This review originally ran on Green Man Review.
I grew up in a household where the sewing machine was constantly in use. My mother did alterations instead of working outside the home when I was young, and taught me how to sew because she thought it was a skill every girl should have. While I was still in elementary school, I did a science project one year on cotton fabrics. Somewhere in a box in the attic, I still have the swatch samples from that learning activity. In my adolescence and young adulthood, I worked in a department store yard goods department and in smaller shops that sold yarn and other needlework supplies. After I taught myself to knit and crochet, I turned around and taught these skills to others. I wrote instructions for a line of crewel stitchery kits for a small, family-owned manufacturing firm and embroidered scenes from Alice in Wonderland and the Wizard of Oz on the backs of shirts.
Somehow, in the last few years, I have not been able to keep my attention focused on needlework projects — probably because my imagination keeps getting far ahead of my accomplishments. But I still really enjoy reading books about needlework, especially those that are full of photographs and offer consistent evidence that the author cares as much about this subject as I do.
I was working in the mailroom at the Estate offices the day The American Quilt arrived. I took it with me on my lunch break. It was still high summer then, and I sat in the dappled shade of the great copper beech behind the building, listening to the cicadas buzz as I turned the pages.
Roderick Kiracofe, the primary author of this extravaganza, got hooked on quilts in the 1970s, when he bought his first antique quilt at an auction in Ohio. In the preface, he admits that he found them interesting as works of art and as artifacts with stories to tell or to keep secret. A quilt collector, dealer, and curator, Kiracofe is not a quilt maker himself, nor does he admit to coming from a family of quilters. Mary Elizabeth Johnson, credited with getting Kirocofe’s narrative “ramblings” into a coherent order, has written several books on quilting and other craft and home decorating topics. She recalls her mother quilting, and started making quilts herself after she completed a degree in clothing and textiles. A third person, Sharon Risedorph, receives mention as the principal photographer — a very significant role in a book that is roughly 50 percent photographs. Like Kiracofe, she was based in San Francisco at the time this book was created. It appears as though she has collaborated with him on other projects, as well.
After an opening chapter about fabrics, about which I shall have much more to say later, the rest of the book follows a chronological order, starting (as the title suggests) in 1750 and ending in 1950. The narrative in each of these chapters is both about the quilts and about the broader social and economic context in which the quilts were made. For example, the chapter covering the period 1875-1900, titled “The Grand Epoch,” opens with a brief description of the 1876 Centennial celebration held in Philadelphia, then refers the reader to a quilt pictured a couple of pages later that has as its centerpiece a commemorative bandana from that event. The chapter goes on to describe some of the education and employment opportunities that were opening to women during this period and to note the importance of mass production and retailing to the availability of fabrics and patterns.
An initially disorienting feature of the book is the use of multi-page inserts printed on yellow paper and otherwise distinguished only by their separate titles. The Grand Epoch chapter, for example, includes inserts on crazy quilts, log cabin quilts, Hawaiian quilts and mourning quilts. These inserts provide interesting digressions from the rest of the text, but if you should happen to be reading a narrative on the page preceding the start of an insert, you may have to flip a few pages to find the rest of the sentence (or even the rest of a hyphenated word!). I am not fond of this layout practice even in a magazine or newspaper. In most publication venues an editor provides the reader with a pointer to the rest of the piece, e.g. please turn to page 164. Alas, that didn’t happen here.
As I mentioned above, the book’s content is about 50 percent photographs. Many of these are images of whole quilts; a few show details of quilts. The photographs are very well documented, with figure numbers that correspond to narrative in the body copy, as well as captions that explain the origin and size of the piece in the photo. While all of the photos are very clear and bright, some of the whole quilt photos are a bit small to show the design to its full advantage. For example, on page 56 there is a 5 1/4 inch square photo of a quilt that is approximately 106 inches square. That’s a reduction to 1/20 of the original size!
Not intended as a how-to quilt book (you can find plenty of those!), The American Quilt
This magnificent book, initially published in hard cover in 1993, is finally available in a splendid, and quite affordable, paperback edition. It's oversized, measuring 9 inches wide X 11 inches tall, with a sturdy cover and a binding that allows the book to open nearly flat at any page you choose. The American Quilt
(Clarkson Potter Publishers, 2004)
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