The Experiment

This irregular button is one of my Bakelite conundrums—a real bizarro-of-a-button. At a glance, the color is a deep brown with unevenly dispersed swirls of gold, whereas the lady who sold me this button called it the darkest rootbeer button she'd ever seen. Looking at it closely, I'd also classify the Bakelite as a rootbeer, although it's so uncustomarily dark that I might even call this button an example of molasses Bakelite. Meanwhile, look at the design on this thing. I see a shark's fin etched with a row of ten lines and a cluster of bubbled periods. Indeed, this button almost looks like an experiment that slipped out of the factory and made it into the material world back in the mid-1930's.

-Sherbert McGee