a big group of Blackington information, Frank Smith information. And then at the very bottom of this large box was a 500 page catalog of the Whiting Company. Okay, Whiting went into business in the year 1866. And they were an independent company until 1924. In 1924 they were purchased by Gorum and then they were combined with Gorum as far as manufacturing in the year 1926. When Gorum bought a company and they bought many, their goal was to get their patterns and to destroy competition. So with Whiting they made their patterns for a while. They made them custom order after a very short time and then they charged a very high price for these patterns. That's how they paid for these purchases. And they did destroy the companies that they acquired. In the Gorum archives, which are at Brown University, there are literally millions of pages about Gorum, about what they made, about what they sold, pictures of items. And saying that they destroyed companies for Whiting, there's only one scrapbook. It's a small scrapbook that had pictures of some of the things that Whiting made. Every other bit of information that Gorum had from Whiting was destroyed. So to get this book I think is quite a coup. So this is the book. It's not in the greatest condition. The cover comes right off. It has a symbol of Whiting company on the front. What's kind of interesting is on the back of the cover there's this white page with everything scratched off. And if you look very closely, you can make out a little bit of it. Basically it says that this book is the property of the Whiting company and that it had to be returned to the Whiting company and was not the property of any jewelry store, etc. So actually this should have been returned to the Whiting company long, long ago. Looking at the patterns in the book and there are many, it really heavily concentrates on the Lewis the 15th page. And a few others. That leads me to believe that the book is circa 1890. There are over 500 pages. I looked at most of the pages to find a date. I couldn't find that. There are also, normally for these types of books, there's a key where I would say, you know, many of these pictures are identified by numbers. And there'd be a key that would show what the actual pattern was. And that is not here either. So the thing that really astounded me about this book was the last 40 or 50 pages. And these pages show the unbelievable trophies that Whiting made. In the Dallas Museum of Art, there's a few examples of really great Whiting hollowware, but I had no idea. And I don't know if there's other examples of this Whiting catalog somewhere, but I've never seen one. And so at the end of this video, we'll take pictures of many of these trophies. And I think you'll be as astounded as I was with the wonderful work that Whiting did. And I think, you know, this is just scraping the surface. This is one moment of what they were making. And as I say, is this the most information there is about Whiting anywhere? It could be. It's really a great book. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.