From a civil war era family photo album

A mid - late 19th century photo album came into luncheonette library that's filled with a family and its branches from New York, Illinois, and parts beyond.

 Filled with tintypes and cartes de visites, and most of the people identified. Where a person wasn't known, there's a question mark in the same penciled hand.

 My favorite photo. Sisters, I think. Look at the hand resting on the shoulder, the slightly tinted pink cheeks, the tight waists and curly hair.

Luncheonette Library

 Softly, as they say, the door opened. Okay not the door, the shop. Softly the shop opened. The problem is I somehow feel duly bent to read all the books before listing them.

Or stare at the photos, reading stories right into them. I had no idea, when I was 10, that all the postcards and pictures I kept in that Louis Sherry candy box were called ephemera. To me they were lives lived that I had to know about. I was always reporting on make believe.

Shagmoor

From September, 1970 ad for Shagmoor coats

I happened across this Shagmoor coat recently.

Purple plaid wool coat with fox fur lining by Shagmoor

It has so much going on that it's like a vintage happening in itself, including a giant silver fox fur collar, deep purple and green plaid, textured, molded, tricolor acrylic buttons, banded hip pockets, swing shape and yet something a bit modified about it, vivid purple lining, and three separate labels. There's a Woolmark label that was introduced in the mid 60s, a Shagmoor sewn in label that looked like the 50s, and then, to really baffle the cook, a red, white and blue IGLWU label that placed it smack dab in the 70s.

So. A 50s swing coat with a fur collar that had been updated for the 1970s? They did that? Clearly.

I can spend hours researching. I started digging up Shagmoor.  It was owed by the Linder Brothers, and started in 1921. The name was developed to convey something luxurious, something high class, slightly British, slightly Wallis Simpson. And so it did. Shagmoor was a kind of wool that, according to the manufacturers, nearly floated off the body. The Linder Brothers original Shagmoor logo:

There's an obituary online from just a couple of months ago for a man who worked in the Linder Bros. cutting room for decades, and was on the company bowling team. He was a decorated WWII veteran who was awarded the Bronze star.

From 1922, this marvelous announcement:

There are 26 different listings when you search "Shagmoor" on etsy. Some, to be frank, have got their eras wrong. But it's not hard. This company, like many — you can practically hear them in a design meeting, hopeful that their new and improved versions will retain their faithful clients and yet attract those new girls. What would they think now.