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Saturday, March 14, 2009

Etruscan Salad Fork Length Mystery

Here is a question we received as a comment to another post regarding Gorham Etruscan pieces. We've copied it here to gain more attention in the hope that someone has an answer. I don't.


Hi, I have recently listed a set of 4 Gorham Etruscan salad forks on ebay. It has been brought to my attention by a potential buyer that he has 7 salad forks that are different and he has been looking for one to match the other 7 he has. Low and behold! I seem to have the 8th fork. It is just a hair shorter than the others, a wee bit narrower and has beveled sides just before the stem. He states Replacement.com has said there is no difference in the Gorham Etruscan salad forks. Have you ever heard of or seen such a difference? Is this possibly not a salad fork? I have a photo I will email you showing the difference. Thanks so much, I appreciate your input.


This is the picture that was emailed. The fork on the right is the one is question


If you have any ideas, please post a comment or email us.

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2 comments:

Silver Jim said...

To the reader who left an inappropiate comment that we rejected:

Be aware of copyright laws.

Deborah said...

Just last night (in 2022) we discovered that our Gorham Buttercup forks are badged with a “M” on 6 of them and a “H” on two of them. Our quick search told us that “M” stands for the heaviest weight (massive) and “H” stands for 4th heaviest (heavy). Weird thing #1: the massive ones weigh 51.5 grams…the heavy ones weigh 54.0 grams. Therefore the heavy and massive designation does not seem to hold. Weird thing #2…after owning these for ~5 years, the two heavy ones are just a little different in length (like maybe 1/16”), a little wider at the shoulder with a little more robust shape overall in that area, and the curvatures throughout the forks are different…they don’t stack exactly as the 6 massive ones. We can only ascertain that they are all 1899-1912, and the forks and knives have the same monograms and styles, so it would be assumed that they were purchased at the same time. We also thought that it could be production run differences from one month to the next, inventory shipped to different retailers, wedding gifts purchased at different shops? I wish I knew more. However the differences noted in the original post no longer surprise me. They are nuanced variations. You would never see it on a set table but now that I know it bothers my OCD brain.