Our Gnomic Gnamesakes
Once upon a time, two wee little carpenters became advertising icons
You may have gnoticed… our long association with a pair of gnomes. Named Hammacher and Schlemmer - more for marketing reasons than for any resemblance to our human founders, we presume - they’ve served as our demihuman familiars for over a century. But why?
Diminutive underground pranksters have long haunted Germanic folklore, sometimes harassing miners, sometimes leading them to treasure. But we can pin the term “gnome” down to 1567, when the Swiss scientist Paracelsus gave them that name, and confidently declared they were 18 inches tall. You’ve come a long way, science.
In the popular imagination, these mischievous mine-dwellers became conflated with other mythical little people with a reputation for mastery of the mechanical arts. Think of the elves helping the shoemaker in the fairy tale, or later, Disney’s diligent dwarves, whistling while they worked. The widespread presence of garden gnomes probably sealed some mental association between gnomes and yardwork.
Thus it made sense in 1920 to play on this pre-existing conception by naming a new brand of tools after one of these races of carpenters. “Dwarf tools” conjures up a picture of tiny little hammers and picks. There’s something about “Elf tools” that doesn’t ring quite right, either. Thus Hammacher Schlemmer debuted Gnome brand tools. It was the beginning of a beautiful mascotship.
The association took hold quickly and firmly. By 1925, the Washington Herald could refer to “Mr. Schlemmer’s big hardware store, near Union Square, with the cute little gnomes”, with no further explanation. This famous incarnation of the gnomes was gangly, dark-bearded, with slouchy hats - and often accompanied by a little dog whose name is lost to history.
Alas, our shift away from hardware wasn’t good news for our mythical avatars. As tools receded from our catalogues, so did the gnomes, presumably back to their treasure caves. By 1948, when the New York Times reported on our 100th birthday party, the piece noted that “The little advertising gnomes who wielded tools on billboards so well that the houseware concern of Hammacher Schlemmer became world famous have long since gone.”
But gnomes are gnothing if not persistent. When we were taken over by new management in 1955, Hammacher and Schlemmer were not only invited back - President John Gerald brought them into the C-suite.
They’d gained some weight in the intervening years, looking more like stouter garden gnomes than previous. A curly-bearded cartoon version was introduced and would appear countless times in catalogues and advertising. It wasn’t long until the gnomes regained their cover stardom, this time in three-dimensional form.
Of course, they also took on the form of products, from gnome-shaped wine stoppers to wrought-iron gnomes who’d hold your garden tools. Just a few Christmases ago, The Musical Pedaling Gnome rode into immortality with perhaps another example of gnome/elf semiotic intermingling. (No word on whether that was Hammacher or Schlemmer.)
And when we released a children’s version of our catalogue in the 1990’s, that gnome energy was a natural fit, so we called it Gnomenclature. That name was too perfectly ridiculous to let it go to waste, so we revived it for this newsletter, minus the original’s multicolored Comic Sans logo.
Which brings us to 2026. As the latest custodians of Hammacher Schlemmer, we haven’t quite found a job for our old mascots to do, beyond this newsletter’s recycled name. But keep your eyes peeled for those adroit little sprites. They never stay idle for long…
More please. And thank you.