10
Introduction
In his 1975
Encyclopedia of Wine
Frank Schoonmaker said of corkscrews
―
... there
are literally hundreds of diverse and ingenious modifications today, some
admirably efficient, some wholly worthless.
‖
And every one of those corkscrews has a story behind it. In this book you
‘
ll find
just a few of those stories. Some tell about those
―
ingenious modifications
‖
in the
words of the inventors and in others we learn the background behind the
advertising on corkscrews. There are a lot of corkscrews that relate to specific
events or dates and these have been melded together. There are collections of
types of corkscrews
–
golfing related, elephants, and more.
Then there are those fun personal stories about corkscrew finds (and losses) such
as Kenn Cameron
‘
s huge Walker corkscrew, Albert Beliard
‘
s first screw, and
Reinhold Berndt
‘
s found and loss prong puller.
Some of the stories originally appeared on the Internet in
The Daily Screw
and in
The Virtual Corkscrew Museum
. When I published the first issue of
The Daily Screw
on February 10, 2003, my intent was to develop enough
―
stories
‖
to do an entire
year of issues. That was accomplished.
On February 11, 2004,
The Daily Screw
became
The Occasional Screw
. Then a reader
asked me
―
I know the website will not last forever, so why not preserve these
stories in book form? How about something I can pick up and just leaf to an
interesting story anywhere, anytime?
‖
I thought
―
Aha, a
Corkscrew Bathroom
Reader
!
‖
So I set out to expand some of the stories with additional information I
had gathered since their original publication. Some of the stories I deep-sixed
because like Schoonmaker said of some corkscrews, they were
―
wholly
worthless.
‖
I approached the project with great enthusiasm and, as I looked at corkscrews
and the piles of information surrounding my desk, I came up with even more
stories. After several months, I ended up with about 500 pages of stories. My
reader would now have plenty to choose from. They may not all be his cup of tea
but, hey, they were ready to be preserved in print form.
I toyed with the idea of calling the book
The Corkscrew Bathroom Reader
but
quickly abandoned that idea in favor of simply
Corkscrew Stories
. A 500 page
book is a lot of book to prop up in front of you when you are reading in bed or to