Don't Burn Your Hands: The History of a Potholder

Some objects announce themselves. They arrive with hallmarks, with maker’s stamps pressed into brass, with palette-shaped labels that promise, however falsely, a name.This is not one of those objects.It is “just” a potholder.The PotholderIt is a square of quilted cotton, a scant 5-1/2 inches on a side, bound in gold bias interfacing gone soft with age, with a small barely frayed loop at one corner for hanging. Gray letters, stamped in a diagonal band across its face, still declare, faintly but legibly: Don’t burn your hands. BURN OUR Quality Coal and Fuel Oil. KOENIG COAL & SUPPLY CO. 1486 Gratiot Ave. Order Department. All Yards. WO 1-1584 No museum will ever accession this object. It is not old enough to be a proper antique, not distinctive enough to be delightfully quaint — barely, if judged scrupulously, old enough to be called a collectible at all. It occupies a strange, unglamorous middle ground: too young for reverence, too ordinary for nostalgia, and yet somehow still here.It…