World of Knaster

1967-2025

My last name, Knaster, is not common. The most recent data I could find estimates there are only about 240 people on the planet with that name. We could have a convention of all the Knasters in the world in a mid-sized supermarket. When I was growing up, everybody I knew named Knaster either lived in my house or was no more distant than a first cousin. When I was 7 years old, my family happened upon Knaster's Department Store on a trip to San Bernardino. This caused great excitement. And that was about it.

Then the Internet came along and made the world smaller. In 1994, I found a guy in Sweden whose nickname was Knaster. I emailed him to ask where that came from, and he told me that "knaster" in Swedish was slang for "cracking voice or scratchy record". I learned there's a Knaster-Tarski theorem, courtesy of mathematician Bronisław Knaster. He is also credited with the Knaster inheritance procedure, which is a way to split up assets among several people. That one is also known as Knaster's Fair Division Procedure. I like that!

I found a whole bunch more people in the world named Knaster, including a county official in Monterey, California, a prolific movie electrician¹, and at least one billionaire.

I can’t even begin to understand the universal Knaster continuum. When I try to learn about it, I read sentences like this: “A Knaster continuum is a compact, connected, metrizable space which is indecomposable.” Maybe one of my smart friends can explain it to me. As a Knaster, it seems like I ought to know.

Knaster game from the Netherlands.

There’s a Knaster dice game from the Netherlands. “Dive into the challenging world of Knaster, where strategy and cunning are crucial to achieving the highest score!”, it says. Sounds great!

I heard about Knaster Records, somewhere in Europe. I guess they're scratchy, or they have singers with cracking voices. (They seem to be gone now.)

Many years ago my friend Scott Boyd gave me a bag of Knaster decorative rocks from Ikea. Amazing. Ikea doesn’t have them anymore, but you can still buy them on eBay. Why???

At Ikea, Knaster is rocks. Or at least it used to be.

Then, one day, a friend surprised me with a picture of the Knaster brand of hemp from Germany. Eventually those nice folks sent me a tin of Knaster, along with a couple of Knaster lighters and some Knaster rolling papers. Dude. I think they wanted to buy knaster.com from me.

Knaster hemp and lighter. I never smoked or chewed it, but my friend Red and I once made tea out of it. It was not tasty.

Still with me? I saved the best for last. I learned that Knaster is an old term for tobacco or other stuff you might smoke. And THEN my favorite discovery of all: J. S. Bach wrote a poem about the joys of putting some Knaster in his pipe and smoking it. The poem was eventually set to music. I guess that makes it a song, and of course you can watch a performance on YouTube). It starts like this:

This is the first stanza. English translation: “Each time I take my pipe and tobacco / With goodly wad (Knaster) filled to the brim / For fun and passing time with pleasure, / It brings to me a thought so grim / And adds as well this doctrine fair: / That I’m to it quite similar.”

As you can see, I’m a long way from my previous Knasterian isolation. Thanks to the Internet, I'm not alone any more.

1. When I blogged about this originally in 2004, the “prolific movie electrician”, Jeremy Knaster, left the following comment on the post: “Well, you've found one, indeed. Yeah, that's me on IMDb. You might also be interested to know that an artist who painted under her married last name of Lozano is my first cousin, Lee Knaster. Known to the art world as Lee Lozano, currently displayed at the Museum of Modern Art here in New York. Alas, she passed several years ago, but her art lives on forever. Traveling abroad last year I looked everywhere for that Knaster tobacco but was not able to locate any. My dad once went to Paris and found a Knaster there, but that was it. Good luck in your search!”