Pin Cube Cubes Securely Fixed (1 results)
More imagesPublished by H. F. Neuss, or Neuss Brothers, Neuss, Germany 1890
Seller: White Fox Rare Books and Antiques, ABAA/ILAB, New York, NY, U.S.A.White Fox Rare Books and Antiques, ABAA/ILAB
Contact seller3-star sellerA novelty pin holder, each side of the cube 43 mm, designed with holes for 108 pins, which it presumably also came with. We are short 28 pins, and there are a few pins that are not original. But we believe the pins with glass heads, both the heads resembling pearls and the slightly smaller black orbed ones, are original to the c…ube, and these are almost all of the ones we do have, plus we have enough of these pins to achieve the decorative look the object was designed to have. The pin shafts were made of steel. The pins were meant to be used as toilet pins. Two sides with mounted leather labels, these with four holes meant to hold four pins in the corners. All other sides with 25 holes. The label doesn't give the make; it only tells us that they were made in Germany. But since there was as far as we could discover a single manufacturer of these, we are confident that the maker was the Neuss company. There is no date; nonetheless, ours is most definitely an early one for this company, and it is the only one that we have found with leather mounted onto the sides. Our near certainty of its age is from its having no company name, unlike other pin cubes we have seen, as well as the styling and typography. Other cubes, with paper mounted onto the sides, may also have the swirling lines associated with Art Nouveau, but there is a particular ineffable quality to the design of ours that places it more squarely in the 1890s. The user could easily add a hole, but to do so would take away from the aesthetics of the object. In ours there are just a few instances of added holes. Our labels are darkened, soiled, slightly abraded, but essentially intact. Leather on other sides probably darkened from the original color.
