A short time ago I put up a little bit of info on Instagram about Lane's Signature and Components groups by Paul McCobb now here's the rest of the info. McCobb's work for Lane, produced between 1961 and 1965 was comprised of three group: Delineator , Signature , and Components . Signature and Components pieces have proven to be relatively hard to come by so far (which is not to say that Delineator pieces are exactly littering the planet, but they are far easier to obtain than their cousins). Lane pieces (at least the tables) are easy to understand as they're typically marked with not only the design group number but they also have a "serial number" right below the design number, which is actually the production date written in reverse, so, once you know what you're looking for the tables are easy to identify. And that nicely brings us right around to the topic of this article which is a quick and dirty primer on how to identify Paul McCobb's des
Over the past few years I have become increasingly aware of the necessity for context in research. At the very beginning of this project I was so narrowly focussed on getting information about Paul McCobb that I ignored anything else that wasn’t about McCobb. For instance, when I scanned the 1962 Lane catalog I entirely ignored the rest of it, only scanning those pages which dealt directly with Paul McCobb’s work. I later regretted this decision but there was really nothing to do about it as the catalog was in California and I wasn’t. Fortunately life has conspired to make it so that I can finally right this egregious oversight, Gerard O’Brien of Reform Gallery (the fellow who has the Lane catalog) having decided to show select pieces from his Paul McCobb collection at the upcoming Los Angeles Antiques and Los Angeles Modernism shows at the Barker Hanger this April has called me in to work with him co-producing these Paul McCobb retrospectives, which means that once again I find
Have you ever seen the "Paul McCobb" World Globes? The ones frequently attributed to Directional? The ones with the very nice curved brass frames and a Replogle globe? They really are rather gorgeous, aren't they? There's only one problem, it seems highly unlikely that they were actually designed by Paul McCobb. Over the past year I have scoured books, newspapers, industry periodicals, furniture catalogs, library collections, etc, traveling around the country where necessary, gathering data about Paul McCobb's work. I have 100's of hours invested in this research. I now have a database containing several thousands of articles from 1936 to 1969 weighing in at a little over 3 gigs of data. One thing I have not found over the past year's research is a single mention of Paul McCobb ever having designed a Globe. With this much information you would think that I might have found some reference, somewhere, anywhere, but as best I can determine there is nothing t
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