Victor Trabucco speaks about Dwight Lanmon consulting with him on antique paperweight-making techniques and Lanmon’s discovery of Pantin as the maker of lizard paperweights. Oral history interview with Victor Trabucco by Barb Elam, conducted via telephone, September 16, 2019, Bard Graduate Center. Clip length: 02:41.

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Clip 1: Victor Trabucco speaks about Dwight Lanmon consulting with him about antique paperweight-making techniques. Clip length: 01:39.

Victor Trabucco: I’ll tell you that my opinion on some of the things that Paul Jokelson would say and state—and I think this was true of all the paperweight experts, let’s say, they had some misconceptions of how things were really done. And what was advanced, and what wasn’t. I remember Dwight Lanmon, who was a big supporter of form, and what we did. And he came to my studio and spent a day here with me, and he was going through a lot of images of the antique paperweights, and he was asking me what was, you know, great accomplishments and what wasn’t. And I went item for item, I went through and I pointed out the different techniques. And in fact that he was so impressed with what I had told him, he felt armed enough that when he gave his next speech at one of the PCA meetings—Paperwork Collectors Association meetings, that he felt as though the work that was being done today was the second golden age of paperweight making. And at that point, it was always just the French antique weights. So we were kind of second-class citizens. So he finally, after pointing out some of the techniques, at some of the things that we’ve done, how much we had pushed the techniques and advancement of that stuff, the process, and so he felt confident with the information that I gave him that he could make statements like that, and he also asked me to be a technical consultant for him when he was going to write a book. Of course, he left Corning before he did that, but that was still quite a nice honor.

Time stamp: 01:42
Clip 2: Victor Trabucco talks about Dwignt Lanmon’s discovery of Pantin as the maker of lizard paperweights. Clip length: 00:58.

Victor Trabucco: And so—in fact, he’s [Dwight Lanmon] the one that actually discovered and gave credit to who made the lizard weight, because before his presence in the field, it was always known as the unknown French Factory. They didn’t know where those, those lizard weights were made. And what he did when he was in France, there was a museum and he went down through some of their collection that was, I think, in storage. And he found this snake that was carved, and you could, if you looked at the face of the snake and the face on the lizard, you could see it was done by the same hand. But the snake head was documented, that was made by Pantin and what year it was made and everything, so there was documentation of it. And from that he surmised that those weights were made at the Pantin Factory so, from that point on, that’s why they were credited with that factory. Before that, it was just called the unknown factory.