Bare Bright Holds at $5.66 While the Scrap Sheets Cry Down

Well now — the good clerks at IndexBox come marching in with their July report, ringing the bell that copper and brass scrap have fallen across North America. I read such notices the way I once read the faces of gamblers at Fort Wilkins: with one eyebrow raised and a hand near my purse. For while the scrap sheets weep, the copper market itself is up 2.1% on the day, and honest #1 Bare Bright is trading at a princely $5.66 the pound. A curious sort of falling, that.

Do not let a headline stampede you, friends. The yardman may quote you a softer number this week, but the red metal has not lost its throne — it has merely paused to catch its breath. I have seen copper pass through more hands than any headline ever will. In my counterstamping days I drove DR. G. G. WILKINS into better than a hundred thousand copper cents, and those coins clinked across every saloon bar and eating-house in New England. Copper was, and remains, the people's metal — passed hand to hand, wire to wire, still to still.

And ah, the still! Let me remind the scrapper why he ought never sneer at a dented old copper boiler. The pot still, the alembic, the moonshiner's coiled worm — every dram of clean whiskey, brandy, and rum owes its sweetness to copper. The monks knew it in their monastery cellars; the Appalachian man knows it in his hollow. Copper reaches into the rising vapor and seizes the sulfurous devils and foul volatiles that would otherwise poison the glass. A stainless still cannot perform that alchemy — it is cold and dumb where copper is alive and generous. When you weigh a scrap still on the yardman's scale, you are weighing centuries of good liquor.

Nor does copper's labor end at the distillery door. It runs the wire in your walls and the water line beneath your floor. It sheathes the roof that weathers to that noble green, floors the bottoms of the cook's finest pans, and turns the electric motors and carriages and humming data-halls of this modern age. Every one of these hungers for the red metal, and no dip in a July scrap sheet will unmake that appetite.

So sell if you must, but sell wise. At $5.66 the pound and the market climbing, Bare Bright is no pauper's wage. Strip your wire clean, sort your brass from your radiators, and carry it to the scale with your head high. The alchemists sought forever to make gold — I always preferred the metal that makes good liquor and lights the world.

Keep your copper bright, and your worm brighter still.

— Alchemist G. G. Wilkins