Of Shoes and Ships and Sealing Wax, with Kay Collier

Curious Objects guest Kay Collier, who is the owner of Kathryn Hastings and Company, purveyor of fine antique and modern wax seals, has always been a letter writer. You can thank her grandmother for encouraging the habit. Every week when she was a child Collier would receive a card with a piece of bubblegum and a dollar bill, and would send mail back. When she was nineteen Collier took a trip to Europe with her sister. Visiting the Amatruda papery on the Amalfi Coast in Italy, one of the oldest paper manufactories in Europe, her heart lit upon a wax seal. “You just have an intuitive feel for an object, it calls to you and you think ‘I don’t know what this is but I have to know more, I have to touch this thing,’” she says. One thing led to another and today she is the owner of some five hundred seals: wheel seals, case seals, rotating seals, fobs made to be worn with pocket watches by Victorian gents. Each boasts a beautiful matrice (the part of the seal that’s actually pressed into hot wax, to render a design) made from citrine, amethyst, bloodstone agate, and other semiprecious stones, with ormolu intaglios. Although wax seals date back to the Bronze Age, Collier is partial to seals from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, when designers began incorporating an array of romantics symbols. Bay leaves mean loyalty, forget-me-nots signify remembrance or true love, ships gesture to the highs and lows of the human experience. For years Collier has been on the trail of a witch riding a broom and holding aloft a hammer to symbolize the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches), a 1486 German treatise on demonology used to charge witches with heresy. The seal is cheekily inscribed “all have their hobbies.” She’s bought three, but all, unfortunately, have been fakes. “There is a witch out there and she’ll find me when she’s ready,” Collier says. Collecting can be a lonesome pursuit, especially when your quarry is without mainstream appeal. Seeking to break out of her bubble, in 2019 Collier had the idea to make seals to sell. Today she manufactures both antique and modern seals, shifting the age-old practice into the future by using multiple colors and layers of wax, and through such innovations as submerging LEDs in the hot wax so that her seals glow from within. “We’re just a few years away from artists emerging who use seals and wax as a way to make art,” she says. That her collecting grow out a passion for letter-writing, is Ben quips, “like being a chair collector because you love sitting down so much.” But for Collier her seals are about more than usefulness, and even about more than beauty. They’re a reminder of the fleetingness of life, measured out, perhaps, by the amount of time it takes to make and send a letter to someone you care about, and the time it takes to receive one in return. “Antiques outlive us, they’re much older when we acquire them and hopefully they’ll have lives long after us. We’re stewards, and that idea of using and sharing is really important.”

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