Business: Concessionaire in Barrels

On exhibition at Lord & Taylor's smart Manhattan department store since last winter has been a collection of icons, glassware, china and bejeweled gewgaws from old Imperial Russia. Chiefly family possessions of the late Romanovs, it is part of the Hammer Collection—largest in the U. S.† And though Collector Hammer was tagged as "first concessionaire in the U. S. S. R.," few people knew just who he was. More of the collection appeared at the Waldorf-Astoria, in Chicago at Marshall Field's, at the Fair. Last week Collector Hammer bobbed up in the news with the announcement that he had two U. S. cooperage plants running full blast making beer kegs from Russian whiteoak staves. Sensing the beer keg shortage he had wangled out of Moscow last May a contract for the entire Russian output of the proper air-dried wood.