Suzanne Karr Schmidt
As a Brown University undergraduate, I curated a small exhibition about the history of artificial flowers at the Rockefeller Library that was inspired by Calart, a recently defunct Providence-area crepe paper flower-making company. I encountered one of the foundational how-to handbooks on flower making at the Library of Congress, written by a mysterious Frenchwoman, one Mme B.***. This was a c. 1850 edition of the Art de Confectionner les Fleurs Artificielles. That particular copy contained a, somewhat unexpectedly, real pressed flower! While I could borrow a volume of Diderot from the John Hay Library, there wasn’t a Madame Blocquel to be had in Rhode Island. Luckily, I was able to secure a nouvelle édition, c. 1880, myself, though this exemplar included no plant specimens. Like many similar handbooks of the same era, the book contained descriptions of flower symbolism and functional plates outlining the shapes of petals and leaves for their construction. Other plates showed the completed flowers in carefully arranged bouquets. An unpaginated final section even advertised the tools and materials flower makers would need. Gradually acquiring other books on this topic, by my senior year, I convinced the Stillwell Prize judges of its bibliographical coherence as a collection.
Mme Bl.*** (Mme Blocquel).
Art de Confectionner Les Fleurs Artificielles.
Paris: Delarue, c. 1880.
After my first experience of discovering “things in books,” when I found a pressed (real) flower in a Library of Congress earlier edition, I had to find a copy for myself. No shrinking violet despite her asterisked pseudonym, Mme Blocquel catered to a genteel female audience that she hoped to attract to her craft, even dedicating the 1850 edition "aux Dames.”
Bobby Darin.
“Artificial Flowers."
Atco: 45 rpm record, 1960.
Bobby Darin’s melodramatic, jazzy tale of underage artificial flower laborer Annie first appeared in the 1890s historical musical Tenderloin. True to the Manhattan red light district setting, it ends in tragedy. The “paper and shears, with some wire and wax” that Annie uses in her freezing attic offers a spot-on description of the tools of the trade. Yet Bobby urges us to “give her the real thing” as a heavenly reward after her untimely demise!
