U.S.A. / New York:

[1] : L.D.B. & Co. (???? until ????)

Like the other great unknown G.M.T. the company named LDB at first slowly and quietly crept in on me - what at first just was a small note regarding some French and Bavarian items with one plop suddenly turned out to have grown into an idea for some research not only from my side. Creating an own page entry for this company should make it easier to present the small scraps of information that surface now and then. Not that we have much until now but then the GMT page started with even less.

First of all we can say that LBD was a an importer/distributor just like GMT as the product range is wider than was assumed at first, for example there are by now two finds regarding a 'L.D.B. & Co. New York' markings on metal lamp bases as well as one 'L.D.B. & CO. N.Y.' stamp in the base of a metal clock casing. It can be assumed that in future people seeing this site will add more info and marks that help backing this statement further.

When one looks at the standalone 'Prince Regent' marks it appears that they seem a bit peculiar; the use of leading and trailing double quotation marks is one thing but they are also used in what people may call 'publishing style': the leading ones are positioned as lower set, the trailing ones as high set. Nobody in Germany (or anybody with common sense) would use them that way to enclose a name. The second bump in the ride comes from the apostroph or whatever in "Princ'e" which does not make any sense at all.

The last mark shown here comes from an item made by the successor of the long line of Coiffe businesses, their last being 'Coiffe & Laviolette'. The remaining Laviolette business was the last to use this dark green mark and the item was then decorated or handled by 'Flambeau China', a firm whose history still throws up many questions as they never really produced items but were only a decoration studio or (depending on source) even only an export and trading company claimed to have been open between the 1890s and the beginning of World War I (1914). Just like the 'Moschendorf' marks the normal Flambeau torch mark was also altered to show 'LDBC'; seems the folks in New York had a faible for such personal touch. Interesting enough most Flambeau marks actually show some 'LDBC' addition or the other and it may even be possible that there was a direct link between the two; Flambeau for example being the French subsidiary or something like that.