Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses the origins of the paperweight and the history of the Paperweight Weekend. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:57.

Gay LeCleire Taylor: Well, the form of a paperweight is from about 1845. In Italy, it first starts with millefiori canes and cane design work inside. The French pick it up, Baccarat, Saint Louis, become the main companies for making paperweights and this—people are learning to read and write—they’re using sealing wax, their desks are becoming almost decorated with these types of forms where the pen nibs and something and the paperweight holds the things so they were functional objects sold to stationary stores and they’re—spreads to England, the American companies see the Crystal Palace exhibition. They see the French paperweights and the New England Glass Company and the Boston and Sandwich glass companies start making paperweights in America as sold to stationery stores. And then in the town of Millville, where my museum was, in the 1880s workers on their own time and their lunch time or at the end of the day develop their own style of paperweight, which was totally for gifts, totally as an artistic design that they could do and make a little money also and sell. So if you saw any book on paperweights, there would still be a chapter on Millville, New Jersey besides, you know, Baccarat, Saint Louis or the French companies. And so, out of that came this sort of idea of these lampwork flamework artists that were starting out to make paperweights, and making small little design in the weights, and a way to support them was to have a weekend because there were collectors out there collecting the French weights, and there was an organization called the Paperweight Collectors Association, which still exists today. I’m on the review committee for their publication, they do a scholarly publication every year, and they would have conventions but focus on French weights and we were more interested in American weights and encouraging young artists like a young Paul Stankard in the early seventies or other artists that were working at that time and encourage their work. So we started a weekend that was geared more toward American paperweights and the young artists, not to the French weights that were being talked about. And so it evolved to every other year, we would have a paperweight weekend and then the other main organization would have theirs on the other times and Paul Hollister who’d written one of the main early books on paperweights, really the one—the encyclopedia, he would come down, authors would come down. We would learn about weights and talk about weights and now we’re going on to—the first one was in 1975 and then we’re still having one this year, you know, so it keeps on going.