Windsor-Chair Making in America: From Craft Shop to Consumer
by Nancy Goyne Evans
Format: Hardback
Date: 2005
Publisher: UPNE
ISBN: 978-1584654933
Status: In Print
Date Read: 20 May 2022
Rating:*****
This is a weighty tome with a very narrow scope of appeal. The third and final installment of Evans’s comprehensive study of American Windsor chairs provides an in-depth look at the process of making the chairs, from small shops making vernacular chairs for the local market to commercial enterprises serving markets throughout the Americas.
The book is a gold mine of information for students of early American material culture and pre-industrial furniture making. Evans’s was a research fellow at Winterthur, where she wrote this book and the two preceding volumes in the series (American Windsor Chairs (1996) and American Windsor Furniture: Specialized Forms (1997)). Altogether they comprise 1500 meticulously researched pages and thousands of photographs of this iconic form.
This final volume of the series focuses on chair production methods and how makers served the expanding commercial furniture market. While this is an in-depth, academic study of Windsor chair making by an expert in American material culture, it’s quite readable. Imagine Victor Chinnery focusing on one specific form of English Oak furniture. For 1500 pages.
Like Chinnery’s opus, the first three chapters (of five) of the book concentrate on shop practices and the historical context of craftwork in early America. Evans discusses how shops were organized, the tools and materials, and the process from material acquisition to construction to finishing. Though this is not a how-to book on Windsor chairs, the historical furniture maker will find a ton of interesting information that will inform their work.
The second section explores marketing and the chair trade as America enters the international stage as a consumer goods producer. Interesting, from a historical perspective, to learn how this sort of trade was carried on in the pre-industrial era.
The final section explores the rise of American consumerism as the middle-class rises in wealth and the use of Windsor furniture in domestic and public settings. Again, an interesting context for the evolution of the furniture trade.
Sounds awesome? It is. In my opinion, it’s a must-have volume for someone interested in pre-industrial furniture making in America. The context and background chapters alone are worth it. It’s not something you will likely read cover to cover; I certainly did not. But there’s so much there that you can’t help but come away with something new and interesting each time you crack it open.
That said, it was very expensive. As a 500-page large-format hardback printed on high-quality glossy paper, you would expect it not to be cheap. And, I am sure they probably only printed a few thousand copies. Let’s face it; if you are not a research library or a nutty historical furniture maker, you aren’t buying this book.
I snagged a very crisp and clean used copy off Amazon for $128. New ones are running $200, but how much use is a book like this going to get? Besides, there probably aren’t many of these books left now. So, not an inconsiderable investment, but if this is your thing, it’s money well spent.