Gay LaCleire Taylor and Bob Banford talk about Victor Trabucco. his innovations, and his sharing of crystal glass with Bob Banford. Oral history interview with Gay LeCleire Taylor by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, March 9, 2018, Bard Graduate Center. Oral history interview with Bob Banford by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, December 19, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 01:53.

Time stamp: 00:00
Clip 1: Glass historian Gay LeCleire Taylor discusses Victor Trabucco’s removal of the seam in paperweights. Clip length: 01:23.

Gay LeCleire Taylor: All of these paperweight collectors would spend thousands and thousands of dollars—ten thousand, fifteen thousand, twenty thousand dollars—on an antique weight and accept bubbles in it, but they wouldn’t accept it from the contemporary artists. The contemporary artist’s work had to be totally clean of everything. So it really, really challenged them into overcoming those kinds of problems. And that Victor Trabucco, he was one of the ones that—he made, makes big weights, I mean big weights, and he’s the one that does the buffalo for the Buffalo Bills—he then figured out when he was doing these two huge compound layers that if he got the seam, when—you know, sometimes in Paul’s work you can see this little high layer, this little layer where the two facets come together, he figured if he curved the edge on the outside where that seam kind of joins, so it sort of folds itself over it—you lose it. And he was the one that really got rid of the line, this tiny, little mirror-y like line, by curving the edges down and he’s the one that perfected that. So once one person really made that breakthrough, the others sort of incorporated some of that in their work.

Time stamp: 01:26
Clip 2: Bob Banford discusses buying crystal with Victor Trabucco. Clip length: 00:26.

Bob Banford: Let’s see. Victor Trabucco, I’ve been friends with him since he first started getting involved in paperweights. We had a couple business deals we used to buy crystal glass together, we’d buy a whole melt of crystal to make our paperweights out of. And he was my, my partner when we, when we, when we did that.