For a potential article, I've been researching unusual hand
fans of the 19th century. I've noticed that numerous 1870s and 1880s
fashion plates depict a fixed fan/handscreen of feathers, usually round.
I've only seen one real-life example from this era of this type of fan (plenty
of later paper advertising fans in this style, of course). So, I'm
wondering how common they really were in the U.S.? Does anyone have such
an item in their collection?
Secondly, if you do have such a thing--what were the feathers
mounted on? Are the feathers pasted onto some kind of disk (if so, what is
the disk made of?) or stuck directly into the stick?