A series of posts on doors in popular culture would be woefully inadequate without a post on the doors … yes, The Doors! The Doors were a rock/pop/pschychedelia supergroup in the 60s and 70s, headed by Jim Morrison of LSD fame, and also including John Densmore, Ray Manzarek, and Robby Krieger. Jim Morrison famously struggled with drug abuse, and died in 1971 of a heart failure … induced by what, it isn’t known. The remaining members continued playing without him, with Robby and Ray filling in on vocals for another couple of years, before drummer John Densmore left the band and obtained an injuction against Ray and Robby using the name The Doors.

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Brass was once the predominant material for creating home hardware – it was cheap, readily available, and looked just a little bit like gold, for a touch of class. It has now mostly been replaced by steel or other alloys which technology has made more prevalent, but for those of us who love the mystery, lure and romance of anything old, brass is still a big part of our lives. From rings, to ornaments, to door hardware … if you want to look after your brass items, you will need to know specifically how to clean brass. That’s where the stark impersonality of modern technology actually comes in handy – we are able to bring this handy reference guide to the convenience of your home computer!

Be Careful!
For Lacquered Brass
For Unlacquered Brass
Maintaining Your Brass
Especially for Door Furniture

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A terrible tale of door knob abuse from the heart of Missisippi (when will they learn?!!), published here.

Charlotte Wolff had a bit of a security habit – a near obsession with having locks and deadbolts on all of her doors, something that can be attributed to the horror movie industry! If they were smart, the security and horror movie industry would have all kinds of product placements and partnerships going :-).

She locked herself in the laundry one night, and found that the only way she could think of to get out was to beat her poor doorknob to death with a hammer … ;-)

We nearly cried!

Photo credits: broken knob by vjsuperlight

Since the internet doesn’t allow the luxury of conveying tone of voice (yet!), can I just warn everybody that this blog post has a sarcasm level of 4.5 stars!

So it seems that one of our contemporaries (another door furniture expert – in this instance a specialist in knockers), has hit the jackpot! He has managed to get himself out of the door furniture business forever, as he had the good fortune (by dint of his ‘esteemed’ name), to be picked by a West African princess to be her legal guardian, and also the guardian of all of her money. It is a beautifully romantic story of hardship, betrayal, and love at first seeing-of-someone’s name… you’ll have to read the entire saga* to fully appreciate how gorgeous it is, but here I’ll give you the blurb to this modern epic!

Gilbert Murray is a door furniture expert who lives in Lincolnshire, in England, and he sells and maintains door knobs, door knockers, letter boxes and bells. He refurbishes people’s antiques for them, and also sells new reproductions of antiques. He sounds just like us, if only we could all have his luck to have found a beautiful African princess!

Princess Moreen Kabba, from Sierra Leone, contacted him because her dear father was poisoned by his business associates, because they hoped to steal his fortune - $9 million dollars, to be precise. That’s US, not Sierra Leone dollars! She had to move to Cote d’Ivoire in fear of her life, and now is trying to fulfill her father’s dying wish that she should get a good education in a Western country. In fact, she is so intent that his dying wish be carried out that she was willing to give a Westerner that could help her 15% of the $9 million booty – that’s around $1.35 million, if we aren’t mistaken …

But Gilbert and Moreen also had the good fortune to fall in love as they were making the arrangements (fraught with bureaucracy and paperwork hassles as they were) to transfer the money into Gilbert’s account. They faced a lot more danger and distress though – it was not all plain sailing for them. There were greedy lawyers trying to get they slimy mitts on large chunks of it, and horrible bureaucrats.

Like all really good love stories though, Gilberts and Moreen’s has a surprise ending … which you will have to read through some of the correspondence to get to!

Can I just mention that amid all of the innuendoes about knockers, especially African princesses’ knockers, and how enthralled Gilbert Murray is by them, we believe one of the highlights of the sequence is the inclusion of the traditional door furniture specialists’ curse – “May your bell ends hurt every time you touch them, and may your knobs drop off from lack of use!”

*http://www.scambuster419.co.uk/doorfurniture.htm

Photo credits: Scambuster419