Arne Mason is a custom leather worker out of Ashland, Oregon specializing in molded cases for fly rods, fly reels, cigars, flies, and knives. Arne also does custom-molded cases for whatever you need to protect. He uses the highest quality, grade A English Bridle Leather tanned in the United States and has been setting the standard for fly fishing cases since 1972. And so, without further ado, I give you the simple and beautiful molded bookweight from Arne Mason
construction
Arne specializes in heat-molded cases, which he brought to the bookweight world. He starts with elegant and clean teardrop shaped lead weights and then molds English bridle leather around them, creating a strip of leather with lead weights in the end. Arne then takes a strip of suede and a strip of Nigerian goatskin, cuts them to match the strip of bridle, and stitches the goatskin on top of the bridle and the suede beneath. Very simple, and very beautiful.
design and aesthetic
The bookweight from Arne Mason is beautifully designed, using rich tan goatskin and light page-gripping suede. The teardrop lead weights are simply elegant and are symmetrically pleasing.
function
Prior to receiving this bookweight for review, I had never used a bookweight. I thought they were fairly useless, as I normally would hold a book in my hands while reading — and I still do. However! I have found this bookweight to be immensely useful in scholarly reading. I am an incoming freshman at Reed College and have summer reading, which requires me to take notes. Having the ability to keep the book open and the information readily available is immensely useful and makes it very easy to jump from text to notebook and back again.
BestLeather conclusion
Bookweights are becoming more and more obsolete as the world moves from physical text to digital. However, books are better than text, and that’s a fact. So, in my mind, buying a beautiful and elegant bookweight to make life easier and make scholarly reading or just reading in general more relaxing is completely worth it. And at $50, you are getting what you pay for: a hand-molded, beautiful, simple, and elegant bookweight. Who knows — with this bookweight, society might reverse its course into the digital darkside and return to the simplicity of books.
Check out the Arne Mason Bookweight here.
Leave a Reply