Pleasure from Polished Wood

State University of New York professor Jennifer L. Anderson demonstrates a healthy fixation with wood in her 2012 study Mahogany: The Costs of Luxury in Early America, published by Harvard University Press. But I’m sure at least one or two of us were wondering upon first handling this book, what makes this a commodity? Perhaps it was the tenacity of a few “hard-driving merchants”?

As Anderson elucidates, the two species of mahogany typically used in activities like ship-building and furniture making, were basically differentiated based on the size of their leaves: one species was shorter and the other longer. Surprisingly, this distinction seems not to have impacted the overall desirability of the wood; however, it did lead to some consternation among people like Benjamin Franklin, who could not understand why wood of different calibers nevertheless went under the same name. However, Anderson is quick to point out that the quality of one’s experience with this wood will differ if it is of inferior quality.

Anderson also raises the point of mahogany’s tropical origins, that it had no problem growing amongst a wide diversity of other tree species. This seems to also have been the case with the final products conceived of the wood. Tables, chairs, china cabinets, etc. were desired and apparently within the grasp of people from a wide range of socioeconomic classes.
A practice of particular interest is that of removing the covering on a mahogany table at dessert during formal dinners so that guests might swoon over the impressiveness of the specimen before them. I suppose this is not hard to imagine, considering that such pieces were somewhere around twelve feet long!