More historical wallet research

As I may have indicated before, there has never been an entry for “Wallet” in printed encyclopedias.  I’ve looked in ALL sorts of encyclopedias from all sorts of dates (as far back as 1911).  It seems that the wallet has always just been in people’s conciousness and we’ve never thought to really look at it before.  It seems to me so silly that a wallet, these days, is considered just a cheap bi-fold.  Where is the soul, the story in that?

Throughout the process of designing wallets and thinking about how a wallet can be optimized for a given man and what sorts of design decisions can be made, I’ve often found myself asking, “What did wallets look like before credit cards and paper currency?”  There is information out there about historical wallets but it requires a bit of creativity in order to find it.  You don’t just type “wallet history” into Google or in an encyclopedia or even in an article database.  I’m still learning, myself, how to best mine this rare ore of information from the mountains of our collected and printed knowledge but here are some more recent finds that I have made that I will be using to update Wikipedia’s “Wallet” article in the coming days:

Wallet usage in ancient times

The classicist, A.Y. Campbell, set out to answer the question, “What, in ancient literature, are the uses of a wallet?”  He deduced, as a Theocritean scholar, that “the wallet was the poor man’s portable larder; or, poverty apart, it was a thing that you stocked with provisions.”  He found that sometimes a man may be eating out of it directly but the most characteristic references allude to its being “replenished as a store”.

Wallet usage in the Renaissance

As metals became increasingly used as currencies, it seems that wallets took shape to include these coins, and in some cases, statements of accounts.

In recounting the life of the Elizabethan merchant, John Frampton, Lawrence C. Wroth describes the merchant as, “a young English-man of twenty-five years, decently dressed, …, wearing a sword, and carrying fixed to his belt something he called a ‘bowgett’ [or budget], that is, a leathern pouch or wallet in which he carried his cash, his book of accounts, and small articles of daily necessity”

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It is my goal to have the most comprehensive collection of historical wallet information available and it will be a fun side project that I’m almost certain will be informing my sense of design as the company moves forward.