Out of the rubble, pt. 1

Paul Vincent

Somewhere in the West Midlands is a start-up. Not your usual new-fangled start-up, this, but rather one which specialises in making old-fangled horn buttons — and, in so doing, becoming the first horn button-maker founded in the Midlands for a good couple of centuries.


Mind-boggling are the efforts needed to start making buttons: reassembling aeons-old button-making contraptions, and Yellow Paging workers and technicians still active and learned in button-making ways, to skim but the surface. Best leave them to it for now.

Other words

T-shirt or not t-shirt
What’s funny — and not funny-ha-ha so much as funny-huh — about the t-shirt here at the workshop is that, well, it isn’t really a t-shirt at all. Or rather,... More
Herdwick on the grapevine
It wouldn’t be so bad if they weren’t so nice. But then, if they weren’t so nice, it wouldn’t be so good. The pleasure-pressure paradox, that, of working alongside acquaintances... More
Factory record
Consider the bumblebee. A ludicrous little fella: oblivious entirely to the impossibility of his fuzzy and rotund form being able to fly. One might wonder, if he stopped to think... More