Strange Bedfellows: Furniture and Undertaking
The old connection between these two industries actually makes a certain kind of sense, but it still seems weird.
In Monday’s post about old advertisements and promotional items featuring the phrase “Both Phones,” one of the items I showed was this matchstick holder:
In the caption, I wrote, “You’ve gotta like a business that’s versatile enough to handle furniture, carpets, and undertaking!”
That prompted a comment from IC reader Jo Zwiep, who wrote, “I only recently learned (I believe from a Bill Bryson book) that it was actually quite common at one time for a furniture maker to also be an undertaker. Since furniture/cabinet makers were enlisted to make coffins for the deceased, it made sense for them to be involved in funeral duties as well.” Huh — I didn’t know that, but there’s a certain logic to it, right?
It’s not clear to me when the furniture and funerary industries decoupled, but it’s interesting to ponder what the world might be like if they were still conjoined today. Imagine, for example, if Ikea sold coffins (which would probably have names like Olaf, Sven, and Björn), or if those relentlessly chirpy Bob’s Discount Furniture commercials also touted discount funeral services, or if your local mortuary offered a free set of plastic slipcovers for your sofa with every memorial service.
For better or worse, that’s not the world we currently live in. But old photos and other documents confirm that our ancestors experienced that world, or something similar to it, a century or so ago. Here are some glimpses of what that looked like:
