“We moved into this house about 1981,” Dick Matthies said at the kitchen of their place just off Miracle Mile in Springfield, “and one of the first things I did was put mantels up on the (two-sided) fireplace. It looked bare without them.”
Because the mantels themselves then looked bare, “we went out to the antiques show” at the Clark County Fairgrounds to find decorations, he said.
Along with a set of sheep sheers, a bell on a leather strap and some other items, they came back with a button hook that took their fancy.
“That,” said Vicki Matthies, “is when this whole sickness began.”
Before zippers
“The earliest known written reference to button hooks (shoe hooks, glove hooks, or collar buttoners) is dated 1611,” reports the authoritative Schroeder’s Antiques Price Guide.
The entry was written by Dick Matthies, who, like his wife, are two of about a dozen American members of the London, England-based Button Hook Society.
“They began as a necessary implement in the 1850s, when tight-fitting, high-button shoes became fashionable,” the entry continues. “Later ... ladies gloves and men’s button-on collars and cuffs dictated specific types of buttoners. Both shoes and gloves used as many as 24 buttons each.”
“You couldn’t get dressed at the turn of the (20th) century without a button hook,” said Dick Matthies, who recently came across a Scribner’s magazine account that illustrates how many buttons were a part of everyday life.
It tells the story of a mother who committed suicide after feeling exhausted, dispirited and overwhelmed at the prospect of having to button all of her children’s clothing for the foreseeable future.
Had she held on just a few years, Matthies said, a now everyday device could have saved her life.
“The zipper came along in the 1920s and basically put button hooks out of existence,” he said.
But B.Z.E. (before the zipper era), button hooks had buttoned down a place in history.
A book on hooks
The Matthieses were drawn into that history when they spent $9.95 on a button hook booklet they picked up at the Henry Ford Museum in Dearborn, Mich., in 1983.
It was the first time they’d left their children at home — a time their children may now look at as the first time they let their parents go unsupervised.
“We laugh now, but we debated whether to pay this price ($9.95) for the book,” Vicki Matthies said.
The pages in Cynthia Compton’s guide were a revelation.
“The materials they used (for clothing) was so stiff, you couldn’t work buttons with your fingers,” Dick Matthies explained. “The leather on their shoes was stiff. The collars were celluloid (an early plastic).”
The hooks were used “to poke through the open button hole and pull the button through the stiff material,” he said. “With a quick twist you were fastened. You didn’t unbutton with a hook, you buttoned.”
The button hook became part of everyone’s 19th-century tool kit.
“When you bought a pair of shoes, you got a button hook with it,” Vicki Matthies said.
Made of stamped steel, collectors call these give-aways “advertisers.”
“Some of the advertising was for shoe makers like G.R. Kinney,” Dick Matthies said, “and some were store advertising.”
Among the Springfield establishments stamped in steel in the Matthies collection: The Hub, M.D. Levy & Sons, Oscar Young’s Correct Footwear, Niseley’s Arcade Shoe Store, Routhzahn and Wright, Starkey & Scowden’s Arcade Shoe House and the Arch Preserver Boot Shop.
In addition to the hooks, clothiers gave away and sold button loops. Essentially for the same task, Vicki Matthies explained, the loops weren’t as sharp as the hooks. Because of that, they were less likely to fray the edges of fabric.
‘Fasten-ation’
But it wasn’t the hooks’ use on boots, shoes, gloves, spats, collars and clothing that led to the Matthies’ “fasten-ation” with button hooks. It was the variety produced.
“We have a whole drawer full of ‘trench art,’” Dick Matthies said. “They’re World War I vintage made by troops who went for weeks on end with nothing to do. They’d take bits and pieces of downed airplanes or machinery and make things out of them. And one of the things they made are button hooks.”
Another sub-category: hooks made by the captive audience of the Nevada State Prison system.
Hooks were made of a variety of materials, too: wood, brass, bronze, gold, mother-of-pearl, sterling silver, ivory, bone and early plastic. The Matthieses have button hooks produced for the 1883 Chicago World’s Fair and for souvenir shops from Toronto City Hall, Yellowstone National Park, the Statue of Liberty, New York’s Woolworth Building and the Garden of the Gods Park in Colorado.
They have mechanical button hooks that retract like pens and hooks made for vanity sets that include hair brushes, nail buffers, scissors and nail files. (Some sets included hair reservoirs for women who saved the hair for weaving and stuffing pin cushions.)
Button hooks also show up in tools that are forerunners of the Swiss Army knife. One of those tools in the Matthies collection combines button hook and a hook for removing a stone for a horse’s hoof. Another is a combination tool that can be stuck in the wall of a bar and used as a hat hook. Yet another sports a button hook, scissors to cut the end of cigar and a mustache curler.
Similarly, there is a whole line of button hooks incorporated in decorative accessories for women’s clothing.
“For such a utilitarian tool,” Vicki Matthies asks, “why did they get so fancy?”
Risk of addiction
That same question occurred to the two Matthies children during the many Christmases Dick and Vicki Matthies individually wrapped button hooks they bought for one another through the year, then individually unwrapped them, when the holiday arrived.
Whatever psychological cost the offspring paid, their father reports in Schroeder’s Antiques Price Guide that button hooks “range from $1 to over $500, with most being in ... $10 to $100.”
He fails to mention an obvious hazard: Some collectors get hooked.
Contact this reporter at (937) 328-0368
About the Author