Talking Shop: The Language of Craft in an Age of Consumption

Acknowledgments

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book is about craft as a public discourse, and in that sense its completion constitutes its own argument—for I have depended above all on the insights, inspiration, and support of others as I have made and remade, constructed and dismantled, its pages. t The idea for Talking Shop was born when, in my own amateur pursuit of a craft, I had the good luck to learn from John Zachary, formerly owner of Catamount Woodworks and now a partner in Water Street Furniture Studios, Leeds, Massachusetts . John’s steady, unpretentious application of his skills revealed to me the daily rhythms of the best artisanship and prompted my thinking about how nineteenth-century authors and artisans essayed to translate those rhythms to the page. The vast, polyvocal discourse of craft I ended up researching was not immediately apparent during the days I spent in John’s one-man shop, but that discourse, I came to see, took its own inspiration from the example of craftspeople like John. I have been fortunate to know other artisans whose choice of life has, more than anything, sustained my interest in this project. In practices ranging from stonemasonry to winemaking, carpentry to gardening, it is an honor to name Dori Betjemann, Peter Betjemann, Chris Churilla, Dai Crisp, Jay Gray, PK McCoy, Scotty Kelley, Trevor Norland, Amanda Sever, and Nathan Warren. t Among literary critics, I owe a great debt to Myra Jehlen, whose consummate scholarly craft and readings of the early manuscript set a plumb line toward which I could only hope to hew. William Howarth, Bill Gleason, Peter Antelyes, and H. Daniel Peck shaped the ideas in this book in ways both direct and indirect; my readers at the University of Virginia Press did much for the manuscript in its final stages, and no scholar could ask for a more satisfying and useful editorial process than the one shepherded at Virginia by Cathie Brettschneider . Coincidentally, I happened to read Miles Orvell’s The Real Thing, which introduced me to the writings of Gustav Stickley, at the same time as I was trying to learn how to make the furniture joint—the so-called through mortise and tenon—with which Stickley is most associated; that happenstance propelled my research for the next decade, and I would particularly like to acknowledge the Winterthur Museum and Library in Delaware for a fellowship viii acknowledgments that allowed me to study Stickley’s original papers and trade catalogs. The remarkable Center for the Humanities at Oregon State University provided time and space for my research on Benvenuto Cellini—and as I wrote my way toward an actual chapter on the fiery goldsmith, Christopher Leoni unpacked Cellini’s equally fiery Italian for me. t In his autobiography, the famously immodest Cellini makes much of his sharp eyes—but the sharp eyes actually more central to Talking Shop are those of my copyeditor, Beth Ina. For help with the bibliography, I also thank Kristi Shelton, and for material support of my research, the Department of English at Oregon State University. In the course of everyday life in Corvallis, my colleagues at OSU anchor a wonderful community of writers, scholars, and, most important, friends. For special help on the project, or for their comradeship while I was away from it, I am grateful to Kerry Ahearn, Betty Campbell, Norman Carlson, Tracy Daugherty, Neil Davison, Colin Day, DeSales Harrison, Anita Helle, Karen Holmberg, Patricia Lacy, John Larison, Ted Leeson, Jon Lewis, Aria MinuSepehr , Rebecca Olson, Michael Oriard, David Robinson, Marjorie Sandor— and, especially, Erik Gray and Tara Williams. t Portions of chapter 1 appeared in ‘‘Craft, Telos, and the Representation of Labor: Nineteenth-Century Readings of Benvenuto Cellini,’’ Nineteenth-Century Prose 36:2 (Fall 2009): 1–30; portions of chapter 3 appeared in ‘‘Craft and the Limits of Skill: Handicrafts Revivalism and the Problem of Technique,’’ Journal of Design History 21:2 (2008): 183–93; and portions of chapter 5 appeared in ‘‘Henry James’s Shop Talk: The Spoils of Poynton and the Language of Artisanship ,’’ American Literary Realism 40:3 (2008): 204–24. I thank the journals’ editors , Oxford University Press, and the University of Illinois Press for their generosity in making it possible to reprint that material. For the images, I have depended on the holdings and the courtesy of the John Hay Library of Brown University; the Victoria and Albert Museum; the Winterthur Museum and Library ; Dalton’s American Decorative Arts, Syracuse, New York; and the Stickley Museum...