Two Family Letter Openers

The first shows both sides of my maternal grandfather’s tarnished letter opener which was given to me by his daughter Barbara. It is about 155mm (or for those who live in the USA about six and a quarter inches) long.

It is engraved with his initials “H. E. B.” on one side. Henry Edward Braine was born in England and emigrated to Western Australia where he became prominent in the grain industry.

I have read that Dirigold resembled gold but was an alloy of copper, aluminium and other non-precious metals formulated to make bronzeware superior to other aluminium bronzeware as it tarnished less. After 1935 Dirigold was renamed Dirilyte. I have not found any good references about Dirigold.

Brown & Dureau was a business partnership formed in Victoria in 1883 to import goods into Australia. It was later sold to Australian Paper Manufactures, and is now known as Amcor.

The next image shows my father’s chrome-plated letter opener. It is about 230mm (9 inches) long and it used to have the name of insurance company on metal plate attached using the two holes. It has the words ALBION and MADE IN ENGLAND on it.

My father, Geoffrey Walter Luyer, used this paper knife to open the envelopes that came into our household. He like my mother, lived through the Great Depression in 1930s and then World War II. During both these events there were shortages of many household items.

My father would cut the envelopes on all four sides and use the resulting two sheets of paper as scrap paper for making notes etc. This was before the era of electronic devices such as mobile (cell) phones, laptops and tablets. You may have heard the terms back of envelope planning or back of envelope calculation.

When I was considering retiring from work, I did my financial calculations on the back of an envelope.

I still use the backs of envelopes as scrap paper but rarely go the extent of cutting them down the sides. I consider the practice of tearing open envelopes as uncouth.

Letter openers versus Paper Knives.

Letter openers are designed to open envelopes whereas paper knives are used to cut paper.

In the early days of mass book printing, books were printed on long reams of uncut paper and folded into a zigzag and bound on one side and cut on the other. Missed cuts were common and a paper knife was used to separate the pages. If you are reading an old book and come across pages with rough edges, then those pages were probably cut by a reader. I sometimes call a letter opener a paper knife.

John, December 2023