Vintage Memorabilia - stealing samples
 

A friend of mine has this interesting blog about various odd history items. Today's caught my attention, as it involves an old custom of cutting pieces off of historical items as souvenirs. I had never heard of this, but if you ever see an extremely old piece of furniture at an antique store, that is missing lots of hand-cut chips, perhaps it belonged to someone famous:

Shakespeare's Chair victimized by Jefferson and Adams as tourists

That was a cool write up, thanks for posting that. It's also interesting that they say "according to the custom".......where are those chips? :D They're probably worth a fortune.......

Sincerely, Clayton

When my mom was a growing up in London in the '30's they used to take school field trips to Stonehenge, where they were handed a hammer and chisel and told to chip off a souvenir. Guess it was a pretty common practice back then to deface anything in search of a momento.

My pleasure. I went to school with the author - very studious and interesting guy.

I wonder - as you say, those chips have to be somewhere. Same thing with the Stonehenge chips the other poster mentioned.

Oh man , I was there, (Stonehenge) in 1976. All broken bottles and grafiti spray painted on the rocks. Now I hear it is cleaned up and protected, at least I hope so. Aloha, Dave.