Shellac Archives Announcement

My name is Don, and I’m a shellacaholic.  The topic of shellac and its uses and performance has been a near-constant focus of mine for the past four decades.  One result of this interest has been my compilation of hundreds of documents with thousands of pages dealing with those very same topics, ranging from manufacturer’s brochures to articles in the popular press to arcane monographs so esoteric that their audience has been nearly invisible over the decades.

One great advantage (?) to electronic self-publishing like blogging is that there is no governor on the enterprise beyond one’s own energies.  That capacity allows me or anyone else to go anywhere their ideas take them.  Which of course brings me to the topic of this blog – my shellac literature archive.  In recent years I have been scanning and digitizing these files, and I am not close to being finished yet!

With Jason’s help I have established a special section within the Writings section to house this archive.  Over the coming few dozen months I will be uploading my shellac archive, one document per week or so.  Some weeks it will be a stand-alone document, some weeks it will be a consecutive series of chapters from shellac treatises.  This will be the shellac world’s analog to the old-time serialized novels.  All tolled I think I have about 200 things to post (if stacked up it would be about a four-foot-tall pile), but the final number will depend on how I chop them up.

The first entry is, appropriately in this centennial year, the 1913 trade brochure, “The Story of Shellac.”