Imagine a woman. It is night, she sits at a desk; candles illuminate the small room and the air smells of wax and paper. Around her, manuscript pages mingle with personal letters. In her life, perhaps she is a bit haphazard, loose curls escaping and falling free, but in her words, in her words she is astonishingly precise.
She reaches for an unopened envelope in one hand and with the other fingers an ornate brass letter opener. It is a tool of paradox, for despite the severity of the blade, it offers surprising tenderness, its curves are well-worn. Its handle is adorned with the phenomenon of light, a woman’s face looks out knowingly. Like her pen, this is an item loved beyond its simple utility.
With delicate grace, the women severs the envelope. When blade meets paper, ordinary objects are transformed into artifacts of revelation. She opens the delicate pages. The news in the letter stirs her, its mysteries now lost to us, so many years later. She notices that outside it has begun to rain. Through the open door of the study she can hear the laughing voices of her friends and husband.
“Come join us, Mary,” they call. “We are telling scary stories.”
When tasked with creating a luxury item to accompany and enhance the experience of the Frankenstein Art Novel, we knew it had to be something that would help forge readers’ relationship to our dear author, Mary Shelley. A letter opener immediately came to mind.
Frankenstein is an epistolary novel, meaning its’ story is told through a series of letters. Letter-writing was a critical form of communication for the Victorians, far more so than most people realize.
In the 1800s, without a government-run postal service in the United Kingdom, letters and notes were sent via messenger boys who would travel well-to-do neighborhoods delivering correspondences.. A respectable young lady may receive upwards of a dozen letters in a single day, and responding to such messages was a frequent occupation for many Victorians, particularly women excluded from other social avenues.
Many affluent families even had their own in-house messenger who would deliver their correspondences, and ornate letter openers were used to signify the status and gentility of the writer. Moreso, in the early to mid-1800s, books were printed in reams of uncut paper sealed on the outward-facing side. While these pages would have been severed at the printer’s, missed cuts were common, forcing readers to cut many of the pages themselves. For the young Mary Shelley, a similar letter opener to the one you now hold was sure to have been found nestled among the books, pages of prose, and letters from friends and family that covered her desk.
The Frankenstein special-edition letter opener began as an artists’ vision sketch before being sculpted and sand-casted by hand using raw brass ingots of superior quality. Each letter opener is then precisely sanded, polished, and antiqued by hand.
When you use the Frankenstein Special-edition letter opener to sever the pages of your Art Novel, you allow yourself to be transported to a distant, but not so different time.
A time in which new technology was advancing in leaps and bounds, where debates about the responsibilities we have to society’s most vulnerable were rampant, and where advanced, innovative, and even dangerous ideas bubbled to the forefront.
At the center of that time, both outside observor and inward participant, we find our author. When you use your special edition-letter opener you are invited to walk, side by side, with Mary Shelley, as she begins a most fascinating adventure.
Enjoy the journey, and don’t forget to write to us with what you discover.
