Old Timey Ads

Sets of false teeth used to be made from pachyderm ivory or actual human teeth, and it was common for teeth to be recycled through more than one set of dentures. Just picture  a warehouse somewhere, with tiny little drawers filled with hundreds of teeth carefully sorted by size, color, and amount of wear, a hunched-over man in a headlamp and leather apron picking through them with long, silver tweezers. “Ah, this one,” he says, rooting through the pile to find an incisor from some long-dead peasant’s corpse, ripped from his skull by grave robbers looking for rum money. “This one will go in your mouth.”