(a not wholly unrelated topic for this house)Everyone has them, it has taken me much longer than it ought to figure out what I really like: old tools. Specifically, pre-1950 metal or wood tools. Some people collect baseball cards or shoes, others collect cars or guns (the latter are really cool but out of my budget). I get innate pleasure out of finding a pair of ‘vintage’ forged steel tin snips, or wrenches built in that elegant curve which was the answer to confined working spaces before weird ratchets came along. I can’t tell you the names and I certainly can’t, to my shame, use many of those old tools; but their relationship of form and function hit a highpoint around 1900 that we have since fallen away from, to our detriment. A carpenter’s square could just be a square edge, the level and handle doesn’t need to have an added curved fillip, it doesn’t do anything functionally, but why not make it beautiful? When a culture decrees that even the utilitarian should be elegant, there is something going right. When it decrees that the utilitarian ought to look utilitarian, and we ought to be proud of that….well….