History of Barbering - Part 1

This is a new series of episodes where we will dive into the oldest barbering textbooks and  publications available (to me) and find some nuggets of knowledge within their pages, as well as some seriously out of date information. Let's take a journey together... back in TIME!!!
Let's start with good ole A.B. Moler... 

Transcript

Bree 0:03

Welcome back to Philosophy of the Barber. Today's episode is gonna be a little bit different than anything we've done before. What we're gonna do today, I'm running solo. I don't have anybody to have a conversation with. Um, but what I wanted to do with this uh episode and segment is to dive a little bit into some of my old barber textbook collection. I probably don't know this, but I do collect old barber textbooks and books that have to do with the profession that have been published over the years. I scour the internet, I scour old bookstores around New England, um, and I try and find these things, and I've amassed, I'd say, probably four or five dozen textbooks at this point, uh, in addition to publications that relate to the barbering profession, and a few cosmetology things too. But one of the main people that I look to find books from was the publisher of the first barber textbook, A. B. Moeller, who also opened the first official Barber College in 1893. So 1893 was also the year he published the first textbook. Now I haven't been able to find one of the original 1893 textbooks, but I have been able to find ones from as early as 1900. I've also found one teeny tiny pocket-sized book called the Tonsorial Memoranda, which is uh a recipe book. It's full of like 200 recipes for barbers to use in their profession. And it was published in 1895. So that's as close as I've gotten so far. Now, with the tonsorial memoranda, it's super cool to read little excerpts to kind of bring you back to what the profession was like back in the day. Um obviously a lot has developed and changed uh since the Industrial Revolution, uh electricity being introduced, uh different diseases and everything that we've dealt with over the decades. Um, you know, in the early days they dealt a lot more with uh syphilis and smallpox and a lot of things like that that we don't have to deal with today, thankfully. But so you kind of have to put yourself in that mind space when looking at these types of materials because otherwise there's a lot of things that we might raise an eyebrow to, or you're gonna have to shake your head at. Or even just like reading the language. I feel I feel like sometimes uh if you go far enough back, sometimes we had higher expectations of the basic necessities than we have today, like English and vocabulary. So what I'm gonna do is uh read some things from a handful of books that I pulled off the shelf, and we'll we're gonna find out some uh interesting things and compare them to like when they were published and what the thoughts were at the time, and I'd I just find this stuff interesting, so I'm gonna share it with you. So the first thing I'd like to read is uh the preface from the Tonsorial Memoranda. It says, A good formula book is a necessity in all well-regulated barbershops. It is not necessary to enter a lengthy excuse for the publication of this book, nor to point out its salient points. We believe it will speak for itself and is offered to the barbers of America in full confidence that it will prove acceptable and valuable, providing the most complete collection of its kind heretofore offered for supplying their particular wants. Throughout the work, we have tried to use English expressions and terms avoiding the use of apothecaries, symbols, and Latin terms. The medical prescriptions, as well as the miscellaneous recipes, have been selected with considerable care and will be found useful and reliable, for which they are recommended, and have been added with the hope that they will prove of some value to the patrons of this work. Blank pages have been placed through the book as a convenient and safe place for writing formulas that may want to be preserved. The publisher, New Paris, Ohio, 1895. So it mentions uh prescriptions as well as miscellaneous uh recipes, and they are not lying. Uh I will I will read you a quick contents of the 200 various recipes that are in this. Uh part one toilet articles, bayrum, bay rum aftershave, uh face powders, face enamels, mustache wax, stick pomade, hair pomade, hair dyes, whisker dyes, sea foam, liquid shampoo, shampoo paste, hair tonics, hair restoratives, brilliantines, bandolines, cosmetics, baldness, sunburn, tan, razor paste, bleaching sponges, toilet jelly, camphor ice, cold cream, rosaline, uh, lip salve, nail polish, satchet powders, perfumes, colognes, tooth powders, tooth soaps, liquid, dentifrice, toothpaste, caucus, wrinkle lotion, shaving paste, shaving soap, hair curling liquids, blondine, dandruff, rose water, freckles, hair oils, and then you have medicinal preparations for part two. Blackheads, pimples, barbers itch, uh scald head, nerve tonics, linaments, asthma, ointments, rheumatism, diarrhea, alcoholism, kidneys, ague, gonorrhea, cough balsams, tonic bitters. Something I can't even begin to pronounce that has two R's and an H. Uh, corn salves, worm syrup, frostbite, liver hives, oh, excuse me, liver, comma hives, uh, toothache, blood salves, eye worm, pile ointments, removing warts, burns, skulls, itch, ingrown toenails. I am so glad that we don't deal with these as barbers today. Let me just put that out there. Uh miscellaneous stuff in part three with inks, cleaning wallpaper, uh cleaning brass and silver, root beer, preserving sweet cider, champagne cider, chewing gum, baking powder, insect powder, bed bug poison, not to back. How to get fish to take the hook, ink eraser, removing grease spots, furniture polish, gilding brass, gilding silver, easter dyes, cement, mothballs, poison fly paper, sticky fly paper, extermination ants, freezing salts, starch gloss, washing fluid, in indelible ink, uh bicycle tire cement, deodorizing cisterns, uh liquid fire extinguisher, tanning skins for mats and robes, colored uh tableau lights. It it goes on and on. And I mean, it sounds like a lot of those things might have been very useful if you happened to be a barber in a town that didn't have an apothecary or a drugstore or a a general store, even. And definitely uh gives you enough information to start up your own shop basically anywhere that you have four walls and a roof, which is a super cool thing for me to find that is in like pristine condition. It is a phenomenal, sturdy book that is easily read today. The second thing I want to read is uh it's a little more uh traditionally challenging. So, alright. I don't know how many barber schools covered this, but like the history of singing as uh a tool of the trade in barbering, which I suppose technically we are still able to do as barbers. Like, correct me if I'm wrong, different states have different laws, but at least in New Hampshire it's understood that technically if we wanted to singe, we could. But I have two publications here that are at odds. One is The Barber's Manual by A. B. Moeller, published in 1911. And next to it I have a book called The Progressive Barber, published by a Dr. Arnold Drexel, MD from Milwaukee, Wisconsin. This was published in 1909. So a couple years before this iteration of the Barber's Manual. Now, this Barber's Manual can be traced back to its forebearer, which is the Barber's Compend, or the Compend for Barbers and Beauty Specialists, um, which was also published by A.B. Moller for like a quarter of the price of the 1911 version that also covers singing. So I will read you the excerpt on singing and why we do it as barbers from the 1911 publication first. It says Singing is to promote the growth of the hair. By burning the ends after it has been cut, it closes the pores of the hair, keeping the fluid in and preventing the ends from splitting. It is one of the best remedies for falling hair and it strengthens the growth. Hair can be singed at any length. Using a singing taper or a gaslight taper in the right hand with a comb in the left, and for short hair, singe over the comb as in cut. Where the hair is long, uh singe over the fingers, the same as in cutting long hair. This work is very simple after you have learned to trim. Still, it is very important and a necessary qualification for the barber. The most pains should be taken around the crown and the forehead, as these are the parts where the hair is apt to fall out and needs the most strengthening. In singing the back of the neck, use the comb above the blaze to prevent the fire from running up and catching the hair above the singer. This is the only difficult part of singing. And conversely, a couple years prior, in The Progressive Barber, written by a doctor, in the paragraph covering hair singing, it states: The method of treating the hair after being cut by singing with the idea of sealing up the ends to prevent the escape of nutrition that should be saved is a wrong one. Singing has absolutely no value whatsoever as a stimulant to make the hair grow, and should rather be considered as a detriment to them. By singing, the hair stumps are sealed up, which in itself is a worthless procedure, but they are at the same time damaged by the heat to about an inch or even more. In addition, for a pecuniary standpoint only is cinching of value. Otherwise, this practice should be condemned. So I feel like this is probably where the profession has fallen victim to something that's very common in professions that have been around a long time. And that is tradition. We see it a lot in. We'll use um firefighting to be uh a basic example, where you will have uh first responders favor equipment that is obsolete or subpar for the task, um, such as in the case of helmets in certain instances where uh a new and better piece of equipment has been developed, but from a traditions standpoint, uh they will apt to go towards the old version more so. And I don't know, I'm sure part of it is a having pride in your history of your profession thing, but it also kind of develops into a less productive pride thing, where you might actually be putting yourself or someone else at risk by not having the most well-developed piece of equipment for the job. No, that's obviously everybody's choice, but I think in this case when it comes to singing and barbers, I still found until I think the 1950s in my collection that singing was still like actively taught for the purpose of sealing up the ends of the hair. Which that's like 40 years, like 45 years roughly, that after this the Progressive Barber publication came out. And don't get me wrong, back then the word did not spread quickly. Like we didn't have the internet, we didn't, like phones were still like not common. So I I will give a buffer for uh we'll say we'll say ten years. Ten years is a buffer for like, alright, get the word spread throughout the entire country. We were still, you know, adding states and stuff by this point, like the United States that we uh know as today was not the United States of back then. So, understanding that. But it's still like it was so heavily still put into publications for such a long time that I think that's a probably a failure on our part uh as a profession. So that being said, um let's move on to uh we'll go with a 1906 version of A.B. Moeller's publication. Now this one is kind of fun because this is, I think, the earliest version of his books that I could find that had pictures. And you can really see the obviously you can't see because this is a podcast, but um you end up being able to see the the quality of his publications really improve over time, and not a lot of time. This is like every few years he's putting out a new uh more revised, better publication. So, like the earliest ones I have, as I said earlier, are the barber's compend. And to describe it to you, it is it's a paperback, and it's about five inches by four inches. So it's like a pocket-sized book, and it's about a quarter inch thick. So there's not a lot here, it's pretty bare bones, and it's it's it focuses on uh, as it says in the title page, it's a complete compend of diseases of the scalp and face, their appearance, causes, diagnoses, and treatment, medicated and non-medicated baths, and numerous formulae for all the various tonsorial preparations. So that's what it focuses on. This is not one for um techniques, this is not a book for instruction of the student learning to be a barber. This is actually um something that the industry kind of called for that needed to be made at the time, as I'll read, um, he explains in the preface why this book even exists. So this is published in 1900. It says at the request of a number of barbers who are interested in the advancement of their profession, feel that a knowledge of the various diseases and afflictions of the face and scalp is almost a necessity. Not only that they may serve their patrons more intelligently, but also as a means of protection to themselves, cleanliness and disinfection of tools is being demanded not only by the public, but in some states by the Board of Health. The required knowledge being unattainable from any one work extent, the author of this little volume was induced to embody some of the results of his experience and study in such form as to be comprehendable, comprehensible, without a special education or frequent recourse to a dictionary. Technical terms have been avoided whenever possible, and when their use was compulsatory, compulsory, uh their meaning has been clearly explained. While the appearance, cause, symptoms, and treatment of all the afflictions of the scalp and face, except such as are rare or foreign to this country, are given, it is not intended that this book shall take the place of a physician. In some diseases, such as smallpox and scarlet fever, it is not deemed necessary to give the treatment, as that is outside the province of this treatise. The formulae that are not the result of the author's experience are taken from the works of eminent specialists and will be found reliable and up to date. So, in essence, I mean this is where the whole English standards thing comes in, going. Alright, there are some words in there that there are plenty of professionals I know in the industry that wouldn't necessarily know. I myself have a hard time reading them, but I also don't have a very good uh reading comprehension. So, as it says in there, you know, the barber's compend was published because the the public and specifically the professionals in the industry felt as though there was a need for this knowledge to be shared. So this was this was definitely for professionals, not for students, but not that long after, as early as uh six years later, 1906, they were incorporating that into a textbook that barbers were learning from in the college. So going back to the 1906 publication, um this was really a textbook that he used to teach the barber students at his college. And in the preface it says, in the pages following, it has been my intention to illustrate and present a set of rules that will at all times be a guide, both while learning and after completing the trades. I have tried to present a system thorough and simple, illustrating in detail the requirements for the real artist and the training necessary to familiarize themselves them with the technical details of the profession. By reason of my eight years constant teaching and my 15 years of service in the work, I feel that no one has had a better opportunity to practice and study the work that I now lay before you. I hope to make this book of more than ordinary service, and by following its instructions closely, combined with the advantages our colleges offer, there is no chance for failures. So, I mean, I have to say I am thoroughly grateful that um Mr. Muller finally decided to do this, though if you really look at the timeline of how much experience he has had at this point, compared to a lot of you know people in the industry, especially today, people just generally live longer. Um it's not a ton. I mean, now that I think about it, I mean, my barber instructors, uh who also own their own school, they have more experience now than he than he did when he wrote this book. Like, at this point, he has eight years of teaching experience and 15 years in it as a barber. They've got I think 11 years uh teaching and closer to 20-something, twenty-ish plus for being in the profession. So for it for for him to to write this book at at say a young age in the profession is pretty impressive in my eyes, especially since this isn't his first version of a publication. It's probably his third or fourth at this point. So, kind of putting that in context for today, given the fact that to my knowledge, there is only one barber textbook that is published today, and that is by Milady. Yeah. Comment, correct me if I'm wrong, but that's the only one that I am aware of. So, to be the first, first and best dressed, definitely lays the foundation for building up for the future. Speaking of the future, um, I really want to cover the first part of this 1906 publication because I think it still applies today, and we can we can reap some some nuggets of knowledge from some timeless knowledge from Mr. Muller. So in part one of Physical and Mental Requirements of the Barber, it says, In considering the idea of becoming a barber, the first question that presents itself is, what are the requirements necessary in order to ensure success after laboring at this work? Will my nervous system permit of handling the razor? Will the nature of work I have done in the past bar me from this profession? Are my mental propensities such that they will allow me to wait upon others with patience and with solitude for their welfare? Solicitude, excuse me. It's not a word I've really seen very often. Uh the question is often asked by those preparing to take up the work, will I make a barber? There is but one answer to this, and that is have you patience and energy to practice diligently at the work until you have thoroughly mastered it, providing you have at your disposal the opportunity for constant practice and the assistance of skillful skillful instructors. There is no part of the barber trade that is impossible for anyone with ordinary ability. No man is too nervous, we're gonna insert in there, or woman, is too nervous to take up this trade as it is part of your education, while a student to overcome your nervous temperament. Proper practice, of which we shall give to give you a description in the following pages, is sure to overcome all disadvantages in this line. But we would advise that no person take up this work who has not first made up his mind to become a public servant, to be patient and painstaking with customers, and to be always pleasant and agreeable. This is not a work that requires any special adaptation, but like every other trade that is mechanical, it is one that requires practice. Some will tell you that you never can become a barber if you are not gifted with particular talents. But it has been demonstrated that the most awkward beginners often make the most graceful graduates. Grace and ease of motion are acquired by the continued using of certain muscles. Good taste has much to do with proper hair cutting, and the different styles of this work must necessarily be a study. No man is naturally gifted with ability to trim hair gracefully, and each one must practice and study this work alike. While some are more apt and painstaking than others, everyone can follow examples and directions laid down by instructors. Thus, you see, no person of sound mind and ordinary ability need exclude themselves from this trade if they are willing to apply themselves to the work. Carelessness has no place in barber business, and no one will succeed either in business for himself or as a journeyman who is not both careful with his own appearance as well as that of his shop. And I think that every word of that still rings true today. As my instructor said, it's a learned trade. So if you're willing to learn, you'll get there. Thank you so much for listening to this short and different episode. Uh feel free to leave comments with your feedback if you want to hear more of these shorter, uh more history-focused format stuff when I grab a handful of books from my shelf and we can dive into different decades of where barbering has been and where we are today. Let me know. Uh, find me on Instagram at PhilofTheBarber. You can send me an email at breezypeters at gmail.com. Or uh you can also find an episode on YouTube, and I might actually be able to put some pictures into a video, and you can see these volumes that I've collected. Have a good night, and we'll see you next time.