books etc.

• book review: Textiles of the Arts & Crafts Movement

  Linda Parry, Textiles of the Arts & Crafts Movement, new edition, Thames and Hudson, 2005.

  Parry, a Deputy Keeper at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London, completed the original version of this book to commemorate the centenary of the Arts and Crafts Exhibition Society, the organization that from its founding in1888 to 1916 provided the primary British venue for showcasing the range of the new decorative art – furniture, rugs, metalwork, textiles – that so influenced the fashion, furnishings and architecture of the era. The Society not only gave us the term – "arts and crafts" – that has come to encapsulate the movement, it provided respectability to an alternative art and design form built upon craft, modest studio and workshop production, and sympathetic retailers, an art form that enjoyed broad public success then, and now, in  revival for the past 30 years.

  Parry’s focus on textiles shown in the Exhibition Society shows limits her survey of course, not only by geography (the exhibitors were all British), but by period. While she provides an introductory chapter on arts and crafts principles and reviews the work of early practitioners including William Morris, the major contribution of the book, and what gives it its uniqueness, is the detailed and comprehensive description of the exhibited textiles in terms of design, materials, production, technology, and sales. Parry’s thesis, so far as there is one, is that the exhibitions, by giving extensive space and attention to textiles, provided a new legitimacy for the medium, moving it, along with the other decorative arts, toward greater parity with painting and sculpture.

  This book, one of a recent spate of specialized volumes on textiles, is  probably more for the specialist than the general interested reader. While the text is on the clunky side, the book’s extensive color illustrations of rugs, wallpapers, woven and printed fabrics, lace, and clothing are wonderful. Parry also provides a useful directory of textile designers, craftsmen, manufacturers and retailers.

• Roycroft Book-Arts Weekend

  Our friend Richard Kegler of P22 (who sell some very detailed and well-designed Craftsman typefaces) is one of the instructors at the following Roycroft workshop, which should be of interest to our readers in the northeast, Roycroft fans throughout the country and anyone interested in fine printing and bookbinding:

  The Roycroft Crafts community of Elbert Hubbard circa 1896-1915 produced astonishing amounts of hand crafted items that have become highly collectable and highly regarded. The Roycroft Campus Corporation presents a weekend workshop series which allows participants to work as artisans did 100 years ago.

  A collaborative workshop series will take participants through all facets of book production. Participants will work on components of one of three books throughout the weekend. Workshops include:  papermaking, paper decoration, hand set type, hand printing, printmaking, illumination, and various binding techniques. Each participant will take home new skills in the book arts as well as a copy of one of the three books. These will be the first Roycroft books to be made at the Campus in over 60 years!

  Roycroft Book-Arts Weekend: Oct 14 – 16, 2005
  Roycroft Campus Coppershop South Grove at Main, East Aurora NY

• Delta 98, Den Haag

  Jaap Eerland and Marx Warmerdam’s Delta 98 buys and sells items of decorative art – "art and applied art" – located in Den Haag, Netherlands. Their large stock of (mostly) small items includes objects from the Nouveau, Deco, Arts & Crafts, Jugenstil, De Stijl, Bauhaus and Modernisme movements, and their stock ranges from glass, ceramics and metalware to books, furniture, posters and plenty more. Their current stock of books – including a number of volumes of especially rare or otherwise notable Arts & Crafts-related volumes – is especially impressive. They will be exhibiting at the 2006 Art Deco Fair in The Hague, and are also standholders at the regular summartime Den Haag Antique Market, May 12 – September 25, at the Lange Voorhout.

  + Delta 98 Den Haag: van Leeuwenhoekstraat 65, 2516 GH Den Haag, The Netherlands
  + t 0031.70.388.79.18 (from abroad)

• book review: The New Bungalow

  essays by Matthew Bialecki, Christian Gladu, Jill Kessenich, Jim McCord, Su Bacon

  "Could anyone have predicted in the early 1920s, when the original Arts & Crafts movement died out, that it would enjoy a revival that would start some fifty years later and last longer than the original movement?" So begins architect Matthew Bialecki‘s introduction to Gibbs-Smith’s The New Bungalow. In this and other essays, the authors investigate not so much the classic designs and styles of the American Arts & Crafts movement, but rather their modern and contemporary reinterpretations in architectural, interior and furniture design.

  As Bialecki points out, A&C style "has evolved into a national style phenomenon," where cheap and often poorly-made "Mission-style" furniture is available even at big-box retailers, and local restaurants and hotels across the country are designed in modernized variants of the Prairie, Craftsman and Mission aesthetic. Bialecki, in the first essay, proposes that a modern proto-luddite rejection of the mass-produced-in-appearance (which also, ironically, drives sales of mass-produced faux-Craftsman goods) might be promoting the increasing popularity of nature-based architecture, specifically the Craftsman-styled open plans that emphasize natural materials, light and landscape. (read the rest of the review after the link, below)

• 2005 William Morris Calendar

  

  This year’s calendar: 12 months of William Morris textile and wallpaper designs. I’m looking forward to hanging this in the kitchen. The printing is unusually good and the paper nice and glossy, and the unorthodox narrow vertical shape will fit the odd space I want to hang it in.

• book review: Living Homes

  Suzi Moore McGregor & Nora Burba Trulsson’s Living Homes profiles the design and construction of twenty-two homes – all constructed using the various principles and techniques of sustainable building – throughout the Western United States. 7 adobe homes, 5 rammed-earth houses, 5 straw bale structures and 4 reinvented / recycled / high-tech material buildings are examined. The homes are built in a wide variety of architectural styles: contemporary steel and earth constructions, pueblo and spanish revival rancheros, mission and craftsman cottages. All are both an expression of their owners’ and builders’ character and the philosophy of the green building movement made real.

• book review: Creating the Inspired House

  A home is more than the sum of its parts – the combination of space for living and working, carefully designed for or altered to fit its occupants, furnishings and other contents specific to the lifestyle of its owners: these all add up to something more, something less easily defined, which John Connell has tried to quantify in Creating the Inspired House.

• Gibbs Smith, Publisher

  This is not a book review, per se, but rather a publisher review. I’ve got a stack of relatively recent books on the Arts & Crafts movement in general to review, and this is sort of an appetizer for the many upcoming book reviews that we’ll be printing throughout the next several weeks.

  Gibbs-Smith, located in Layton, Utah of all places, give their corporate motto as "to enrich and inspire humankind." This may be the kind of thing you expect to read on the letterhead of a big art book publisher, but they do strive to meet these lofty goals.

  pictured: one of Yoshiko Yamamoto’s letterpress-printed cards

• book review: Designing a Home with Wood

  Heather and Earl Adams’ Designing a Home with Wood is more an homage to the world’s most versatile and expressive building material than a builder’s instruction manual, but it certainly offers plenty of examples and good advice for those contemplating novel and attractive uses of a wide variety of woods (and wood-based or related building materials).

• new & notable books

  The past month has been a good one for those of us with a bit to spend on new books; of the various review copies I’ve received and the books I’ve bought and browsed, these are a few of the past month’s highlights. I’m also including a few that won’t see wide distribution until later this month or early November.