Furniture Books

The buying and selling of oak furniture has been given relatively brief note in collector's guides, so any dealing in oak furniture in particular needs The Marketplace Guide to Oak Furniture, now updated to its second edition, packs in color photos along with the latest values and furniture-maker history. It's an excellent, basic reference for any dealing in oak furniture, and for libraries catering to such specialty collector audiences.

Diane C. Donovan
California Bookwatch

I grew up in Milton, N. C. and my father was Mayor there for 16 years. He introduced me to Tom Day furniture when I was a child. I have several pieces and value them highly. A copy of your book is on the coffee table in my living room and I prize it. I am so happy that you wrote this book, because I had told my children for years how valuable the furniture was and purchased a copy of your book for each of them.The beauty of his furniture and the history behind it is expressed well in your book. Thank you.

The Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute is a world renowned center for the fine arts. Ably edited by Anna Tobin D'Ambrosio, the Curator of Decorative Arts at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute Museum of Art has compiled essays by herself and other decorative arts scholars on more than 65 finely crafted examples of American furniture encompassing nearly every 19th century style and explores the careers of America's most influential cabinetmakers and shops of the era in Masterpieces of American Furniture From the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute. Her introductory essays traces the evolution of the museum's decorative arts holdings. The informative text is superbly illustrated with more than 90 color plates, plus detail images from period sources and labels. The outstanding and scholarly presentation is highly recommended for students of 19th century American furniture, cabinetmaking, and home decorative fashions.

This is simply the finet book on marquetry available and will appeal to a wide audience... collectors, woodworkers, etc. The book contains a massive number of pictures of the finest examlples of marquetry ever made. It goes over the history of marquetry and the historical techniques for making marquetry. In addition, for those who may want to attempt to build some of these examples themselves, it contains detailes outline scetches of a good number of the pieces along with legend of the wood species used. These sketches can be copied to allow you to cut our your own marquetry... or scanned into a computer to control a laser cutter. I have a number of books on marquetry but this is the set that I most often go back to

This is a surprisingly good book that I purchased not knowing what to expect. It offers detailed plans and instructions to recreate several historical/classical buildings and structures, its furnishings and accesories. There are also some projects that can be made more or less whimsical according to personal preference. All in all, a well rounded book.

This wonderful book traces Mennonite furniture from the Vistula Delta region of Poland, through southern Russia, and on to Canada and the plains of the United States. It begins with an examination of the unique styles of Mennonite furniture, and then goes on to show how they developed during the Mennonite's migrations, also showing how the Mennonites themselves developed.

This book is a fascinating resource. It is (in my opinion) a poor Mennonite house that doesn't have some family treasure in it, a piece of furniture or a clock that was brought by the family from long ago and far away, no matter how humble that piece may be. This book places those items in context, showing what they are, and what their significance is. If you are at all interested in Mennonite furniture, then I highly recommend that you read this book.

From the San Francisco Chronicle, Dec. 15, 2002, by Kenneth Baker:

The Art of Finding the Right Book: ...Nothing else in the annual holiday-season spate of photography books compares with Michael Wolf's "Sitting in China." Wolf, a German born photographer educated in the Bay Area, now lives in Hongkong and works mostly for Stern Magazine. Traveling in China, he noticed and decided to document a remarkable variety of makeshift seating. In the books single page of text, Wolf tells how his interest in scavenged, ramshackle chairs was mistaken for a foreigner's condensation. Anyone who leafs through "Sitting in China" will recognize his images as portraits, not forensic studies - snapshots of folk resourcefulness rapidly giving ground to the official ethos that sees only embarassing signs of backwardness in down-home know-how. Anyone without ideological investment will find "Sitting in China" the most improbable and humanly alert book of travel photography to appear in years.

From The Saturday Telegraph Magazine, London, November 2002, by David Rennie:

Good communist do not sit around. They march to and from heroic acts of labour, following a billowing red flag, and singing. They stand in massed ranks listening to improving oratory. They sit in neat rows, studying the party line in little books. But they do not lounge. They must not loll. Chairman Mao Tse-tung, a clever as well as evil man, launched his muderous revolution with the cry, "The people of China have stood up." Once they were up, he understood that his greatest enemy was inertia - the capacity of peasants to endure endless hunger and poverty by hunkering down, squatting by the roadside and waiting, like so many beasts in a field, for the storm to pass. Chairman Mao wanted perpetual revolution. Instead, he achieved perpetual motion, setting a whole nation in pointless, destructive movement, like a giant poking an ant's nest. The educated were ordered to the countryside to labour alongside peasants. The peasants were formed into brigades to dig canals that would soon run dry, damms that quickly broke, and carve out wheatfields from hillsides which quickly lost their soil. Millions of Red Guards - Mao's fanatical young followers - were granted free travel across the nation, quickly bringing train and bus networks to their knees. Then it stopped. Mao, the old psychopath, finally died - not a moment too soon. Now, a quarter of a century on, the Chinese can sit around. Their freedom to sit defines a new era of economic liberty, an era in which the state increasingly leaves them alone - for good or for ill. For some, sitting means pure leisure. Michael Wolf, the German photographer behind a strange and wonderful book, "Sitting in China" shows us pensioners meditating in a park. There is a baby, content on a bamboo mat. He is seemingly uninerested in China's new rich, for whom sitting means status; the fat cats who have swapped bicycle saddles for limousine seats. The new rich slouch in armchairs (always a symbol of status), ordering XO brandy, or crooning at a karaoke screen. Their childrens bottoms know what the chairs at McDonald's feel like - the meanness of the padding, the chill of air-conditioned plastic on bare summer legs. In Michael Wolf's book, there are few armchairs. There are plenty of stools, worn smooth by years of use, patched or pathetically padded, uncomfortable - the seats of those who live just a few inches above the dust of the ground. His Chinese workers sleep, exhausted, at their factory benches. Others are laid off factory workers, or migrant peasants - now scraping a living in the city as self-employed artisians. There is the carpender, the bicycle mender. There are gangs of men - labourers waiting for a day's work, perched on a traffic barrier like crows on a telegraph wire, a line of wary eyed cobblers. In the countryside, his poorest peasants squat: a flat-footed, folded-leg crouch that Western muscles cannot hold for more than a few moments. Working Chinese will sleep anywhere, any time, conserving energy, killing time - the enforced idleness of poverty. Chairman Mao would not have tolerated it. But his successors, attempting a transition to something like a free market, have washed their hands of these people. And so the unwanted masses sit, oddly beautiful through Wolf's respectful lens. To Chinese eyes, this is an offensive book, without a doubt. They are not proud of inaction, of shabby lives lived in the street. To his credit, Wolf admits his offence at the beginning of his book - it is the only writing in the volume. Photographing a broken chair in a Beijing street, he is surrounded by an angry crowd. "you are a foreigner who is trying to show how backward the Chinese are," an old woman hisses. Wolf defends himself, explaining that to her the chair is not ugly but timeworn. The crowd is not convinced. The police are summoned, and smash the chair as a thing of shame. His accusers are half -right. Wolf says that he is interested in the "beauty inherent in used objects."
If that were all he wre trying to do, this would be a loathsome book. But it is not. Wolf is trying to show how the Chinese are. He has chosen a strange angle. But he is on to something.

Okay, si I'm biased. My ideal home would be something like the Farnsworth House with all the furniture designed for the Barcelona expo.

So, for me, this is an excellent book which acts as a showpiece for the selected works of the timeless brilliance of Mies van der Rohe.

The book covers his architectural, interior design and furniture design work with a fairly balanced distribution of illustrations and written content.

regards,

martyn_jones@iniciativas.com

This book is more than just a price book. It uses a series of questions to help you nail down just what you are looking at. In the BASICS section you find the different types of inlays as Line inlay Marquetry, Parquetry, and Oyster-veneering. The book is small enough that I carry this with me.

Some of the highlights are:

Uses a unique question-and -answer approach to help you identify and date genuine antique glass

Deals with fakes, copies, condition and other factors that may confuse even experienced collectors

Analyses typical items that collectors can find in shops and auction houses

Gives Guidelines to values

Contains a wealth of background information, including an extensive glossary

Is a thorough introductory course for the beginner and also a superb refresher for those with some collecting experience.

After having read and created many projects from other books of this type, I have to say this is the best and most informative book up to date. The author not only shows us projects using many types of different needlework, she also explains the history behind them. Mostly this book is limited to the "Victorian" period, but it looks like she plans to produce other books along this line on other periods. Although I find this book especially to my liking, I don't think it is for everyone. Most of the projects are for the advanced needleworker with some very fine detailed oriented designs. There are patterns for using needlepoint, embroidery, quilting, netting and so on, and they consist of projects from rugs to quilts to curtains and small items. I can't wait for her next book to come out.