Dating from the 1850s to the First World War, the Arts and Crafts Movement was an international phenomenon of enormous scope and influence. It encompassed everything from architecture to town planning, metalwork and embroidery, in places as diverse as California and Budapest. Born of thinkers and practitioners in Victorian England its ideological currents reflect the era's most pressing social, political and artistic concerns. Early British Arts and Crafts practitioners campaigned for a revival of old craft techniques, for the elevation of the applied arts and for honesty in design. These aims were quickly picked up and developed across Europe and the United States, with many national variants soon emerging. In this fascinating and beautifully illustrated introduction to the subject, Rosalind Blakesley explores the common ideas that give cohesion to this wide and stylistically varied movement.

Dazzling new, original collection by a master of the genre presents more than 260 high-impact, permission-free designs that exploit to their fullest the dramatic potential of squares, circles, triangles, rectangles, and other elements. Invaluable for wallpaper and textile design, packaging and computer art, these eye-catching forms provide artists and craftspeople with angular forms, pleasant symmetries, and other great images for immediate use and inspiration. More than 260 black-and-white designs.

One of the most powerful stories of the Arts and Crafts movement: a perceptive biography of one woman's valiant life in a vanished era of emerging feminism and bold socialist thought.

C. R. Ashbee was, some would say, the key man in the British Arts and Crafts movement during the early decades of the twentieth century. Regarded as heir to William Morris in political belief and design reform, Ashbee (and his Guild of Handicraft) gained international fame in his own time and remains a legend today. While much has been written about him, little has been said of his wife. Now Felicity Ashbee breaks the silence in a compelling book about her mother.

The book depicts Janet Ashbee as a gifted woman of emotional warmth, strength, and unconventionality, all of which enhanced her husband's work. An accomplished writer and thinker in her own right, Janet Ashbee's life revolved around great historic issues that still resonate today: the socially conscious Arts and Crafts movement, the role of women in contemporary affairs, and embattled ethnic relationships in the Middle East -- not to mention marriage and sexual orientation, predicated upon her husband's vibrant and well-known homosexuality.

A book of rare insight and significance, Janet Ashbee sheds welcome light on the Arts and Crafts movement and on women in oft-romanticized Victorian and Edwardian British culture.

This lavish collection of copyright-free engravings by the celebrated 19th-century artist F. Knight-reproduced directly from a rare original edition-contains elaborate wall murals with trompe-l'oeil effects; scenes of hunters, flanked by mythological figures; idealized damsels in rustic settings; and numerous other florid motifs. Designs both floral (leaves, running vines, and blossoms) and animal (realistic and grotesque) appear in a variety of sizes and styles. 700 black-and-white illustrations.

Otto Prutscher (1880-1949) was an architect and a designer in all applied arts media, as well as an exhibition designer, teacher and member of all the important arts and crafts movements, from the Secession to the Wiener Werkstatte and the Werkbund. The MAK - Museum of Applied Arts in Vienna - possesses a comprehensive graphic bequest and many significant objects from Prutscher's design oeuvre. Selected examples of Prutscher's creative work document his long-lasting influential role as a designer and artistic adviser for decorative art companies from Johann Loetz to Thonet. The publication conducts an audit of Prutscher's work as a pacemaker of Viennese modernism - over twenty years since the last show in Vienna and seventy years on from his death. Text in English and German.

The Arts and Crafts Movement, a fascinating period in American decorative history, led to the unprecedented commercialization of fine crafts and the empowerment of thousands of women and immigrants, who began to pursue new careers in design and handicraft. In 1893, the World's Fair in Chicago heralded the egalitarian art movement in America that led to the establishment of a plethora of metalwork and jewelry companies and studios by the turn of the century. Darcy Evon documents how these new trends spread throughout the Midwest and eventually the country, led by innovative pioneers who inspired an entire nation. They designed exquisite, original pieces of metalwork and jewelry by hand, starting with basic raw materials. Dozens of previously unidentified shops, artists, their creations, and accurate information on well-known historical figures, are featured for the first time in this important, major publication. Organized by trade name and location, this book is for collectors, dealers, and art historians, as well as artisans.

Rozsika Parker's re-evaluation of the reciprocal relationship between women and embroidery has brought stitchery out from the private world of female domesticity into the fine arts, created a major breakthrough in art history and criticism, and fostered the emergence of today's dynamic and expanding crafts movements. The Subversive Stitch is now available again with a new Introduction that brings the book up to date with exploration of the stitched art of Louise Bourgeois and Tracey Emin, as well as the work of new young female and male embroiderers. Rozsika Parker uses household accounts, women's magazines, letters, novels and the works of art themselves to trace through history how the separation of the craft of embroidery from the fine arts came to be a major force in the marginalisation of women's work. Beautifully illustrated, her book also discusses the contradictory nature of women's experience of embroidery: how it has inculcated female subservience while providing an immensely pleasurable source of creativity, forging links between women.

A rich, authoritative look at a material that plays an essential role in human culture
Wood has been a central part of human life throughout the world for thousands of years. In an intoxicating mix of science, history, and practical information, historian and woodworker Harvey Green considers this vital material's place on the planet. What makes one wood hard and one soft? How did we find it, tame it? Where does it fit into the histories of technology, architecture, and industrialization, of empire, exploration, and settlement? Spanning the surprising histories of the log cabin and Windsor chair, the deep truth about veneer, the role of wood in the American Revolution, the disappearance of the rain forests, the botany behind the baseball bat, and much more, "Wood" is a deep and satisfying look at one of our most treasured resources.

More than 530 beautifully photographed examples of jewelry and art-enamel work glow from the pages of this first comprehensive study of the work and aesthetic vision of the American Arts & Crafts movement. The lives and art of the era's top craftsmen-84 jewelers, enamelists, and metalsmiths-are explained with careful consideration to the contexts and influences that shaped them. The belief that beauty should be part of everyday life was paramount in the design reform movements of the early 20th century. Dozens of creators are featured here, including Josephine Hartwell Shaw, Frank Gardner Hale, Robert Riddle Jarvie, the Kalo Shop, Louis Comfort Tiffany, and the Roycroft. Although jewelry and enamelwork pieces received appreciative critical acclaim in that period, during today's revival of interest in the US Arts & Crafts movement, they have attracted scant attention from art historians. This collection fills that void and is a valuable resource for collectors and historians.

This book presents the designs for bookplates and badges by the English Arts and Crafts designer and architect, C.F.A. Voysey, (1857-1941). Perhaps the most recognised and influential designer of his age, Voysey designed over one hundred bookplates, badges and greetings cards. The focus of the book is the collection of these designs from Voysey's own personal archive. Only a very few of these designs have been published to date, and never as a completed collection. Beautiful to look at and full of interesting symbolism, each design encapsulates the spirit and underlying principles which informed every aspect of Voysey's architecture and decorative design. They also form the centrepiece of a beautifully illustrated tale about the life and work of Voysey, touching on his personality, interests, relationship with family and clients, and his central role as designer of the Arts and Crafts Movement.

Contemporary Crafts explores craft practices in both North America and Britain, revealing an astonishingly rich and diverse picture of artisanal work today. The book ranges across both urban and rural crafts and analyses how the country/city dichotomy creates differing approaches, practices and objects. Analysed in the context of their environment and its localised history, crafted objects are shown to embody or critique particular urban/rural myths and traditions. Covering both traditional and cutting-edge crafts from the small-scale domestic to large outdoor works, Contemporary Crafts demonstrates how craftspeople today are responding to the changing creative contexts of culture and history.

The oldest word in politics is "new". The oldest word in the writing of history may well be "modern": it is, without doubt, one of the most overworked adjectives in the English language. But the indeterminacy is perhaps just another way of saying that the difficulties raised are of a kind which simply will not go away... This collection of eight essays on aspects of modernity and modernism takes up the challenge of examining the complex, but fascinating convergence of aesthetics, politics and a quasi-spiritual dimension which is perhaps typical of British modernist thinking about modernity. This may have produced figures whom we now dismiss as eccentrics or "aesthetes", it none the less produced figures whom many still think of as in some sense embodying the national identity: what, after all, could be more "English" than a William Morris wallpaper design? Rather than towards socialism in any of its "scientific" guises, what the British modernist approach to modernity may have been pushing at was yet another mutation of liberalism: a libertarian-humanitarian hybrid in which indigenous radical and Evangelical legacies keep scientific socialism in check, where fellowship and domesticity edge out a larger-scale, more abstract "fraternity", and where citoyennete or civisme give way to what George Orwell was later to define simply as "decency".