@kdfrawg At least they kept the businesses going & weren’t just asset stripping.
// @streakmachine
@matigo It’s still happening. If I click on the anchor, I can see the whole conversation, but the conversation view only shows part of it.
Here’s one:
https://10centuries.org/post/141749
@streakmachine It’s a kind of deception. I say kind of, because they’re not actually lying about it. If you look at the small print on the web sites, the information is there, but they’d just prefer you to see them as a traditional small specialist company.
@streakmachine No, and they really go out of their way to make it look as if nothing has changed.
Art suppliers like to have historical sounding names and to associate themselves with artists & artisans of the past. It’s disappointing how many of them actually turn out to have been bought out by some international conglomerate and now belong to the artistic equivalent of Nestlé.
In some ways it shouldn’t matter if they carry on producing good quality materials, especially if the smaller company wouldn’t have survived, but it seems a tad misleading that the marketing still presents the image of a small artisanal company long after that stops being at all true.
eg Winsor & Newton, Arches, Conté are all owned by the same company, whose parent company is Swedish.
I’m now sitting indecisively in the middle of an embarrassingly large stash of different printmaking papers.
@JeremyCherfas So did I — in the 80s. Maybe I’ll try it again some grey December day when it’s not likely to be busy.
// @kdfrawg
@kdfrawg I think it was there originally because there was the water supply. As with lots of places, when they first opened up, it was really interesting. Then they wanted more, and it all got a bit out of hand.
@kdfrawg It’s still there, but almost lost behind the dinosaurs.
@kdfrawg That could very well be an issue. There’s a “tourist attraction” in Cheddar that, as well as a tour of some caves, includes a tiny paper making place, where you watch people shaking the trays of fibres and tipping sheets out of them, then stacking them between layers of felt to press. I haven’t been for years, because it all gets way too crowded, but I loved watching.