About this archive
Schreiber-Neffen.com is a slowly growing reference archive rather than a news site. Material is added when a volume has been photographed in full, described and checked against the surviving company numbering, which means the collection expands in irregular steps rather than on a schedule.
The work proceeds in a fixed order. A pattern book or catalogue is first collated and its plates counted, because volumes were rebound and pages were removed over the decades and gaps have to be recorded before anything else. The plates are then photographed page by page at a resolution that keeps the hand-colouring and the pencilled annotations legible. Finally each drawing is matched to the mould or pattern number written beside it, so that a shape can be traced from the drawing to the printed sales catalogue in which it later appeared.
Recent additions have concentrated on the illustrated sales catalogues of pressed and lighting glass, which are the most heavily used part of the collection, and on the loose supplementary plates that were issued to agents between editions. Corrections are as welcome as new material: a misread mould number or a misdated plate propagates quickly through any catalogue of this kind, and the descriptions here are revised whenever better evidence appears.
What gets added, and why
Priority goes to volumes that unlock other volumes. A pattern book that carries mould numbers used across several catalogue editions is worth photographing before an isolated album of loose plates, because once its numbering is transcribed, dozens of otherwise anonymous drawings elsewhere acquire a date and a place in the sequence.
Everything published here is treated as provisional. Descriptions are revised as more of the numbering becomes legible, and pages that were photographed early are sometimes rephotographed when better lighting shows an annotation that was previously invisible. Where a plate is missing from a volume, the gap is stated rather than quietly closed up.