H. C. Fry No. 10 Brilliant Era Cut Glass Manufacturer Catalog

By Rob Smith and Val Smith

Hard to find Fry Catalog No. 10 catalog patterns, pictures, and prices are delivered in a searchable format that also provides shapes, sizes and sets. The catalog used relatively simple woodcut images. This eBook adds a comprehensive Fry cutting pattern index covering 21 sources, captioned photos of 67 surviving examples of Fry cut glass, and research results presenting publication dates for all seven known Fry cut glass catalogs. Produced for LABAC Cycle #22 Brilliant Era cut glass enthusiasts, this eBook presents fresh information not available elsewhere.

• Language: English
• Publisher: V-R Information Systems
• Release date: Mar 18, 2021
• ISBN: 9780937508480

Rob Smith

The Expansive Pairpoint Design Name Index eBook is Rob's eighth cut glass eBook. He and wife Val have previously edited or authored more than four dozen glass-related paper books. Rob formulated a plan for the 2011 Master Index of Cut Glass Patterns, then recruited the tenacious team that accumulated, validated and integrated those lists. Rob and Val edited and illustrated the data, designed and published the resulting three-volume reference. Rob also developed the Cut Glass Pattern Identification Flash Card concept, and has so far created eleven different 100-card sets. A long-time collector and student of Brilliant Era cut glass. Rob writes frequently for the ACGA Hobstar, and has published hundreds of cut glass photographs. Rob and Val began collecting American Brilliant Era cut glass in Austin more than thirty years ago, and became active members of the ACGA Lone Star Chapter. Since moving Midwest from the Bay Area, they've refined and expanded their diverse cut glass collection, which they greatly enjoy. Favored shapes in cut glass are loving cups, mugs of all sizes, napkin rings and butter pats.

Book preview

Published by V-R Information Systems

Special Interest Books Since 1978

FRONT COVER: SIGNED Fry 15" tall electric table lamp in the seldom-seen Vanity pattern, sometimes also called "Lily of the Valley."  8 diameter dome, 6 wide base. Presents intaglio gatherings of slender leaves and tiny bell-shaped blossoms.  Ribbons with hex hobnails of crosscutting enclose fat vesicas with distinctive ovals of hobnail.  Accents include flat stars and fans.  This surviving lamp has the original signed Fatboy socket marked Paiste, and an original silver plated bell pull. See page 4 of the Fry #10 catalog.

THE WORLD IS MOVING so fast these days that the man who says it can't be done is generally interrupted by someone doing it.

– Puck Magazine, 1902

COPYRIGHT (C) 2020 by Robert J. Smith, II  All Rights Reserved.  Published in the United States of America.  No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner without written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles, reviews or research accounts.

ISBN  978-0-937508-48-0

Preface

THIS IS OUR THIRTY-fifth LABAC cut glass book, and our second eBook.  Early in 2020, long-term difficulties with online cut glass catalog posting motivated a decision to change the strategy used for electronic publication of older material from out-of-print LABAC paper books.  LABAC will no longer augment ACGA website postings of reprinted catalogs.  Instead, the group intends to publish a series of low-priced electronic books (eBooks), each based on a catalog reprint plus substantial new catalog-related material. The  Fry No. 10 catalog reprinted as Chapter One of the out of print 2003 FBMC book was selected as the basis for our second eBook project. We've added captioned photos of many surviving Fry cut glass examples relevant to this catalog content and a Research Results Report ascribing a date to each of the seven known Fry cut glass catalogs.  There's also a pattern index plus an an updated About LABAC summary.

Perhaps the most important material in this eBook is the comprehensive 21-source index of more than 240 Fry Brilliant Era cut glass patterns. The pattern index is believed to be the most comprehensive aggregation of Fry cut glass cross-reference information so far accumulated. The somewhat unconventional index format is required by the EPUB eBook file format standard which provides no support for either tables or tab-delimited text. The twenty-one Fry cut glass information sources indexed include five catalogs reprinted by the Fry Glass Society [F1, F2, F3, F4, F5], Catalog No. 10 reprinted by LABAC in their FBMC book [No. 10], reprinted catalog pages plus surviving cut glass pictured in the FGS Fry Encyclopedia [Enc], Fry advertisements reprinted in LABAC Cut Glass Advertisements Book Two [FRY-88], LABAC Cut Glass Advertisements Book Five [FRY-99] Fry ads, and Flash Card Sets One through Twelve [FC01 to FC12].

While indexing the Fry Encyclopedia, the catalog reprinted on pages ENC-195 through ENC-202 was found to be almost identical to the content of F1, also reprinted by the FGS.  The ENC version does not reprint the page factory numbered 5 in F1, and ENC reprints twice the content on F1 pages numbered 12 and 13.

The H. C. Fry Glass Company catalog No. 10 reproduced here is based on a photocopy given to LABAC in 2003.  Only four patterns are presented in Catalog 10: Pershing, Vanity, Asteroid and America. The woodcut illustrations picturing pieces cut in these designs are of moderate quality, and they have been further corrupted by several generations of scanning.  Whenever possible, photographs of surviving identical pieces have replaced the lowest quality woodcuts in the eBook catalog presentations.  If you have good quality photos that could be used to further improve the catalog presentations, please contact the authors.

Previously known Fry cut glass information sources have been enumerated in the index basis list above.  We would like to thank reviewers Randy Skalsky and Clif Dietz for their careful examinations of earlier drafts of this eBook. Their many refinements have greatly improved the results! We are also grateful to the auction houses, dealers and collectors for their support in assembly of several dozen captioned photos of surviving Fry cut glass, especially the examples that have not been published elsewhere.

Soon after the end of the Brilliant Era, Fry used three distinct types of glass production furnaces: classic pot furnaces (which used discontinuous pot batch charges); day tanks (semi-continuous melting tanks reloaded daily with batch raw materials); and continuous melting tanks (raw materials continuously supplied to one end of the molten glass pool, while workable fluid glass was withdrawn from the pool opposite end).  The continuous melt tanks made lower grade high-volume molten glass used in machine forming (primarily casting) applications.  Over 100 years ago tank furnaces could produce over 50 tons of molten glass per day, and were typically operated nonstop for years at a time before requiring major overhauls.

During 1902 Fry began operations in Rochester, New York with two 18 pot furnaces, claimed to be at