Klarinet Archive - Posting 000776.txt from 1999/08

From: LeliaLoban@-----.com
Subj: [kl] RE:German silver
Date: Thu, 26 Aug 1999 09:38:15 -0400

Thanks to Richard Bush Roger Shilcock and Ann Bell for the technical
definitions of German silver. It's no wonder there's a lot of confusion
among clarinetists, because tradespeople use the term sloppily. I've noticed
in my flea marketing that jewelry dealers, especially, have spread
misinformation so far and wide that it's a wonder the errors haven't sneaked
into the dictionaries under "secondary definitions" (yet...give 'em time).
Low-end jewelry dealers will call almost any silvery-looking metal "German
silver." It sounds much more desirable than, "pot-metal."

The main source of trouble, I think, has nothing to do with clarinets. Much
of the mess dates back to the publicity, about two decades ago, around the
fact that true pewter contains a lot of lead (sometimes 40-50% lead or even
more). Customers began to notice and avoid handling pewter products such as
old jewelry and tableware, out of fear of lead poisoning. To make matters
worse, quite a lot of the cheapest pewter costume jewelry, toy soldiers and
tableware was marketed for kids, in the 1880s through 1930s. Suddenly that
old *cheap* Depression-era pewter (I'm not talking about the scarce,
high-quality goods that collectors seek; I'm talking about the common,
low-end products more likely to turn up in an average job-lot at an estate
auction) became impossible to sell unless dealers called it something else.
They understood that buyers realized "German silver" wasn't real silver and
might contain "some" lead, so they'd sneak in something that's up to half
lead under the "German silver"definition with the rationalization (which I've
actually heard articulated by dealers; I'm not guessing about this) that they
weren't *really* engaging in false advertising because they weren't claiming
the stuff was real silver. (Try to tell that to some mom who gave a piece of
this so- called "German silver" jewelry, really high-lead pewter, to her
grade school kid, who handles it constantly....) Well, right now, there's a
growing market for collecting old pewter, to the point where much of the
non-antique pewter that dealers considered get-rid-of-it-quick junk 20 years
ago is now marketable as "vintage" stuff. So now we've also got gen-u-wine
German silver getting mislabelled as pewter!

Unfortunately, the sloppy definitions have filtered through the bottom of the
marketplace to the point where IMHO, the majority of flea market or
"junktiques" dealers don't know (or care about) how to tell the difference
between the various types of silvery-colored non-silver (or not-much- silver)
metals. What convinces me we're dealing with honest, widespread confusion
today, instead of the probably-deliberate misleading labels of yesterday, is
that I frequently see *marked* Mexican silver or coin silver -- both closer
to pure silver than Sterling silver -- mislabelled as the far less valuable
"German silver," sometimes priced accordingly and sometimes not!

My guess is that very few clarinet dealers and repair technicians ever go to
the trouble of researching metals as Richard Bush and Ann Bell have done.
The manufacturer's specifications, such as the Buffet specifications
consulted by Roger Shilcock, include more reliable information than we can
get from the average store employee.

Lelia

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