Packaging is something of a hot topic at the moment, but in our eagerness to get rid of as much of it as possible we need to be careful not to throw the baby out with the bath water. Wrapping It Up gives an account of the usefulness of packaging to all involved - manufacturer, wholesaler, retailer and consumer - beyond its commercial value as a marketing and advertising tool. Homage is paid to the many graphic artists and designers - whether employed by manufacturer or retailer, by a design studio or an advertising agency - whose ingenuity was so successfully applied to the problem of how to protect goods in transit and in storage as well as having them attract attention. A visit to a super-market or a daily check in kitchen cupboards will never be quite the same.

Although how we furnished our homes in the latter part of the 20th century was largely influenced by two men - Terence Conran of Habitat and Ingvar Kamprad of IKEA - a number of women attempted, in their various ways, to influence our taste when it came to how we lived. Early on were the Victorian/Edwardian women, often associated with the Suffragette movement who both designed and sold furniture. These were followed, after WWI, by others also breaking social rank - the society hostesses - totally untrained but full of confidence, and having their own 'interiors' admired, saw a way of supplementing their incomes by imposing their tastes on others. Meanwhile a few women were proselytising their concerns for well-crafted and designed products, through retail outlets from small financially precarious shops, to running part of the prestigious store, Heals. Wartime threw up an altogether more professional group - the 'doers' - those empowered to 'do it themselves' . Additionally there were a handful of professional furniture designers and another small groups looking to the design needs of the masses rather than the comfortably off. From Palaces to Pre-fabs sets out to restore the reputation of such women working in what was the largely male-dominated world of interior design.

The mid-20th century brought about an advertising renaissance in the western world. Technology boomed. Standards of living increased, innovation abounded, and 'luxury' consumer products such as TVs, fridges and gas heating became readily available to the public. In order to sell them, ads needed to be as quirky and appealing as the new commodities themselves. This compact yet comprehensive book, written by an experienced design historian, explores the hand-in-hand development of advertisement and the many household amenities that we take for granted today. This book began its life as an offshoot of another, also written by Ruth Artmonsky, but focusing on the advertising of furniture. Her research led her to discover the expansive genre of domestic appliance advertising - not relevant to her book, but more than interesting enough to merit a new text in its own right. Adverts that caught Ruth's eye include "an advertisement for a gas iron, and a rare one of a man admitting he might be able to do the laundry when the house purchased a washing machine." Discover all this and more in Powering the Home.