Clip 1: Paul Hollister talks about paperweight maker Charles Kaziun’s secrecy and Paul Stankard’s 1986 Flameworking Workshop. Paul Hollister Recording, January 11, 1987. Paul Hollister Lecture on Glass America 1987,  January 11, 1987 (Rakow title: Talk on Studio [sound recording] / with Paul M. Hollister, BIB ID: 168493) Clip length: 02:08.

Paul Hollister (PH): Charles Kaziun, the great pioneer American paperweight maker, began making weights about 1939, but he says they were very crude and he didn’t get an idea what a good paperweight ought to look like until he saw Mrs. [Evangeline] Bergstrom’s book [Old Glass Paperweights: Their Art, Construction, and Distinguishing Features.] in 1940, which was privately printed and then later went to Crown Publishers. Charlie has been making weights ever since, in total secrecy, in his basement. And that this is, of course, is lampworking. He’s been making—about the time the studio glass movement came along, Francis Whittemore was beginning to make paperweights, but Paul Stankard is the first, and only American or European, to challenge Kaziun’s supremacy, and I must say here parenthetically that lampworking and paperweight making have always been very secretive techniques until Paul Stankard came out of the closet last May was it? Or April? And gave an absolutely wild one-week demonstration with 40 people hanging over the burners making little objects—and he had vases of flowers on—fresh wildflowers on the table—this was done at Penland [Penland School of Craft, Penland, North Carolina], every morning fresh flowers, and the people that would come in about nine o’clock and start to lampwork and they left about four a.m., every day. The girls came out of the jewelry department, they came out of the ceramics department, the men came out of the forge, and they all started to lampwork. So it is now, thanks to Paul, in the public domain, but not in Charlie Kaziun’s domain, he won’t reveal anything about it. He’s the greatest question dodger that I know.