Untouched Very Early 20th C. Log of Steel Wool

Like a large untouched roll of a British butcher's butcher paper I recently found and sold, this one feels like it found me, to my eye a perfect readymade which I had no choice but to take home whether it appeals to anyone else or not. I've since learned that the American Steel Wool Manufacturing Company that produced it--founded in 1896 by David Wolf in Greenwich, New York--seems in fact to to have been the first company to bring steel wool to market as a product for common use. I believe this roll dates to those early days, and have included a 1912 advertisement showing this same roll in photos. To my eye it is a beautiful thing formally, between the excellent label and the pinkish paper and the coarse hair-like threads of the steel wool peeking at at either end (and visible through one small hole in paper too.) Like a log of latent potential, or tightly constrained unruliness just waiting (seems like forever now!) to escape! Just one of those found things that feels strangely poigna