Dwight Lanmon talks about attributing lizard paperweights to the Pantin factory. Oral history interview with Dwight Lanmon by Catherine Whalen and Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, August 5, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:39.

Dwight Lanmon: The other thing we tried to do, which I did not point out is there was one class of paperweights, which we called the lizards, and those paperweights are, for me, the highest technical achievement of paperweight making. These are the lifelike lizards with flowers and flowering bushes and so forth, encased in glass. They’re all very big. Nobody knew who made them, it was always thought it was one of the big three factories, and I just thought that was not the case, but what we tried to do was to get every known example for the show, and that was the only category in the show where we tried to get every example, and every one of them was a technical masterpiece. And if you, like lizards they’re interesting aesthetically, and if you don’t like lizards you’d probably hate them, but I felt that they were technically an achievement that was beyond what any other paperweight maker had made. And finally working with Tim Clark after the show, and Tim was the paperweight expert at Sotheby’s, he and I met in Paris [France] as I was returning the weights from the show, and we went to the Musée des Arts et Métiers, which is, I don’t know if you know the museum if you haven’t been there put it on your list, it’s an amazing place. The Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris. And their collection was to document manufacture, and so they received gifts from paperweight makers in the 19th century, and so these are well documented weights that we know exactly what they were called, who made them, when they were made and so forth. But I found on one of the shelves a snake. Just a lampwork snake, with a facet cutting on the body. And it was clear that it was the same maker who made the lizards, which also many of them have facet-cut bodies. But this was not encased in a paperweight, and looking at their records I realized it was the Cristallerie de Pantin that made the snake, and so that documented all the rest of them, and so I was finally able to put to rest who made them, and I published that in the Paperweight Collectors Association Bulletin.