Wing back chair
Two-seater couch aka Loveseat
pg 54
Sam put another log on the fire, then joined Remi in the love seat.
A couch, also called a sofa, is an item of furniture designed to seat more than one person, and providing support for the back and arms. Typically, it will have an armrest on either side. In homes couches are normally found in the family room, living room, den or the lounge. They consist of a wooden or metal structure supplemented by padding and are covered in a variety of textiles, leather, or sometimes a combination of both. They will also be found in hotels and parts of commercial offices, waiting rooms, furniture stores, etc.
The term 'couch' is used in North America, Australia and New Zealand. Other terms synonymous with the above definition of couch are sofa (derived from the Arabic word suffah), settee, chesterfield, divan, and canapé.
Types
The most common types of couches are the "loveseat", or British two-seater, and the settee or sofa, with two or more seats. A sectional sofa, often just referred to as a "sectional", is formed from multiple sections (typically two to four) and usually includes at least two pieces that join at an angle of 90 degrees or slightly greater, used to wrap around walls or other furniture. A sectional sofa is known as a corner sofa in the UK.
Other couch variants include the divan, the fainting couch (backless or partial-backed), the chaise longue (long with one armrest), the canapé (an ornamental 3-seater), and the ottoman (generally considered a type of footstool). To conserve space, some sofas double as beds in the form of sofa-beds, daybeds, or futons. There are also couches known by genericized trademarked names, such as a davenport or Chesterfield (named for one of the Earls of Chesterfield).[citation needed]
In the United Kingdom a Chesterfield is a deep buttoned sofa, with arms and back of the same height. It is usually made from leather and the term Chesterfield in British English is only applied to this type of sofa.
The term "chesterfield" is a Canadian term equivalent to couch or sofa. The use of the term has been found to be widespread among older Canadians. This term is quickly vanishing from Canadian English according to one survey done in the Golden Horseshoe region of Ontario in 1992.
Northern California is the only place besides Canada where "chesterfield" is a synonym for couch or sofa; again, this probably applies nowadays to older Northern Californians. In the United Kingdom, the word refers to a particular style of sofa featuring a low rolled back and deep buttoning.
The term "three-piece suite" is used to describe a furniture set consisting of a two or three-seater couch and two armchairs. Other less specific terms for sets with at least one sofa include "chesterfield suite", "lounge suite", "living-room suite" and "sofa suite"
Frobisher sat opposite them in a wingback chair.
A "wing chair" (also, "wing-back chair" or "wing-back") is an easy chair or club chair with "wings" mounted to the back of the chair typically but not always stretching down to the arm rest. The purpose of which was to enclose the head or torso areas of the body in order to provide comfortable protection from drafts, and to trap the heat from a fireplace in the area where the person would be sitting. Hence, in historic times these are often used near a fireplace. Currently most examples of wing chairs are fully upholstered with exposed wood legs, but, many of the oldest wing chair examples have an exposed frame with padded cushions at the seat, arm rests, back and sometimes wings.
Though there are many types of wing chairs there are two standard wing styles - the flat wing and the scroll wing. There are also bat wings and butterfly wings just to name a few. The length, depth, vertical position and shape of the wings may vary from chair to chair.
Some have applied the term "ear chair" to wing chairs but that is not correct. Although some wing chairs may have "ears" at the top of the wings where the wing ties into the back, "ears" (as typically known in furniture design and antique designations) are elements rarely found on a wing chair.
Frobisher was in his mid-sixties and bald save a monk's fringe of silver.
Tonsure is the traditional practice of Christian churches of cutting or shaving the hair from the scalp of clerics, monastics, and, in the Eastern Orthodox Church, all baptized members. Tonsure, usually qualified by the name of the religion concerned, is now sometimes used more generally for such cutting or shaving for monks, devotees, or mystics of other religions as a symbol of their renunciation of worldly fashion and esteem, e.g., by Buddhist novices and monks, and some Hindu streams.
History and development
The origin of the tonsure remains unclear, but it certainly was not widely known in antiquity. There were three forms of tonsure known in the 7th and 8th centuries:
* The Oriental, which claimed the authority of Saint Paul the Apostle (Acts 18:18) and consisted of shaving the whole head. This was observed in the Eastern churches, including the Eastern Orthodox Church and the Eastern Catholic Churches. Hence Theodore of Tarsus, who had acquired his learning in Byzantine Asia Minor and bore this tonsure, had to allow his hair to grow for four months before he could be tonsured after the Roman fashion, and then ordained Archbishop of Canterbury by Pope Vitalian in 668.
* The Celtic, the exact shape of which is unclear from the sources, but in some way involved shaving the head from ear to ear. The shape may have been semicircular, arcing forward from a line between the ears, but another popular suggestion, less borne out in the sources, proposes that the entire forehead was shaved back to the ears.
More recently a triangular shape, with one point at the front of the head going back to a line between the ears, has been suggested. The Celtic tonsure was worn in Ireland and Great Britain and was connected to the distinct set of practices known as Celtic Christianity.
It was greatly despised by those affiliated with the Roman custom, who considered it unorthodox and associated it with the damned Simon Magus. Some sources have also suggested links between this tonsure and that worn by druids in the Pre-Roman Iron Age .
* The Roman: this consisted of shaving only the top of the head, so as to allow the hair to grow in the form of a crown. This is claimed to have originated with Saint Peter, and is the practice of the Latin Rite of the Catholic Church.
He wore a pair of Ben Franklin half-glasses
The teeny tiny glasses that are used for reading glasses are Franklin half glasses.
There's a heckuva lot of info on Ben Franklin and his invention of the bifocals here:
http://www.antiquespectacles.com/topics/franklin/franklin.htm
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